‘The Whale’ Review: Body Issues

Charlie is a school writing teacher who by no means leaves his condominium. He conducts his courses on-line, disabling his laptop computer digital camera so the scholars can’t see him. The film digital camera, guided by Darren Aronofsky and his go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, additionally stays indoors more often than not. Often you get an exterior view of the drab low-rise constructing the place Charlie lives, or a breath of contemporary air on the touchdown exterior his entrance door. However these respites solely emphasize a pervasive sense of confinement.

Based mostly on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the script), “The Whale” is an train in claustrophobia. Moderately than open up a stage-bound textual content, as a much less assured movie director may, Aronofsky intensifies the stasis, the calamitous sense of stuckness that defines Charlie’s existence. Charlie is trapped — in his rooms, in a life that has run off the rails, and above all in his personal physique. He was at all times a giant man, he says, however after the suicide of his lover, his consuming “simply acquired uncontrolled.” Now his blood stress is spiking, his coronary heart is failing, and the straightforward bodily exertions of standing up and sitting down require huge effort and mechanical help.

Charlie’s dimension is the film’s governing image and principal particular impact. Encased in prosthetic flesh, Brendan Fraser, who performs Charlie, provides a efficiency that’s typically disarmingly sleek. He makes use of his voice and his huge, unhappy eyes to convey a delicacy at odds with the character’s corporeal grossness. However practically the whole lot about Charlie — the sound of his respiration, the way in which he eats, strikes and perspires — underlines his abjection, to an extent that begins to really feel merciless and voyeuristic.

“The Whale” unfolds over the course of per week, throughout which Charlie receives a collection of visits: from his pal and casual caretaker, Liz (Hong Chau); from Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a younger missionary who needs to save lots of his soul; from his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and embittered ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). There’s additionally a pizza supply man (Sathya Sridharan), and a chook that often exhibits up exterior Charlie’s window. I’m not an ornithologist, however my guidebook identifies it as a Widespread Western Metaphor.

Talking of which, Charlie just isn’t the one whale in “The Whale.” His most prized possession is a pupil paper on “Moby-Dick,” the authorship of which is revealed on the film’s finish. It’s a wonderful piece of naïve literary criticism — perhaps the most effective writing within the film — about how Ishmael’s troubles compelled the writer to consider “my very own life.”

Maybe Charlie’s troubles are supposed to have the identical impact. He turns into the nodal level in an internet of trauma and remorse, variously the agent, sufferer and witness of another person’s unhappiness. He left Mary when he fell in love with a male pupil, Alan, who was Liz’s brother and had been raised within the church that Thomas represents. Mary, a heavy drinker, has stored Charlie away from Ellie, who has grown right into a seething adolescent.

All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic whereas demanding further credit score for emotional honesty. However the understanding of the varied points entails a whole lot of blame-shifting and moral evasion. Everybody and nobody is accountable; actions do and don’t have penalties. Actual-world subjects like sexuality, habit and non secular intolerance float round untethered to any credible sense of social actuality. The ethical that bubbles up by way of the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s rating) is that persons are incapable of not caring about each other.

Possibly? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman present some literary ballast for this concept, however as an exploration of — and argument for — the ability of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and mental fuzziness.

Aronofsky tends to misjudge his personal strengths as a filmmaker. He is a superb manipulator of moods and a formidable director of actors, specializing in characters combating their means by way of anguish and delusion towards one thing like transcendence. Mickey Rourke did that in “The Wrestler,” Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” Russell Crowe in “Noah” and Jennifer Lawrence in “Mom!” Fraser makes a bid to affix their firm — Chau can also be wonderful — however “The Whale,” like a few of Aronofsky’s different initiatives, is swamped by its grand and obscure ambitions. It’s overwrought and in addition surprisingly insubstantial.

The Whale
Rated R for abjection. Operating time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.