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