"The Whale": review

Brendan Fraser as Charlie, our protagonist

[WARNING: spoilers.]

Darren Aronofsky is one of my favorite directors: he's deft with magical-realist imagery and biblical metaphors and human suffering in many of his works. Aronofsky's films all swim at the deep end of the pool; you don't go into one of his movies expecting rainbow-farting unicorns and gaily singing dwarves. There's going to be the sweat of effort, the tears of absolute misery and, very often, the specter of death. These films are not subtle. I haven't even seen most of Aronofsky's filmology, but what I have seen has been intriguing and fascinating: "The Fountain," "The Wrestler," and "Noah." (Strangely, I haven't reviewed most of these films, which means it may be time to host my own Aronofsky festival, as depressing as that will likely be.) Many of these films deal with a person or people on a deathward spiral—usually a spiral of their own making. In some of these movies, all we can do is watch helplessly as a main character self-destructs. In other movies, like "The Fountain," we see people actively fighting against death. In "The Whale," the magical realism is kept to a minimum, and when the magical moment occurs, you're free to interpret it as the delusions of a dying mind in its final moments or, perhaps, as something more spiritual on the order of an apotheosis (we'll get into why that might be ironic).

"The Whale" is a 2022 Darren Aronofsky filmic adaptation of a stage play by Samuel Hunter, who is credited as the film's screenwriter. It stars Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, and Ty Simpkins. It is the story of the final week in the life of Charlie (Fraser), a morbidly obese college professor who is trying to reconcile with his daughter. The twist is that Charlie was married to Mary (Morton), and they had a daughter named Ellie (Sink), but Charlie is gay—first secretly, then openly. Charlie falls in love with Alan, a missionary from the New Life Church, and on a selfish impulse, Charlie abandons his wife and daughter, but some time later, Alan kills himself. This loss sends Charlie into a binge-eating spiral, which is how he's ended up so enormous.

All of that is background. The film begins inauspiciously, with Charlie awkwardly masturbating to gay porn. He is interrupted by a young teen named Thomas, himself a New Life missionary who has ostensibly come to proselytize. Thomas catches a bit of the gay porn on Charlie's laptop right as Charlie slams the laptop shut, but the young man remains tastefully silent, and the two pretend nothing has happened as they converse about the New Life church and Charlie's unbelief (New Life's theological focus is on the End Times). Charlie also gets regular visits from his friend Liz, a nurse and Charlie's caretaker because Charlie refuses to visit hospitals since he has no insurance and doesn't want to end up in debt. Liz's other connection to Charlie is that she was Alan's sister, a self-described "black sheep" of the family who, unlike her brother, rejected the church's teachings. The other three visitors to Charlie's apartment are Dan the pizza guy, who never sees Charlie (Charlie leaves money in the mailbox for Dan to collect); Charlie's bitter teen daughter Ellie, who may be psychotic; and Charlie's ex-wife Mary, who had initially told Ellie to stay far away from Charlie. There is arguably a fourth visitor: a bird who appears outside one of Charlie's windows.

As the story progresses, Charlie makes efforts to reconcile with Ellie who is, in some ways, a typical teen furious at the world. In her case, she has some justification: her dad abandoned her when she was eight, and she never understood that his efforts to get in contact with her were rebuffed by her mother, who wanted there to be a wall between Ellie and Charlie. What Ellie doesn't know is that Charlie, with his severe congestive heart failure and frequent chest pains, has kept Ellie's middle-school essay on Moby-Dick as a salve to be read out loud by someone (or recited by Charlie himself when he's alone) whenever he is having a medical crisis. All Ellie knows is that Charlie might be able to keep her from flunking out of school by helping her write some essays. Cynical, spiteful, and manipulative, Ellie makes Charlie promise that she'll inherit all of his money (despite pleading empty pockets to his nurse friend Liz, Charlie actually has around $120,000 in the bank—all of it earmarked for Ellie), and she goads him into trying to stand and walk toward her without the aid of his walker. Ellie also compulsively takes cell-phone pics of the people she meets, and she posts uncharitably captioned photos online (for a picture of Charlie, she says there'll be a grease fire in hell when this one burns). Nurse Liz does what she can to help Charlie when he's choking on food or needing a check of his vitals. Liz, who rejected New Life Church, feels nothing but venom for Thomas, the New Life missionary who is harboring a secret of his own. And despite being a medical practitioner, Liz abets Charlie in his overeating by buying him huge subs and allowing him to eat a bucket of fried chicken. Charlie gets a visit from his ex-wife Mary, an encounter that proves to be an emotional roller coaster.

