This review first appeared for Jumpcut Online on September 4th 2022 as part of Venice Film Festival coverage
After 2017’s critically divisive Mother, director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem for A Dream) returns with The Whale. A highly anticipated premiere at Venice Film Festival, it is a sporadically intense film about guilt and love, that strips back his unrestrained shenanigans and focuses prominently on the relationship dynamic of its central cast.
Charlie (Brendan Fraser), an online English professor, weighs 600 pounds and is trapped in his own home. Due to his weight, Charlie has hypertension type 3; excessive blood pressure that would usually send a person into the emergency room, but Charlie refuses to go. He’s already given up. So much so, that he keeps a prized Moby Dick essay on hand to read when he has a heart attack, for one last read as he dies. His weight, as described by carer Liz (Hong Chau), is from the grief of losing his partner Alan from suicide. It’s also from having no contact with his ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) or with his 17-year-old daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he walked out on to be with Alan.
The film follows a week of Charlie’s life in the confines of his living room, never exiting his building as he looks to reconcile with his abusive daughter. Despite Charlie’s ambivalence towards his mistreatment, he wants what little time he has left in the world to be near his daughter.
The Whale, known as the alternate title for Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, uses the novel as a comparison piece. In Moby Dick, Ishmael joins Captain Ahab in his obsession with a white whale – the origin of the term white whale to obsess over something elusive. In Charlie’s case, the narrative of The Whale takes the literary text as precursor for ideas, which aren’t corporeal or directly translatable across mediums. It’s adapted from a play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter, who also gets the screenplay credit here.
It’s unfortunate that The Whale doesn’t forego certain elements of the play’s theatricality. While Charlie is figuratively trapped in his own guilt and desolated self-identity and literally trapped by his physical impracticality in the outer world, Aronofsky doesn’t utilise this space enough. Shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio to help hammer home the confines of his space, it can’t get away from those theatre roots. None more so than the seemingly EXIT-STAGE-LEFT instructions that supporting cast members are prone to, as they come and go from the screen as their scene ends. This is along with weak scriptural reveals that are deigned to garner gasps from a participating audience as if they weren’t predictably obvious from their inception.
Mercifully, Brendan Fraser is magnificent, and as much as the direction threatens to capsize that, his return to Hollywood makes one proud. His performance as Charlie, who spends the entire shoot in over 300 pounds of make-up and prosthetics – is soul-shudderingly good as he strives for his white whale: Brendan’s successful return to Hollywood, and Charlie’s unrequited love for his daughter. The emotional resonance of the final act saves the lethargic first hour. A testament to how magnetic Fraser is in the role, that the film grows in strength the longer we’re subjected to the red, tear-stained eyes of Charlie’s grief. Fraser’s performance is so enthralling that it elevates The Whale far beyond the sum of its parts.
His grief is the driving force for The Whale, what with the film being a bunch of clumsy metaphors on Moby Dick. After all, it’s up for debate whether Charlie is Moby Dick in this story. Is he Ahab – described as “a grand, ungodly, god-like man” on the hunt for the whale which once bit his leg off? Or is he Ishmael, the man who shares a bed with another man and is the narrative driving force of the novel? Which then begs the question: are we, the audience, Ishmael?
Grand ideas make this film a curious one to chew on. Even if this Moby Dick riffing chamber piece threatens to capsize, this is ultimately Brendan Fraser’s crowning glory.
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