THE WHALE
****
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Screenplay: Samuel D. Hunter, based on his eponymous play.
Principal cast:
Brendan Fraser
Hong Chau
Sadie Sink
Ty Simpkins
Samantha Morton
Sathya Sridharan
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 117 mins.
Australian release date: 2 February 2023.
Darren Aronofsky makes fascinating films, not all of them successful, but guaranteed to be different to anything else coming out of Hollywood. From his first very feature, the very off-beat Pi in 1998, you knew that this was a writer/director to watch. He followed that up with Requiem for a Dream in 2000, one of the best movies about addiction that you’re ever likely to see, then went back into weird territory with the time-jumping The Fountain in 2006. The years 2008 and 2010 saw him produce two hits, The Wrestler and Black Swan, but Noah in 2014 and mother! in 2017, were disappointing. So, his track record is a bit hit-and-miss but the films are never dull. Now, he’s back with another controversial title, The Whale, which shows a morbidly obese man trying to make amends with his estranged teenage daughter in his final days. Aronofsky describes his film as “exercise in empathy” but some reviewers have criticised his depiction of the man’s body as monstrous, in particular writer and social commentator Roxane Gay, who wrote in The New York Times that The Whale was “an inhumane film about a very human being.” The one thing that everyone agrees on, however, is that Brendan Fraser’s Oscar-nominated performance as the protagonist is extraordinarily moving. His co-star, The Menu's Hong Chau, has also been nominated for an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress.
Working from a script by Sam Hunter, who wrote the play on which the film is based in 2012, Aronofsky introduces us to Charlie (Fraser), an online English teacher living in Idaho who, because of his enormous size, refuses to reveal himself on camera to his students, his best friend and nurse, Liz (Hong Chau), his angry daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young missionary from the New Life Church, who knocked on Charlie’s door one day and keeps coming back. Charlie’s blood pressure is through the roof but he refuses to go to hospital, despite Liz’s urging, claiming that he has no insurance and can’t afford treatment. Thomas, meanwhile, is unaware that the hard-line conservative beliefs of his fundamentalist Christian church have had a profound impact on the lives of Charlie, Liz and Ellie, and are, to some degree, responsible for Charlie’s condition - but he’s about to find out thanks to Ellie’s cruel mind-games.
Despite its origins in the theatre, The Whale never feels ‘stagey.’ Matthew Libatique’s camera constantly prowls around the rooms of Charlie’s modest house, circling him as he, like the sun, holds our gaze at the centre of this small universe, barely moving from his sofa. Fraser gives one of the performances of his career and had to do it under difficult circumstances; it took hours every day to fit him with prosthetics weighing as much as 135 kilos before he could venture on set. It is a difficult role to get right, requiring nuance and subtlety to make Charlie worthy of the audience’s compassion. After all, this is a guy who’s basically given up on life, full of regret for some of his past actions, and desperate to earn his daughter’s forgiveness. Hong Chau is terrific, too, as the loving friend who can see what is happening to Charlie but is powerless to stop him travelling on his destructive journey. Looking like a young Uma Thurman, Sadie Sink from TV’s Stranger Things is sharp-tongued and bristling with barely suppressed rage as Ellie, a girl who feels she was abandoned and has become a dedicated misanthrope. She resents Charlie’s attempts to teach her that life can be beautiful and therein lies a basic fault line in Hunter’s screenplay. Charlie asks Ellie the movie’s ‘big question,’ “Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?” even though he has, seemingly, given up caring himself – at least about his own life. It’s a contradiction that is left unexplained.
The Whale is a story about flawed lives and the search for redemption and salvation. None of the people we see on screen are ‘without sin,’ so to speak, and that is what makes them so real. The director says, “What I love about [the film] is that it invites you to see the humanity of characters who are not all good or all bad, who truly live in grey tones the way people do, and who have extremely rich, intricate inner lives. They’ve all made mistakes, but what they share are immense hearts and the desire to love even when others are seemingly unlovable. It’s a story that asks a simple but essential question: can we save each other?” It’s an important question but not one that Aronofsky has succeeded in answering.
