The Whale

dir: Darren Aronofsky

2022

The strangest thing, for me, about the prominence of this film, The Whale, is that despite the awards it’s been nominated for, and all the column inches burned up saying how wonderful it is that Brendan Fraser is ‘back’ after a long time in the wilderness, is that at least around the movie review websites I frequent, I can’t seem to find a single positive review.

And definitely not any glowing reviews. Despite the fact that Fraser himself and his co-star Hong Chau are nominated for Oscars in the upcoming popularity contest in March, almost every review I’ve read says that regardless of the wonderful performances, the film is an abomination and shouldn’t exist.

An academic writer and thinker I deeply admire and respect, whose books I’ve read and enjoyed, being Roxane Gay, pretty much saw the film as an abhorrent personal attack, which also made me dread watching it. No review I read encouraged me to watch the flick.

But watch it I did, all the same. Because… I guess I wanted to know myself.

As a fairly large person myself, yes, it does hurt to see overweight people depicted as monsters, less so in the image itself (from my perspective), and more in the horror and disgust of the people around them voicing their displeasure. Much has been said about how Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is deliberately shown gorging on food, with the accompanying carefully curated sound effects, in order to elicit pity or disgust from the audience.

And then there’s the grotesquerie of his actual appearance, which seems at least to me to be a combination of a fat suit and CGI / digital effects as well, which makes him look like an inflated 600-pound man for whom every breath is laborious and a miracle.

I don’t know what was in director Darren Aronofsky’s mind when he made this, but when I look at his body of work, in which even if there are themes carried through, every film is different, and while cruel things happen to his characters, I didn’t ever feel that he himself wanted to be cruel to them because he hated them and wanted us to detest them. Wow, that sounds weird, written down.

I honestly can’t accept, in my head, that he ‘hates’ Charlie, and wants us to be horrified by him.

Part of me, probably infected by some of Charlie’s surreal optimism in the face of all opposition, feels compelled to think that while he may want us to pity his state and his compulsion to hurt himself through his feeder addiction, he wants us to empathise with him more so.

Some of the criticisms of the flick that aren’t about the main character’s appearance label the ‘plot’, such as it is, contrived and unbelievable.

Well, since this is based on and adapted from a play, I feel compelled to ask: What play have you ever seen that didn’t seem somehow contrived or unbelievable? No one ever in real life talks as much as characters do in plays.

Plays! Honest to goodness, plays. Yes, it’s very stagey, and claustrophobically filmed in one location, being Charlie’s dingy apartment, but I think we’re meant to feel as trapped as the character is, and that’s not invalid conceptually, even if it means we stay in one dingy location throughout.

His entrapment is not only by his surroundings, or his body and its ailments, but because of his choices, which he feels he can never make up for, and the loss of his last partner Alex, which started the process that we are witnessing the end stages of. We are pretty much watching what we are being told will be the last week of Charlie’s life unless there is a medical intervention, which he doesn’t want. The reasons for which play out much later, the more we get to understand why Charlie is Charlie and does things in his Charlie-esque way.

It's meant (I think) to be funny, but when we’re introduced to Charlie, he’s pleasuring himself while watching porn, starts having a heart attack, but hark! A knock at the door, a helpful Samaritan, but it’s a chaotic scene because two people have turned up at the same time, one more welcome than the other.

One is a missionary (Ty Simpkins) who is mistakenly trying to save Charlie’s soul by converting him to some cultish godbother-y Mormonish version of Christianity. The other person is Liz (the magnificent Hong Chau, who steals every scene she’s in, in every movie she’s in), Charlie’s only friend in the world, who also happens to be the sister of the guy Charlie lost, and essentially, his care giver. I think she’s a nurse.

And yet Charlie begs the missionary to read something to him, something which he treasures above all else. The other person who turns up has no interest in reading, or in Moby Dick. The essay isn’t even particularly well written or argued, but Charlie loves it, is soothed by it, and loves it more than anything else in the world.

