Monthly Archives: November 2022

  • The Whale

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2022)

    The Whale, showing at the London Film Festival, is based on the 2012 play of the same name by Samuel D Hunter.  Only for the first few minutes does Darren Aronofsky attempt to disguise his film’s stage origins.  The opening shots show a road and surrounding landscape in rural Idaho.  Next up is a computer screen, filled by the faces of students participating in an online literature seminar.  Aronofsky’s camera then moves inside the apartment of Charlie, the academic leading the seminar.  Except for occasional exterior shots at the entrance to his home and a brief flashback sequence, the camera doesn’t get out of the apartment again.  Nor does six-hundred-pound Charlie, the film’s title character and decidedly of the beached variety.

    Although his voice is heard, Charlie remains unseen during the seminar sequence:  a blank square at the centre of the computer screen, he tells his students he has to get the camera on his laptop fixed.  In our first sight of him, Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is sprawled in a chair, masturbating as he watches gay porn on the laptop.  Doing so nearly gives him a heart attack.  He calls someone called Liz, urging her to get over to his place.  When the doorbell rings, Charlie shouts, ‘It’s open’:  enter not Liz but Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young evangelical Christian missionary.  In the course of the film, Thomas will return to the apartment several times – so will Liz (Hong Chau), who is Charlie’s friend and a nurse at a local hospital, and Ellie (Sadie Sink), his estranged teenage daughter.  Her mother Mary (Samantha Morton), Charlie’s ex-wife, puts in an appearance, too.  Hunter’s play (he also did the film’s screenplay) is evidently one of those single-set theatre pieces that encapsulate the character and backstory of a somehow confined protagonist through dialogues with key people in their life – a life now approaching its end.

    Exterior shots in The Whale show the weather as always grim.  Thomas represents a group called New Life, more than once referred to as an end-of-times cult.  To reinforce the doomsday atmosphere, Aronofsky and Hunter have updated the story to 2016:  the apartment’s television shows coverage from Republican presidential primaries.  All in all, it’s pretty clear the end is nigh for morbidly obese Charlie.  He’s eating himself to death and pizza delivery man Dan (Sathya Sridharan) is another regular caller, though he doesn’t cross the threshold; once Charlie has phoned an order, he hauls himself up and struggles on a walking frame – or, later, in a hospital wheelchair, obtained by Liz – to the doorway, leaving the pizza money just outside.  Dan’s curiosity eventually gets the better of him.  He contrives to get a look at his customer and is shocked by the sight.  Before he finally signs off, Charlie also shows himself to the zoominar students, whose facial reactions are a mixture of suppressed pity and horror.

    These moments have probably intensified the accusations of ‘fatphobia’ levelled at The Whale but this viewer has to admit needing no encouragement to find Charlie uncomfortable viewing.  I sometimes wanted to look elsewhere, hoping, for example (and in vain), that Aronofsky would cut away before Charlie negotiated his way into the shower.  His appearance and situation kept bringing other films and their leading men incorrectly to mind.  Wearing a vast grey T-shirt, Charlie gives a new meaning to Elephant Man; next to Charlie, the hugely obese Jake LaMotta of Raging Bull is a featherweight.  (Charlie is also stuck in his own private Idaho.)  Cheap shots aside, though, isn’t criticism of this kind of ‘body shaming’ an instance of political correctness trumping common sense – and itself an expression of prejudice?  Charlie’s overweight is a pathological condition:  he has been diagnosed with congestive heart failure.  If he were, say, a skin-and-bones alcoholic or drug addict, would his story reflect phobic attitudes towards the behaviour that’s killing him?  The flashback showing him on a family holiday in happier times confirms that Charlie was, as he himself says, always on the big side – but nowhere the size he is now.  Overeating is this self-loathing, despairing man’s way of making himself feel and look worse, of ensuring that he literally can’t escape his situation, of hastening his end.