It's impossible to talk about some of the issues I want to go over without spoiling the film's ending. The movie is periodically interrupted by title cards showing the day of the week, so we're left with the impression that we're witnessing the final week of Charlie's life. Charlie gets himself fired from his online-teaching job after profanely demanding that his students write something honest. Dan the pizza guy, overcome with curiosity about Charlie, sticks around one night after delivering two pizzas so he can see Charlie. Charlie opens the door to collect his pizzas, and the two have an awkward moment as they look at each other. Charlie's ex-wife Mary is full of lingering emotions about Charlie; at one point, they reminisce about being at the beach with a very young Ellie. Charlie wants to know that, in having fathered Ellie, he's done at least one good thing with his life. Liz does her best to care for Charlie as it becomes obvious he probably won't last more than a few days. Ellie comes back in a rage: Charlie's supposedly "rewritten" essay earned Ellie an "F" because what Charlie submitted was Ellie's old middle-school essay about Moby-Dick. Charlie breaks through Ellie's rage, telling her she's beautiful and incredible, and he asks her to read the essay out loud to him. In that moment, as Ellie is reading, Charlie again tries to get up and walk to Ellie unaided, as Ellie had goaded him to do before. Charlie totters ponderously toward Ellie as she reads... and the movie's one moment of magical realism kicks in as Charlie's feet leave the earth, and the entire scene is consumed by white light. There's a vision of that long-ago trip to the beach, then... fade.

My reading of that moment is that we're witnessing Charlie's simultaneous death and fulfillment. It may not be the best possible reconciliation with his daughter, but it's the best he's going to get after living a lifetime of wrong, self-undermining choices. The image of Charlie's feet leaving the ground, and of the white light, symbolizes a kind of rapture right as Charlie steps through the Great Door to whatever comes next after death. The movie ends in beauty—a bit like the play W;t, in which the main character walks into a shimmering light—but we pragmatists are left to think that what really happened was that Charlie had his internal moment of rapture, then he collapsed ponderously to the floor and breathed his last, dying in front of his daughter—a fat, rasping mess.

You'd never think of Brendan Fraser, the one-time action hero and star of a dozen lame comedies, as being capable of an Oscar-worthy performance (assuming the Oscars mean anything anymore), yet here we are. Fraser acted his heart out in this role, and the entire time, he must have known he was skirting the bounds of caricature or parody: a dude in a fat suit is, let's face it, a fairly ridiculous sight. Fraser and Aronofsky both had to face PC accusations of "fatphobia," and many critics think the movie's portrayal of Charlie as a compulsive binge eater went too far into the realm of satire. As someone who knows very well the gravitational pull that tasty, bad-for-you food can exert on the mind, I didn't think Fraser was out of bounds at all. How do 600-pound people come to weigh 600 pounds, after all, if not via their grandiose compulsions? I may not have Charlie's drawer full of candy bars, but I spend an awful lot of time imagining myself gorging on food. And yes, on one level, you're always conscious of Fraser's fat suit (Fraser is a large, doughy guy now, long past his action-movie days, but he's nowhere near 600 pounds), but Fraser pulls off a tour de force that's more in spite of the fat suit than because of it.

