Review: Does Brendan Fraser give a great performance in ‘The Whale’? It’s complicated.

When the digital camera seems to be at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? It sees a person named Charlie who weighs 600 kilos and is slowly expiring from congestive coronary heart failure in a colorless Idaho residence. It additionally sees a well-recognized Hollywood face hooked up to a most unfamiliar physique, enacting the type of dramatic, prosthetically enabled transformation the film trade likes to slobber over.

You may discover these two photographs to be of a bit — an intuitive fusion of performer and position that reaches for, and typically achieves, a state of transcendent emotion. Or chances are you’ll discover them grotesquely at odds: the character whose each groan, wheeze and choking match means to encourage each empathy and revulsion, and the actor whose sweaty dramatic exertions are calculated to elicit reward and applause.

Let’s render that reward the place it’s due. There’s extra to Fraser’s efficiency than his exertions, simply as there may be extra to Charlie than the corporeal shock worth that the film frontloads him with: The opening scenes discover him frenziedly masturbating to homosexual pornography on his sofa, then doubling over with searing chest pains. It’s rather a lot for an actor to come back down from, however in a grueling chamber piece that tends to wield a dramaturgical cudgel, Fraser makes an attempt, and largely achieves, a symphony of unusual grace notes. He reveals us Charlie’s struggling, but in addition his sweetness; his grief, but in addition his good humor.

He laughs simply, although additionally with nice problem. He can mope and rant, however caught on the proper second, he’s an out-and-out charmer, a affected person listener, a superb storyteller. He teaches a web-based faculty writing class, hiding his overweight body from his college students (his webcam’s damaged, he tells them), however giving full voice to his love for phrases, his eager understanding of the pleasures and potential manipulations of language. His favourite piece of writing is an essay on Moby-Dick — the precise whale of the title — that he usually reads or calls for that somebody learn to him, a tool whose ludicrous backstory Fraser nearly makes convincing. And after some time, as doorways slam, stress mounts and Rob Simonsen’s rating broods and surges, you may really feel a curious tingle of recognition. Charlie, in any case, is a personality in a Darren Aronofsky film, which suggests he’s destined for a crucible of struggling that, nonetheless emotional and non secular in nature, exacts its most grievous torments within the flesh.

That’s to not counsel that he’s kin to the tortured performers of “The Wrestler” and “Black Swan,” who pushed their athleticism to brutish extremes, or the strung-out children from “Requiem for a Dream,” even when Charlie is aware of the ache of a special type of dependancy. The variations lengthen past the truth that Charlie is generally immobilized, solely often rising from his sofa to stumble, with a walker, towards the fridge or the toilet. (At occasions the digital camera, wielded by Aronofsky’s common collaborator Matthew Libatique, virtually appears to mock Charlie, transferring round him with an ease and agility that he can’t muster.) There’s additionally the truth that, in distinction with most Aronofsky characters, Charlie is born of one other author’s creativeness: Like quite a lot of research in confinement, “The Whale” relies on a play, this one written and tailored for the display by Samuel D. Hunter.

However whereas we could also be confined with Charlie, we aren’t alone with him. “The Whale,” straining to each honor and break freed from its supply materials, unfolds over a number of consecutive days, throughout which Charlie receives a collection of tourists. Their common appearances directly modulate the drama and expose its artificiality, none extra clearly than Thomas (Ty Simpkins), an earnest younger Christian missionary who turns up at Charlie’s door at a seemingly opportune second. He’s there to save lots of this man’s soul, and in addition to facilitate a load of exposition regarding Charlie’s late accomplice, Alan, whose premature dying hastened his personal downward spiral. Thomas can also be there to harass Charlie’s tough-loving greatest pal, Liz (an exquisite Hong Chau), a nurse who stops by each day to deliver him meals, examine his vitals and nag him to take higher care of himself. She is aware of that Charlie doesn’t want faith; he must go to the hospital.

However Charlie refuses, citing a scarcity of medical insurance and the final hopelessness of his trigger. Which doesn’t imply he has nothing to dwell for, judging by his concerted latest renewal of ties together with his 17-year-old daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink). Nearly 9 years in the past, Charlie deserted Ellie and her mom, Mary (a briefly seen Samantha Morton), to be with Alan. {The teenager} who now sits earlier than him is greater than a resentful youngster; she’s the personification of spite, vindictive and verbally abusive. Sink’s emotional ferocity is spectacular, however Ellie, as written, quantities to at least one indignant word struck with relentless, finally misapplied pressure. As a personality, she’s about as delicate because the ultra-dim lighting — not simply realistically dim however fastidiously, oppressively dim — that suffuses Charlie’s residence, an all-too-literal embodiment of his internal darkness.

