Review: The Whale Collapses Under Its Own Weight

Darren Aronofsky has lengthy been obsessive about the frailty — and defilement — of the human physique. From a heroin-addicted amputee in Requiem for a Dream (2000) to an growing older, steroid-addled hardbody in The Wrestler (2008), from a bulimic ballerina in Black Swan (2010) to a pregnant trophy spouse in Mom! (2017), the filmmaker’s most memorable leads transfer by means of the world in our bodies that betray them or are betrayed by them in equal measure.

His newest psychological drama The Whale is not any totally different — although the kind of physique portrayed onscreen, and the way that physique is visually rendered, has prompted no small quantity of controversy. Is the graphic depiction of a 600-pound man dying of coronary heart failure mechanically grotesque? Is the fats go well with donned by lead actor Brendan Fraser itself a type of fats phobia? Or, slightly, is the movie humanizing — certainly heroizing — a personality whose physique we’re all too groomed to disgrace?

Whereas all these questions are value pursuing so far as the ethics of illustration are involved, they’ve little bearing on the standard of this movie, which sadly can’t be categorized as considered one of Aronofsky’s higher films. Certainly, it might very effectively be his worst (and I say this as one of many solely critics on the market who loved Mom!). Tailored from a play of the identical title by Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale typically feels trapped inside its personal stage-like home setting by means of which Charlie, the movie’s reclusive hero, struggles to heave himself off his sofa and transfer inside his Idaho condominium. The slender Academy ratio lends additional claustrophobia to the body — deliberate, maybe, because it forces our eyes to give attention to Charlie, however tendentious in insisting that his physique, as spectacle, is sufficient to lend the film dramatic heft.

To say this film is heavy-handed is an understatement: Aronofsky and Hunter overtly spell out the phrases of Charlie’s tragic decline and assign unambiguous ethical virtues to just about all of the characters onscreen. In an early scene, we study from Liz (Hong Chau, who manages to make even probably the most stilted dialogue believable), Charlie’s good buddy and, we later study, the sister of Alan, his deceased male lover, that he has “solely every week to reside” if he refuses to go to the hospital. From there on out, the movie’s narrative is split into “Day 1,” “Day 2,” and so forth., simply in case we weren’t already involved that Charlie is likely to be on his means out.

Dealing with imminent mortality, Charlie has good motive to keep away from devoting his closing week to his job — instructing the fundamentals of a five-paragraph essay to detached undergrads on-line — and so spends the majority of the movie attempting to make peace together with his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton). A sadistic excessive schooler as dedicated to mocking her fats Dad as she is in accumulating his life financial savings, Ellie is just not your typical flannel-sporting, smartphone-scrolling Gen-Z delinquent. She manages to exhibit precisely zero redeeming values, regardless of Charlie’s incessant fawning about her being “a tremendous individual.” “I’m apprehensive she’s forgotten what a tremendous individual she is,” he tells Mary, and by some means, we’re presupposed to consider this.

Equally, we’re presupposed to consider that the physique Charlie stuffs with meals is an precise overweight physique. However it’s clearly not. In a means, the surplus of the fats go well with visually distracts from the realities of residing in such a physique. At instances, I discovered myself stricken with sympathy for Charlie making an attempt to finish fundamental, on a regular basis duties, then would discover myself pondering, “However that doesn’t look actual.” Did he must be 600 kilos? Fraser is already a big actor and would arguably be much more susceptible onscreen as a really obese man, slightly than a morbidly overweight one.

In case any have been unsure of the movie’s gravitas, Moby Dick is repeatedly referenced to remind us. Studying from what’s supposedly Ellie’s hand-written middle-school essay on Herman Melville’s traditional (who reads the unabridged model in seventh grade?), Charlie finds which means in his personal unhappiness, apparently redeemed by the likelihood that his daughter was ready, sooner or later, to discern unhappiness, too. What’s most unhappy about this film, nonetheless, is that not one of the individuals onscreen — irrespective of their measurement — bear the complexity of any considered one of Melville’s minor characters. And it’s too unhealthy. A shifting drama a couple of sympathetic fats individual is one thing I’d like to see — however Aronofsky was not the director to make that film.

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