Fraser is also surrounded by a very capable cast. Hong Chau, whom I saw recently in "The Menu," plays a character who is the polar opposite of her straitlaced, militaristic Elsa in that other movie: Liz is a gentle soul who wears her heart on her sleeve. She cares very much for Charlie; she's comfortable enough around him to do the occasional fat joke (when Charlie walks backward to settle himself in a new wheelchair, Liz makes beeping noises like a truck in reverse); she desperately wants Charlie to get medical attention, but beyond taking his vitals and helping him with little things, Liz can do little more than stand by and watch Charlie slowly die. In these two movie roles, Chau shows off her amazing versatility as an actress. Samantha Morton, whom I saw recently in "She Said," makes the most of her brief screen time in the role of Charlie's ex-wife Mary. Mary, a bit white-trashy, looks weary and timeworn, and she confesses to Charlie that she thinks their daughter Ellie is outright evil, or at least psychopathic. And Sadie Sink, in the role of Ellie, is at times a bit scary when she settles into cold-eyed-bitch mode. With her sniper's stare and her off-putting demeanor, Ellie is the kind of daughter you disown as quickly as possible... yet Charlie, relentlessly positive, sees only the good in her. He respects her fierce honesty and is convinced she can be an amazing writer. When Charlie gently asks Ellie to write something sincere in a journal for him to read later, she writes: "This apartment smells. This notebook is retarded. I hate everyone." Charlie realizes with amusement that the spiteful words are written in the 5-7-5 syllabic structure of a haiku, and now, he has some insight into Ellie's mind.

We should talk about the obvious: the movie, being based on a stage play, looks and feels like a stage play. The action takes place almost entirely inside Charlie's apartment, with only a few tantalizing outside shots sprinkled throughout the film. The characters (only six) often speak in long paragraphs that make the dialogue feel unwontedly stilted—a typical characteristic of a stage play. The scene of the exchange between Charlie and his ex-wife carries all the emotional ups and downs of a play, and while the scene was extremely well acted, I did feel a bit manipulated and could anticipate the changes in emotional tenor before they happened (e.g., a moment of tenderness followed immediately by a moment of cold anger).

And then there's my biggest complaint about the film: the ending. Charlie's moment of death/rapture makes for an ironic contrast with his constant rejection of New Life's message of salvation. Maybe this was intentional: he rejects salvation only to experience it at the very end. Charlie's rapture is supposed to symbolize his reconciliation with his daughter, but you have to wonder whether Ellie—who has had years to train herself to be bitter and cynical—sees it that way. From her perspective, she's having a potential breakthrough moment with her father, but then, he collapses and dies on her in what is effectively a second abandonment prompted by Charlie's irresponsible eating. Charlie is a complex character: at the end of his life, he wants to be more of a father to Ellie, but he also can't stop compulsively eating, which puts him on what is effectively a suicidal path. All of this mixed messaging makes it hard for me to buy the ending. I acknowledge, though, that I may be complaining about the very thing that Aronofsky is going for: maybe he wants us to feel these mixed feelings about Charlie, his possibly ironic rapture, and where all of this leaves Ellie. I realize I may be complaining about the very complexity that Aronofsky is trying to express.

Some critics have noted that Aronofsky has done the father-daughter thing in other movies like "The Wrestler," in which Mickey Rourke's character tries to reconcile with his daughter. Other directors have also done the father-daughter thing, like Debra Granik with "Leave No Trace," a film that genuinely touched me. I wasn't quite as touched by "The Whale," which is too on-the-nose with its whale/fatso metaphor, but I don't mind that Aronofsky goes back to certain favorite themes. He does seem obsessed with human fallibility, especially of the self-undermining sort, maybe because that's what so much human fallibility amounts to: how we trip ourselves up even as we profess higher motives and a desire to reach loftier ends. The better angels of our nature raise us up, but our animalistic side always drags us down. Life is often about finding a way to navigate those two urges and impulses, but Aronofsky seems most at home giving us characters who are in the midst of veering out of control.

So watch "The Whale" with my recommendation, but know that (1) it's not going to be an easy watch, (2) the magical realism at the end might turn you off, and (3) you might not be in a mood to be faced with a movie that deals with sailing the tempest-tossed seas of human weakness. Charlie is, at times, a very sympathetic character, but at other times, it's hard to relate to him when he's made so many stupid and dangerous life-choices. And yet, as I said earlier, that might be Aronofsky's point. We're all only human. And Liz the nurse says something, at one point, that gives me pause: she says she's not convinced that anyone can save anyone. In other words, we're all left to marinate in the mire of our own self-made circumstances. As Living Colour sang so long ago: Only you can set you free.