Screenplay: Samuel D. Hunter, based on his eponymous play.
Principal cast:
Brendan Fraser
Hong Chau
Sadie Sink
Ty Simpkins
Samantha Morton
Sathya Sridharan
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 117 mins.
Australian release date: 2 February 2023.
Darren Aronofsky makes fascinating films, not all of them successful, but guaranteed to be different to anything else coming out of Hollywood. From his first very feature, the very off-beat Pi in 1998, you knew that this was a writer/director to watch. He followed that up with Requiem for a Dream in 2000, one of the best movies about addiction that you’re ever likely to see, then went back into weird territory with the time-jumping The Fountain in 2006. The years 2008 and 2010 saw him produce two hits, The Wrestler and Black Swan, but Noah in 2014 and mother! in 2017, were disappointing. So, his track record is a bit hit-and-miss but the films are never dull. Now, he’s back with another controversial title, The Whale, which shows a morbidly obese man trying to make amends with his estranged teenage daughter in his final days. Aronofsky describes his film as “exercise in empathy” but some reviewers have criticised his depiction of the man’s body as monstrous, in particular writer and social commentator Roxane Gay, who wrote in The New York Times that The Whale was “an inhumane film about a very human being.” The one thing that everyone agrees on, however, is that Brendan Fraser’s Oscar-nominated performance as the protagonist is extraordinarily moving. His co-star, The Menu's Hong Chau, has also been nominated for an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress.
Working from a script by Sam Hunter, who wrote the play on which the film is based in 2012, Aronofsky introduces us to Charlie (Fraser), an online English teacher living in Idaho who, because of his enormous size, refuses to reveal himself on camera to his students, his best friend and nurse, Liz (Hong Chau), his angry daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young missionary from the New Life Church, who knocked on Charlie’s door one day and keeps coming back. Charlie’s blood pressure is through the roof but he refuses to go to hospital, despite Liz’s urging, claiming that he has no insurance and can’t afford treatment. Thomas, meanwhile, is unaware that the hard-line conservative beliefs of his fundamentalist Christian church have had a profound impact on the lives of Charlie, Liz and Ellie, and are, to some degree, responsible for Charlie’s condition - but he’s about to find out thanks to Ellie’s cruel mind-games.
Despite its origins in the theatre, The Whale never feels ‘stagey.’ Matthew Libatique’s camera constantly prowls around the rooms of Charlie’s modest house, circling him as he, like the sun, holds our gaze at the centre of this small universe, barely moving from his sofa. Fraser gives one of the performances of his career and had to do it under difficult circumstances; it took hours every day to fit him with prosthetics weighing as much as 135 kilos before he could venture on set. It is a difficult role to get right, requiring nuance and subtlety to make Charlie worthy of the audience’s compassion. After all, this is a guy who’s basically given up on life, full of regret for some of his past actions, and desperate to earn his daughter’s forgiveness. Hong Chau is terrific, too, as the loving friend who can see what is happening to Charlie but is powerless to stop him travelling on his destructive journey. Looking like a young Uma Thurman, Sadie Sink from TV’s Stranger Things is sharp-tongued and bristling with barely suppressed rage as Ellie, a girl who feels she was abandoned and has become a dedicated misanthrope. She resents Charlie’s attempts to teach her that life can be beautiful and therein lies a basic fault line in Hunter’s screenplay. Charlie asks Ellie the movie’s ‘big question,’ “Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?” even though he has, seemingly, given up caring himself – at least about his own life. It’s a contradiction that is left unexplained.
The Whale is a story about flawed lives and the search for redemption and salvation. None of the people we see on screen are ‘without sin,’ so to speak, and that is what makes them so real. The director says, “What I love about [the film] is that it invites you to see the humanity of characters who are not all good or all bad, who truly live in grey tones the way people do, and who have extremely rich, intricate inner lives. They’ve all made mistakes, but what they share are immense hearts and the desire to love even when others are seemingly unlovable. It’s a story that asks a simple but essential question: can we save each other?” It’s an important question but not one that Aronofsky has succeeded in answering.