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‘the whale’ review: brendan fraser is heart-wrenching in darren aronofsky’s portrait of regret and deliverance.

Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins and Samantha Morton also appear in this chamber drama adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his play about grief and salvation.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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With its airless single setting and main character whose dire health crisis makes the ticking clock on his life apparent from the start, The Whale seemed a tricky prospect for screen transfer. Aronofsky succeeds not by artificially opening up the piece but by leaning into its theatricality, immersing us in the claustrophobia that has become inescapable for Fraser’s character, Charlie. The scene structure of a focal character confined to a few rooms while secondary characters come and go, at times overlapping, remains very much that of a play.

Shooting in the snug 1.33 aspect ratio might seem to box us in even more, and the shortage of light seeping in from outside Charlie’s apartment is perhaps a tad symbolically heavy-handed. But DP Matthew Libatique’s spry camera and Andrew Weisblum’s dynamic editing bring surprising movement to the static situation. The one significant questionable choice is the overkill of Rob Simonsen’s emotionally emphatic score, rather than trusting the actors to do that work.

Aronofsky and Hunter startle the audience early on, not just by exposing Charlie’s severe obesity — Fraser wears a mix of latex suit plus digital prosthetics designed by Adrien Morot — but by revealing this mountain of a man to be still capable of sexual desire. Charlie keeps the camera off during the online writing course he teaches, claiming that the webcam on his laptop is broken. But its video component functions just fine when moments later he’s watching gay porn and furiously masturbating.

Charlie’s crisis is averted by the arrival of his health care worker friend Liz ( Hong Chau , wonderful), who is used to dealing with his emergencies. She tells him his congestive heart failure and sky-high blood pressure mean he’ll likely be dead within a week. Exasperated at his continuing refusal to go to a hospital, ostensibly due to lack of health insurance, Liz is often impatient and angry with Charlie. But her love for him is such that she reluctantly indulges his fast-food addiction, bringing him buckets of fried chicken and meatball subs.

Grief is the ailment that unites Charlie and sharp-tongued Liz, also making her ferocious with the persistently present Thomas. Her adoptive father is a senior council member at New Life, and she blames the death of her brother Alan on the church. Alan was a former student of Charlie’s who became the love of his life but could never get over his father’s condemnation, developing a chronic eating disorder that eventually killed him.

The tidy symmetry of one partner starving himself to death and the other’s self-destruction happening through gluttony is a little schematic, just as the Moby Dick elements are a literary flourish that shows the writer’s hand. But Hunter’s script and the intimacy of the actors’ work keep the melancholy drama grounded and credible.

The teenager’s spiky confrontations with her gentle giant of a father are matched by her needling exchanges with Thomas, whom she manipulates the same way she does Charlie and her hard-bitten mother. Sink (a Stranger Things regular) doesn’t hold back in a characterization that justifies Mary’s description of her as “evil.” But the residual love beneath both women’s screechy outbursts and hurt distance is slowly revealed in some genuinely moving moments, notably as Charlie reminisces with Mary about a family trip to Oregon when he was much less heavy, the last time he went swimming.

Every member of the small ensemble makes an impression, even the mostly unseen Sathya Sridharan as a friendly pizza delivery guy who never fails to ask about Charlie’s welfare from behind the closed apartment door.

The standout, alongside Fraser, is Chau, following her slyly funny work in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up with a nuanced turn as a woman knocked sideways by loss and bracing for another devastating hit of it. In both cases, her inability to intervene has left her helpless, enraged, exhausted and in visible pain. There’s also humor in Liz’s annoyance with Charlie’s innate positivity, which endures no matter how bad his circumstances become. In a movie that’s partly about the human instinct to care for other people, Chau breaks your heart.

His physicality, straining to navigate awkward spaces and maneuver a body that requires more strength than Charlie has left, is distressing to witness, as are his fits of coughing, choking, gasping for breath. On the few occasions where he struggles to stand to his full height, he fills the frame, a figure of tremendous pathos less because of his size than his suffering. But in a film about salvation, it’s the inextinguishable humanity of Fraser’s performance that floors you.