“You’d be disgusting even should you weren’t this fats,” Ellie snarls on the man she refuses to acknowledge as her father. And her ugly phrases discover a painful echo within the query that Charlie at one level asks Thomas: “Do you discover me disgusting?” It’s a query the digital camera appears to foist in flip upon the viewer, most emphatically when it reveals us Charlie, in a depressing fury, devouring and vomiting up a complete pizza. It’s unsurprisingly disagreeable to observe, not least as a result of Aronofsky appears to be shoving the digital camera in Charlie’s face with one hand whereas wagging his finger at us with the opposite. His query may immediate your personal: Is that this uncooked, unvarnished scrutiny of a tough topic tilting into exaggeration, even exploitation? If we’re disgusted by what Aronofsky reveals us, is that our fault or his?

Or is it Fraser’s? I’m reluctant to counsel it, and never simply because I’m as fond as anybody of an interesting, long-underappreciated actor returning to prominence, after a number of years’ absence, within the trade that made, broke and allegedly abused him. However I’m additionally reluctant to fall into the default crucial sample of lauding an actor for what works a few film or a efficiency and blaming a filmmaker for the whole lot that doesn’t, particularly because it simply feels just a little too straightforward. Film performances are sometimes extra collaborative achievements than we (or actors themselves) care to confess, and a efficiency as reliant on exterior wizardry as Fraser’s — on the unusual, seamless alchemy that welds an actor’s expressive instruments to an array of digital and prosthetic tips — doesn’t come into being with out a director’s agency hand on the wheel. What’s good and dangerous concerning the efficiency is unquestionably the accountability of actor and director each.

Sadie Sink in a scene from “The Whale.”

(Niko Tavernise/A24)

The film’s crudest moments, those during which Charlie’s physique is handled as not only a matter-of-fact bodily actuality however a dare-you-to-look-away spectacle, have already raised respectable questions and accusations of fatphobia — a debate that tends to come up each time a Hollywood actor packs on some synthetic kilos. Typically this sort of transformation is finished for comically villainous impact, whether or not it’s Colin Farrell’s Penguin in “The Batman” or Emma Thompson’s imposingly evil Miss Trunchbull in “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical.” However do these prosthetic encumbrances really feel kind of low cost when utilized to somebody like Charlie, who isn’t a violent caricature however a sympathetically drawn human being? Is the grindingly self-conscious realism of a film like “The Whale” a extra empathetic gesture or a crueler, uglier one?

To return to the query on the outset: When the digital camera seems to be at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? I believe it sees a superb actor giving a well-meaning, erratically directed and infrequently touching efficiency in a film that strives to wrest one thing uncooked and truthful from a narrative that’s all bald contrivances, technological in addition to melodramatic. But when “The Whale” is a bizarre conflation of the unflinchingly sincere and the unbearably phony, Charlie’s personal sincerity is simple: “Inform me the reality,” he says and reiterates on a number of events, whether or not he’s urging his college students to write down from the intestine or partaking Thomas in a genial theological debate. As he demonstrated in his latest “Noah” and “mom!,” Aronofsky is a skeptic who’s extra keen than most to satisfy God midway.

And God, on this film, absolutely has rather a lot to reply for: hypocrisy, homophobia, despair and suicidal ideation, for starters. But when we will consider God as synonymous with goodness, and I believe we will, then he additionally appears to show up extra usually than anticipated — not simply when Thomas comes thumping on the door with a Bible in hand, but in addition each time Liz returns. Hong, not for the primary time proving herself a film’s secret weapon, provides maybe “The Whale’s” most interesting, least compelled efficiency. Whether or not she’s scolding Charlie, passing him a meatball sub or snuggling subsequent to him on the sofa, Liz lays naked her uncertainty: Ought to she be attempting to save lots of her pal or making his final days as joyous as she will be able to? It’s OK that she doesn’t know. It’s sufficient that she sees him and loves him — and extra absolutely, finally, than the film round him can handle.