    His physical grotesqueness complements the mawkishness of the storyline (insistently confirmed by Rob Simonsen’s mournful score).  Samuel Hunter recognises the dramatic need to tie his small cast of characters together and Darren Aronofsky is well equipped to point up the melodramatic highlights.  After Charlie’s sexuality brought his marriage to Mary to an end, he lived with Liz’s brother, who was the love of Charlie’s life.  As Asian child immigrants to the US, Liz and her brother were adopted by members of the same New Life sect that Thomas belongs to.  Their adoptive father’s hardline evangelism and homophobia drove Liz’s brother to commit suicide.  His death turned Charlie to self-destruction and explains Liz’s vehement antipathy to Thomas.  Ever since Charlie left her and her mother, Ellie has been disruptive at home and at school.  There are two whales in the story, the other being Moby-Dick, and repeated references to an essay about Melville’s novel (first published as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale) that Charlie treasures and quotes from.  When Ellie re-enters her father’s life, he’s eager to atone to the extent of ghosting her high-school literature assignments.  It turns out the cherished Moby-Dick crit was written not by one of Charlie’s students but by Ellie in eighth grade, before she turned sour and angry.

    Mary remembers that she found her ex-husband’s ‘positivity really annoying’.  The film makes you sympathise with her, at least as far as Charlie’s feelings about Ellie are concerned, though at one point this is genuinely amusing.  He’s convinced that Ellie is a born writer:  when he finds a few words she’s jotted down on one of her visits – ‘This apartment stinks.  This notebook is retarded.  I hate everyone’ – Charlie counts the syllables and decides Ellie has composed a haiku.  It’s his daughter’s Moby-Dick example that prompts him, in his last online teaching session, to tell his students to forget all that phony academic stuff and to write-what-you-feel.  Doing right by Ellie is Charlie’s one-minute-to-midnight mission – in order to mend their relationship and salvage something from his wrecked life.  It emerges that, in fact, he’s been laying the ground for this for some time:  he has considerable savings, which he won’t use for medical treatment but will give entirely to Ellie.  It’s presumably the humanly redeeming effect of all this that explains the white light flooding the screen in the film’s closing shots, as Charlie breathes his last.  This burst of transcendence is a bit confusing:  it looks as if the hero is going to heaven.

    Aronofsky presumably doesn’t mean to suggest that although The Whale does keep faith with undoubting Thomas for longer than might be expected.  He eventually shows his true homophobic colours but by this stage has also shown some vulnerability, succumbing to temptress Ellie’s invitation to smoke pot, revealing that he ran away to Idaho from his native Oregon to escape issues with the local religious community that includes his parents.  (Ellie posts online photos of the pot-smoking so that the Oregon mission knows Thomas is OK – this at least is how positive-thinking Charlie interprets his daughter’s actions.)  Ty Simpkins does well in stressing Thomas’s sympathetic, compassionate side.  Sadie Sink finds it hard to do likewise in her monotonously acrid playing of Ellie.  Hong Chau (best known for Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2016), a polar opposite film in which people got fantastically small) is forceful as Liz.  Mary’s a clumsily conceived character but Samantha Morton, as usual, brings emotional truth to her role.

    But The Whale is, as it must be, Brendan Fraser’s show.  Like the man he’s playing, Fraser has always been on the big side.  It’s a few years since I last saw him on screen so it’s a relief to learn that his appearance here is largely artificial:  according to Wikipedia, ‘Fraser would spend four hours each day in the make-up department getting fitted with prosthetics that weighed up to 300 pounds. … He also worked with a dance instructor for months prior to filming to figure out how his character would move with the excess weight …’ (the prosthetics, of course, have also been deplored by Defenders of the Fat).  The performance certainly is a remarkable physical achievement but its best feature – and what makes you root for Charlie – is Brendan Fraser’s vocal variety, blending pain and humour, and plenty more in between.  I don’t think I’m stressing this just because I might have found The Whale easier to cope with as a piece for voices only.