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Brendan Fraser’s Soft Quizzicality in “The Whale”

Few actors have done more to promote the power of innocence than Brendan Fraser. Go back to the first wave of his fame, and to the gag that ran through his drollest roles. In “Encino Man” (1992), he was an early human, frozen solid during an ice age, defrosted by high-school kids, and invited to party down. In “George of the Jungle” (1997), he was a Tarzanesque vine-swinger let loose in San Francisco. And, in the charming “Blast from the Past” (1999), he was born in a nuclear bunker, raised on pure Americana, and eager, when he emerged after thirty-five years, to marry somebody from Pasadena. In each case, California was held up as the acme of civilization, and Fraser as a figure who knew almost nothing, bore no ill will, and was ready to be happily surprised. Get a load of those peepers, primed to pop! And that cartoon grin! When the meek are built like Johnny Weissmuller, it seems a little easier to believe that they might yet inherit the Earth.

Fraser then swung out of orbit, and partially faded from public view. If you missed him in the confusingly titled “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” (2008), or in “The Poison Rose” (2019), where he was billed below John Travolta and Morgan Freeman, don’t feel too bad. Now, though, Fraser is back, looming large in “The Whale.” He plays Charlie, who lives on his own and teaches literature classes online, explaining to his students, who can’t see him, that the camera on his computer is broken. This is untrue. Charlie doesn’t want to be seen, because his mind, however nimble, is housed in a body so gravely obese—the actor is robed in prosthetic fat—that a simple trip to the bathroom becomes an odyssey. Only when he eats does Charlie move fast, rootling through a drawer in search of chocolate bars, as busy as a jewel thief, or ripping slices from a pizza and hurrying them into his pie hole.

“The Whale” is directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter, who has adapted his play of the same name. Most of the action is set in two or three rooms, and Aronofsky strives to dispel any air of the theatrical; near the start, we are taken on a guided tour of Charlie, circling around him like travellers marvelling at a mountain, and there are times when his bulging features, in closeup, all but congest the screen. No playgoer would be granted such intimate privilege. What stymies the film, though, is not so much the confined space in which it unfolds—Hitchcock made do with less in “Rope” (1948) and “Rear Window” (1955)—as the stagy clunk with which other characters enter and exit that space. I half expected Charlie to exclaim, “Goodness gracious! Who could that be, at this hour?” as we hear a knock on the door.

One visitor is Charlie’s good friend Liz (Hong Chau), who is also a nurse, and makes no bones about the fate of his flesh. Who else would take his blood pressure, announce that he will soon die of heart failure, and bring him a sub to gorge on? Then, we have a young missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who drops in at random, asks Charlie, “Are you aware of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?,” and winds up smoking weed. More challenging is the arrival of Charlie’s daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and later of his ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). Both were estranged from him for years, after he fell in love with a man, but they now show up and embroil Charlie in highly wrought conversation. “You’re disgusting,” Ellie tells him, but he offers to help her with an essay for school, and her anger slowly melts. Could it be that Charlie, alone in his vastness, is valued after all?

“The Whale” is laughably earnest, larded with melodrama, and designed to shut down the long-standing association of human bulk with high spirits. Forget the tumid wit of Falstaff—“that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts,” as Prince Hal calls him—or the sinister bonhomie of Sydney Greenstreet. The film presents us with obesity as tragedy, and as a preventable scourge inflicted on the hero by a hostile and traumatizing world. (The villain, needless to say, is evangelical Christianity.) Here, in short, is a self-regarding drama of self-loathing: hardly the most appetizing prospect. If it proves nonetheless to be stirringly watchable, we have Brendan Fraser to thank. Returning to the spotlight, he continues to radiate an essential sweetness of nature. His line readings have lost none of their soft quizzicality, and he even ventures a giggle; as Charlie, so often does he apologize that I began to suspect him of being secretly British. Inside the whale is a still small voice of calm.

How does the story of Pinocchio begin? For Carlo Collodi, whose tales of the wooden child were published as a book in 1883, everything kicked off with violence—with a log moaning in fear at being struck by carpenter’s tools, and with two old men fighting over it. Walt Disney, in 1940, plumped for coziness: the carolling cricket, and the mock-alpine fantasy of Geppetto’s shop, its peace broken only by ticking clocks. In the latest retelling, officially titled “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” the tone of choice is pathos. We first meet Geppetto as he mourns a real boy: his son, Carlo, whom he cherished and lost. Pinocchio, in other words, fashioned in a drunken fit, is a replacement .

