The Whale

Brendan Fraser makes a valiant attempt to transcend Darren Aronofsky’s maladroit adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter's histrionic play. In what is undeniably a major come-back role for the actor, he manages to uncover a few threads of honesty from under this massive weight of narrative and thematic artifice. Fraser stars as a depressed, reclusive, severely obese English teacher named Charlie whose life consists of eating himself to death, mourning the loss of his younger lover, manoeuvring himself with great difficulty around his unkempt apartment, and trying to encourage authenticity in the online students he teaches over Zoom. As it becomes clearer to him that his life is coming to an end, he attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. 

Charlie keeps his camera disabled while teaching, so the impressionable young minds he tries to inspire can't see what the man preaching banal positivity actually looks like. But we certainly see the state he's in. Part of the power of this movie, and, I assume, the play it is slavishly faithful to, comes from witnessing the day-to-day, minute-by-minute existence of someone who weighs over 600 lbs. We've seen countless movies about characters slowly committing suicide via alcohol, drug abuse, and other reckless behaviours—including the “sexier” eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia—but rarely do we see someone using food and inactivity to bring their life to a premature end. Along with Fraser, the make-up, hair, and costume team, headed by prosthetic designer Adrien Morot, do an incredible job making Charlie's body, movements, and overall physicality more than credible. This is a deeply emotional performance that understands a great deal about the life of a morbidly obese individual.

As someone who's been overweight most of my life—often well into the obese end of the spectrum (as I was when I watched this picture)—the performance felt authentic and powerful. Many have criticized this picture for not casting someone obese in the role. But even if there is an over 300 lb actor out there who could both carry the movie in terms of performance and open the picture in terms of securing financing and drawing audiences, I doubt the movie would achieve any deeper levels of truth than we get here. This is not a case where you can cast a relative unknown like Darlene Cates, who played the fatally obese mother in Lasse Hallström’s excellent 1993 drama What's Eating Gilbert Grape, to give an outstanding supporting performance in a limited amount of screen time. Charlie is in almost every shot of The Whale, as I'm sure actors playing this role theatrically are on stage for the play's entire duration. And just as middle-aged actors of even half this character's weight do not have the stamina for eight shows a week, I don't think there's one out there who could withstand even the lightest possible production schedule for a traditional feature film in which they are in nearly every scene.

In his heyday, Fraser was most known for lightweight comedies like Encino Man, George of the Jungle, and Bedazzled and goofy FX-heavy action movies like The Mummy series. His most prestigious picture was Bill Condon’s 1998 Hollywood period drama Gods and Monsters, in which his co-star Ian McKellen did all the heavy lifting. Here, he's given the role of a lifetime, and he makes the most of it. He's able to tap into both basic and complex emotions, which he sometimes expresses with subtlety and dignity despite the heavy-handed, graceless writing and direction.

Hunter's story takes place over a five-day period. On day one, Charlie is visited by a young missionary from the New Life Church who tries to save him with pamphlets about God's love. Charlie has a bad history with this church but is kind to the naive kid (Ty Simpkins) who returns frequently. He's then visited by his best friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who looks after him. When she takes his blood pressure, things become abundantly clear that he won't last the week unless he consents to go to the hospital. As the days wear on, Charlie gets his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) to visit him, something her mother (Samantha Morton) has always forbidden. Eventually, the mother also shows up too. On paper, each of these roles serves a different narrative purpose. But in terms of their dramatic functions—thematic dynamics, exposition, conflict, insight, energy, and all other forms of literary drama, these characters are practically interchangeable. And the film becomes a repetitive series of people alternatively yelling at Charlie, and then listening to him, even cuddling up to him, as he showers them with empty platitudes about their inherent goodness.

Like Charlie, playwright/screenwriter Hunter seems to have a feebleminded obsession with people getting in touch with their truest selves. Charlie desperately wants his students, his daughter, his best friend, his ex-wife, and even the pizza delivery guy to connect with their internal purity and sincerity. But the genuineness he seems to value is less about transcendent humanity and more along the lines of the straight-talk, speak-from-the-gut "authenticity" that got Donald Trump elected. It's really hard to root for this guy's redemption when we as viewers put as little stock in his view of what constitutes absolution as he puts in the bullshit end-of-days religion the young missionary is trying to sell him on. Essentially, these two philosophies offer the same kind of spiritual enlightenment via self-annihilation of the self.

Director Aronofsky does nothing to mitigate the overt theatrics and puerile thesis of Hunter's script. On the contrary, he adds layers of his own signature themes to material that is already bogged down by dubious literary pretensions and insipid religious allegory. This film comes less from the director of the absorbing (if hardly subtle) The Westler and Black Swan; this is from the auteur whose last two pictures were the unwatchably vacuous grandiose Noah and Mother! Aronofsky is only 53 years old, but I wouldn't be surprised if, by the time he's 60, he's made some new-age version of The Passion of the Christ. 

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