    14 October 2022

  • Women Talking

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sarah Polley (2022)

    Women Talking is Sarah Polley’s fourth feature as director and the first for ten years.  I’ve admired all three of its predecessors:  Polley got a wonderful performance from Julie Christie in Away From Her (2006), crafted an unusual, complex drama in Take This Waltz (2011) and made a highly original documentary in Stories We Tell (2012).  Women Talking is more successful on its own terms than most other films I’ve so far seen at this year’s London Film Festival.  Thanks to its subject matter, it will probably give its writer-director a higher profile than ever before.  I found it monotonously disappointing.  Adapted from a novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, Women Talking is peopled by members of a religious sect and you come out of the film feeling you’ve been in church – for a service that’s nothing but sermon.

    Somewhere in rural America, the women of a Mennonite community have recently discovered that repeated sexual assaults on them during the preceding two years were not, as their menfolk told them, the devilish work of an incubus or a figment of ‘wild female imagination’ but were carried out by male members of their colony, who used animal drugs to anaesthetise the women before raping them.  The perpetrators, one of whom was eventually caught in the act, are now in police custody.  Other men from the community have travelled to the city where their fellows are being held to arrange bail for them.  While they’re away, eight women convene for urgent consideration of their options.  Should they do nothing?  Should they stay put and try to reform the colony?  Should they make good their escape before the men return?  The do-nothing option is almost immediately rejected.  The women argue among themselves, and the pros and cons of remaining or leaving.  Their processional exodus is the conclusion to Polley’s film.

    Most of Women Talking takes place in one location, a hayloft where the women debate and that functions essentially as a theatre set.  This doesn’t of itself condemn the piece to talky stasis but Polley’s camerawork – a succession of uninteresting close-ups and reaction shots – does.  I’ve seen the film described as a distaff version of 12 Angry Men (1957), which suggests that one of the women is set to convert all the others to her way of thinking (as the Henry Fonda character persuaded his eleven fellow jurors to switch to a not guilty verdict).  While it’s true that the two characters with the most lines in Women Talking – Mariche (Jessie Buckley) and Salome (Claire Foy) – take different positions, opinions within the group are, from the start, much more evenly divided in Polley’s barn than they were in Sidney Lumet’s jury room.  This limits Women Talking as a dramatic entertainment but entertainment isn’t what the film-maker is after.  The DP, Luc Montpellier, has desaturated the images to near-monochrome.  The austere look that results makes clear that Polley means serious, morally educative business.

    In a foreword to her novel, Miriam Toews describes it as ‘a reaction through fiction’ to real-life events.  According to Wikipedia, ‘In 2011, seven men from the Manitoba Colony, an ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia, were put on trial after being accused of raping 130 women in their homes between 2005 and 2009 after drugging them with animal anaesthetic’.  It’s hardly surprising that this piqued the interest of Toews, herself the daughter of Mennonite parents and a native of Manitoba, Canada.  Women Talking was first published in 2018, soon after the #MeToo movement had begun to develop its powerful cultural traction, but Toews must have been writing the novel well before then.  Polley’s adaptation is, inevitably, a different matter.  By now, it’s hard to see its characters’ circumstances and war of words as anything other than an analogue of the sexual harassment and abuse debates of recent years.  The destination of the film’s title characters, when they exit the patriarchal community, isn’t a specific place but a better tomorrow for women.

    Sarah Polley is no doubt deeply invested in Women Talking‘s sexual abuse theme and for partly personal reasons.  In October 2017, she wrote a piece for The New York Times about her own experience of Harvey Weinstein and gendered power relations in Hollywood more generally (‘The Men You Meet Making Movies’).  Earlier this year, she published Run Towards the Danger, a collection of autobiographical essays in one which she claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the Canadian television personality and writer Jian Ghomeshi on a date, when she was sixteen and he twenty-eight.  On the evidence of the film she’s made, Polley is relatively less interested in the fact that the rape victims in her film are Mennonites – even though their beliefs are crucial to their identity and, the women think, to the dilemma they face.  Polley, well aware that few of her audience will find it easy to engage with her characters’ extreme piety, ensures that their religion matters much less than their gender.

