The Big White is a 2005 black comedy film directed by Mark Mylod and starring Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Giovanni Ribisi, Woody Harrelson, Tim Blake Nelson, W. Earl Brown, and Alison Lohman.
In a podcast interview with Marc Maron in 2010, Williams admitted that during filming, he started drinking again after 20 years of sobriety.
Heavily in debt and attempting to find a cure for his wife Margaret's apparent Tourette syndrome, he stages a disfiguring animal attack of the body to cash in his missing brother's life-insurance policy, for which a corpse is required.
Raymond is angered at his brother's deception and arrives as well, and is told by the insurance agent, who has finally pieced together what has happened, about Paul's million dollar policy.
[6] In November 2005, Variety, after seeing the film at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles, called it "snowed under by misjudgment on every level", with "frigid" commercial prospects.
[1] In March 2006, David Mattin of the BBC gave it three stars out of five, saying that the film "wants to be a cross between small-screen hits Northern Exposure and Frasier" but "can't resist the lure of cheap and obvious one-liners".