In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, mounds upon mounds of prosthetics rework Brendan Fraser into a personality many instances his actual dimension. That’s the hook of the film, and its headline, and in addition its early controversy. Why, some have questioned, have such nice sources been expended to permit an actor of Fraser’s common stature to play a task a naturally bigger man may have occupied as a substitute? Are so-called fats fits inherently dehumanizing, or have they simply been put to that use up to now? Wherever one lands on such questions, the fact is that the frilly full-body makeover of The Whale isn’t any much less actual than anything on this fatally overwrought melodrama of compulsion and atonement. Its dramatic heft is solely phony, too.
Fraser performs Charlie, a university English professor who teaches remotely from his dwelling in small-town Idaho. Charlie retains his webcam off, telling his college students it’s a technical error. In actuality, he simply doesn’t need them to see him, and uncover the reality: that he’s a shut-in who weighs over 600 kilos. It’s been years since Charlie’s made any try to drop extra pounds, and a brand new blood stress studying places him within the “name 911 instantly” hazard zone. His overeating is killing him, quickly and decisively. However he gained’t go to the hospital.
The Whale affords therapy-couch explanations for what Charlie has slowly been doing to his physique through the years. (He was at all times greater, he explains, however not at all times this large.) It’s a symptom of grief that turned a spiral of disgrace, and has progressively manifested in an obvious demise want. The movie wheels out carts and carts of tragic backstory: an anguished grapple with sexuality, a lover misplaced to suicide, an deserted household, an evangelical group that performed its damaging, judgmental half. The one pleasure Charlie appears to derive from life comes from rereading a private scripture, an previous scholar essay on Moby Dick from which the movie attracts its dual-meaning title. (His obsession with its unvarnished honesty is ironic in such a dishonest drama.)
Adapting his personal decade-old stage play, Baskets creator Samuel D. Hunter makes little try to disguise the theatrical origins of The Whale, which unfolds over what we’re led to know is perhaps the previous few days of Charlie’s life. Hunter’s screenplay is an overheated stew of hot-button points, tackled by a supporting forged of characters that maintain getting into proper and exiting left at common intervals, nudging Charlie towards acceptance or doable redemption.
Among the many ensemble of coming and going home company is Charlie’s longtime buddy, Liz (Downsizing’s Hong Chau), a nurse who checks up on him repeatedly, lecturing him about his well being whereas additionally acquiescing to his pleas for unhealthy meals. Hong is so robust and susceptible and genuine within the function, it’s a disgrace she’s taking part in a personality who can’t cease spilling her guts by way of torturously overwritten monologues. There’s additionally Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a younger, fresh-faced missionary who moderately conveniently wanders into the narrative and turns into decided to avoid wasting Charlie’s soul earlier than it departs. (Naturally, he has some demons of his personal.) Most outstanding is the protagonist’s estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink, finest generally known as Max from Stranger Issues), who he deserted to start out a brand new life years earlier. Given these unhappy circumstances, it’s form of spectacular how unsympathetic The Whale manages to make her. She’s a veritable cartoon of venomous teen angst, hurling slurs and cyberbullying insults at anybody in her proximity.
That final subplot, a bad-dad quest for forgiveness, recollects Aronofsky’s earlier The Wrestler, one other portrait of a broken man pushing his physique to life-threatening extremes. One may, the truth is, name corporeal abuse a daily theme of this hots-hot auteur’s work, mirrored by the hangnail-pulling ballerina meltdown of Black Swan and the spiraling eating-disorder dependancy Ellen Burstyn endures in Requiem for a Dream. Right here once more, the director can’t resist indulging his fascination with grotesquerie. The Whale isn’t explicitly an act of callous fat-shaming, as some have declared the film sight unseen; its intention is empathy. However too typically does Aronofsky’s compassion curdle right into a form of nightmare pity, gazing upon Charlie as he masturbates on his sofa in a state of co-mingled agony and pleasure, or as he desperately binges by the glow of his fridge.
Not that Fraser ever appears to be begging for pity. Grabbing possibly his meatiest function ever, no pun supposed, the one-time A-list heartthrob of The Mummy and George of the Jungle wrestles mightily with the restrictions of the overheated materials. For all of the struggling the movie pours on his character, the star refuses to play Charlie as a morose sob story. He brings a touch of suppressed mirth, and a light-weight sensitivity that clashes productively with the heaviness of the fabric. Burying him in latex is perhaps a form of stunt casting, however Fraser by no means lets the substitute girth he dons do the appearing for him. As a substitute, he lets us see glimmers of the carefree charisma that outlined his derring-do star turns of a Hollywood lifetime in the past. The impression isn’t of somebody swallowed by their dysfunction, however of a soul nonetheless flickering beneath the ache that spurred it.
However Fraser can’t overcome the contrivances, community-theater histrionics, or clanging synthetic dialogue of Hunter’s play. Nor can Aronofsky, that inconsistent however at all times formidable maestro of holy and earthly battle. The Whale is definitely his limpest drama, irrespective of how absolutely he commits to the black-box claustrophobia of the fabric or how incessantly Rob Simonsen’s operatic music swells and pleads. To get hung up on that cocoon of pretend flesh Fraser inhabits is to overlook the extra important shortcomings of the movie. It wears it themes like shoddy prosthetics, a gimcrack phantasm of profundity.
The Whale opens in choose theaters December 9. Our protection of the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition continues all week. For extra of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please go to his Authory web page.
Editors’ Alternative