    Although the film does what it says on the tin, it’s even more a matter of Actors Acting:  the struggle for the upper hand in argument is a contest in theatrical vocal effort.  Women Talking features forceful performances rather than strongly realised or developed characters – the lines are parcelled out to the dialectic’s eight participants and three generations.  Each of the matriarchs Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey) has two daughters; Greta’s are Mariche and Mejal (Michelle McLeod); Agata’s are Salome and her older sister Ona (Rooney Mara), who is unmarried but pregnant as a result of rape.  Although Mariche and Salome are often antagonists, there’s a strong bond between their daughters, Autje (Kate Hallett) and Neitje (Liv McNeil) – it was the latter that witnessed a rape and blew the lid off the systemic sexual outrages occurring.  A third older woman, Scarface Janz, represents the small minority that prefers to carry on as if nothing had happened.  She therefore soon exits the hayloft.  But since Scarface Janz is played by Frances McDormand (also one of the film’s producers), she’s the strongest presence in the piece.

    Two other individuals of note reinforce the sense that Polley has shaped Women Talking to meet the expectations of a supposedly progressive audience.  Miriam Toews cleverly contrives to have her novel narrated by a male voice that gives expression to women’s voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard.  August Epps, a young man raised in the colony but educated outside it (and, for a time, excommunicated), has recently returned to teach the boys of the community.  House rules forbid female literacy; the eight women therefore ask August to take minutes of their debate; the novel comprises what he writes down.  Polley retains August (Ben Whishaw) but translating the material to the screen inevitably diminishes his importance:  the highly articulate disputants don’t need him to convey their arguments.  Although he carries a torch for Ona, August comes across almost as an honorary female in the company, even though few of the actual women share his meek, transparently sensitive manner.  Nettie/Melvin (August Winter) is a much smaller role.  I don’t know whether s/he features in Toews’s novel or is Polley’s invention (Nettie/Melvin doesn’t appear on Wikipedia’s list of the book’s characters).  Late in the film, this mostly silent character says to another, who has acknowledged their male name, ‘Thank you for calling me Melvin’.

    I couldn’t begin to imagine what a religious community of the kind depicted in Women Talking would really make of someone whose sex assignment at birth was female but who identified as male.  I’m not sure that Sarah Polley can imagine this either but the ‘acceptance’ of Nettie/Melvin as non-binary presses the right political button, as does the fact that they’re played by a non-binary actor (I’m using the word, as above, in its non-gendered sense).  I do hope that casting a publicly gay actor as August isn’t, similarly, Polley’s way of making the film’s only cis male more palatable to the audience.  As might be expected, Ben Whishaw does some fine things but he’s unusually self-conscious in this role – and Polley comes close to spoiling one of his best bits.  It’s hard to tell from the characters’ idiosyncratic clothes and manner of speaking the time in which the story takes place but both suggest quite a distant past.  One of the most powerful moments in Women Talking comes when the camera moves outside the hayloft to show a vehicle on the outskirts of the colony.  The vehicle’s loudspeaker exhorts people in the area to engage with the 2010 US national census:  it’s startling suddenly to realise you’re observing lives in nearly present-day America.  The loudspeaker then plays the Monkees’ ‘Daydream Believer’.  Watching life outside from the inside, August quietly and wistfully sings along.  Ben Whishaw sings to touching effect but, as the music fades into the distance, Polley has him stop singing with corny abruptness.

    The women decide to leave at daybreak.  On the evening before, Mariche’s abusive husband Klaas returns to the colony.  I wasn’t clear why he was, it seems, the only man to do so, except in order for Mariche to have a black eye the following morning (when Klaas, who remains unseen, is said to be still in a drunken stupor so unable to interfere with the women’s departure).  I wasn’t clear either what lay in store for August.  He’s increasingly weepy in the closing stages – how much this had to do with male guilt or saying goodbye to Ona or worrying about the reaction of the other men when they returned, I wasn’t sure.  To be honest, I wasn’t interested either.  It’s a mark of the effect this film had that, by the end of Women Talking, even Ben Whishaw was starting to get on my nerves.

    13 October 2022

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