In contrast to Charlie’s placid, good-natured energy, Liz is spiky and abrupt, yelling at him with concern, but she’s not harsh towards him. She is less kind towards the missionary, who seems baffled by everything, but is still determined in his mission.

Liz loves Charlie, and it broke my heart to see her leaning her head on his shoulder, but she knows she can’t save him from himself. She castigates Charlie for his choices and inaction (towards his own health) but, perversely, she also brings him the food he wants most, which is also killing him.

How can she go from telling him that he’ll be dead within a week if he doesn’t go to Emergency, to handing him a bucket of fried chicken or meatball subs for him to gorge on?

I…don’t know. Over the course of the week, these characters pop in and out, revealing more about themselves and each other, with Charlie as the large celestial object that they revolve around.

Someone else who keeps popping in and out: Ellie (Sadie Sink). Ellie is, strangely enough, Charlie’s teenage daughter with his now estranged wife (Samantha Morton). And she hates Charlie because in her eyes she abandoned him in order to shack up with his lover, instead of continuing to be a dad to her.

So, absent for seven years of her life, he struggles to reconnect with her, resorting to outright bribery, and she unleashes hell upon him. Her vicious words and cruelty, well, it’s pretty harsh. She’s savage, and doesn’t only hate Charlie, either. She seems to loathe everyone.

Sadie Sink is probably best known for playing Max on Stranger Things, and while her performance here is one note, she’s very good at playing that one note. She makes no effort to transcend the stereotype of teenagers being awful once they hit 15, 16, and will possibly make a lot of people who never had kids feel better about themselves.

She’s horrid, and the temptation in a lesser story than this would be to point to the embittered ex-wife as the cause of the toxic estrangement, as having poisoned Ellie against him. But once we meet the mum, we see a woman even more put off and afraid of Ellie than Charlie could be. She even wonders out loud whether Ellie is just plain evil?

I am not sure that it was intended as a comedic line, but I laughed, I have to say.

I don’t want to put aside or try to argue that other people’s opinions about the film aren’t accurate or aren’t true for them: that was their reaction, and that’s their right to express. My reaction, upon watching this, was different. I very much enjoyed this flick. I loved the performances by everyone, especially Hong Chau, but I thought everyone else was great, even the strange missionary kid.

When I watched the scenes where we’re perhaps meant to recoil in horror, the thing is, those scenes don’t hit me that way, for reasons I won’t go into. All I felt was sadness, and a desperate wish that I could help, and that things weren’t the way they are, but above all empathy for this person struggling with himself, who could never get out of his own way. Where others see a mawkish and fake saintliness to Charlie, I just saw a sweet natured, gentle soul who made too many mistakes to come back from, but still deserved to be loved. I loved his performance, and I think I love him, a little bit, too.

In some of the reviews online, where they talk about the essay that Charlie is obsessed with, I think they either misinterpret or don’t care about what it’s really saying, because it seems like a pretentious linkage the script tries to make with Moby-Dick that doesn’t really add anything to the plot. Sure, Charlie is a creative writing teacher, and Moby-Dick is a famous American novel that almost no-one enjoys reading. But I think some people deliberately misunderstand that he doesn’t love that essay because it’s about Moby-Dick and he feels like the whale in the story. Sure, it’s easy and insulting to just say that, in a movie called The Whale, the main character, who is very large, is like the whale in the novel Moby-Dick: A white mammal that someone hates beyond all reason and will destroy themselves and others in their pursuit of it. But Charlie is the whale, and Captain Ahab, and the narrator, and Ishmael as well. And he’s Melville, the author, occasionally hiding from his own problems in those alternating fact chapters, as the essay’s writer asserts.

But again that’s not why he loves the essay. He loves the essay because of who wrote the essay. Isn’t it obvious?

8 reasons The Whale is definitely not for landlubbers or the faint of heart out of 10

--
“I need to know that I have done one right thing with my life!” – you and me both, buddy - The Whale