It’s a hell of a suggestion, and it accounts for the emotional thrust of what ensues. This Pinocchio will behave, throughout his exploits, as if he had plenty to prove and nothing much to lose, like someone who knows he was merely half wanted to start with. His basic locomotion is a kick-and-hop, and that reckless onward rush is an ideal match for the animation that drives the film along. The technique is that of stop-motion, and the effect is far smoother than it was in the old Ray Harryhausen epics—though the jerkiness of the stop-motion skeletons, in “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), made them more spooky, not less—but there remains a welcome smack of the homemade, gnarly and sticklike. This is the kind of movie that Geppetto would create in his dreams.

Parts of the narrative will seem familiar, especially to anyone weaned on Disney. Once again, Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) is lured away from Geppetto (David Bradley) and recruited into the circus by a vulpine rogue (Christoph Waltz). There is still a cricket in the offing, but his name is Sebastian (Ewan McGregor), not Jiminy, and there’s a cruel farce in the way he keeps getting knocked about and smashed. This remorselessness, and the characters’ ability to rise again after meeting the blows of fate, reach a very strange apogee in Pinocchio’s regular deaths. Time after time, he finds himself in a darkling underworld, where rabbits act as pallbearers, and where a glowing blue sphinx (Tilda Swinton), tricked out with buffalo horns and a lashing tail, lectures him on eternity and grief. Whereupon the boy bounces back to life: a rubber soul within a frame of wood.

How to respond to this? Well, readers of Collodi will warm to the blend of fatalism and hope—“When the dead cry, it means they’re on the way to recovering,” as a crow says in the book. And parents will ask themselves if it was quite such a good idea to drag their youngest offspring to the new movie, and what the chances will be, come evening, of getting them to sleep. (It’s certainly more of a nightmare than “Nightmare Alley,” del Toro’s previous work, released last year.) Oh, and be warned: the film takes place during the upsurge of Fascism, and provides a withering cameo for Mussolini, who is taunted by Pinocchio with poop jokes. So, if you are taking the kids, you’ll obviously need to fill them in on twentieth-century Italian political history while you’re lining up for Cherry Vanilla Cokes. No pressure.

To be honest, del Toro has thrown too much into the mix. For no compelling reason, for instance, and to unresounding effect, the movie also happens to be a musical. Imaginative overflow, however, is always more appealing than a dearth, and though the rounded beauty of Disney’s draftsmanship—remember the cathedral-like cavern of the whale’s interior—can never be erased, the angularity of this latest attempt has a piercing punch of its own. Nowhere more so than when Pinocchio, standing in the nave of a church, stares up at a Crucifixion. Like him, it has been carved by Geppetto, and, in honor of that affinity, Pinocchio suddenly cricks and skews himself to mimic the posture of Jesus in his agony. It’s an astonishing moment, undoubtedly blasphemous, yet touched with more wonder than derision. Suffer little children, even the ones made of pine.

Precisely how much Netflix paid, last year, to acquire the Roald Dahl estate is unconfirmed. Low estimates murmur of six hundred million dollars. In the wake of that transaction comes “Matilda the Musical”—a new movie, directed by Matthew Warchus, jammed with larky songs by Tim Minchin, and based on the show that was based on a novel by Dahl. And how deliciously uncomfortable it is, may I say, to observe Mrs. Wormwood (Andrea Riseborough), the heroine’s mother, testifying to her tackiness by waving wads of cash and crying, “Money! Money!” Ugh. Horrible stuff.

If Geppetto was alarmed by the advent of Pinocchio, Mrs. Wormwood and her husband (Stephen Graham) are appalled by their daughter’s birth. Nobody wished for her upon a star. As a young girl (Alisha Weir), she is loathed by her parents, not least for her literacy; following Dahl’s cue, the film is an ode to the bliss of reading (“like a holiday in your head,” Matilda says), which unchains you and renders you dangerous to tyrants. Hitherto self-educated, Matilda goes to school at Crunchem Hall, where she stands out as a freethinker, to the delight of her teacher, Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch), and the thunderous annoyance of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull (Emma Thompson). A former hammer thrower, Miss Trunchbull now contents herself with tossing her pupils into an adjacent field.

Like “Pinocchio,” the saga of Matilda goes where “The Whale” fears to tread, into the murky and Dickensian comedy of abuse. Miss Trunchbull is descended from other principals whose names smell of torture, like Thomas Gradgrind, in “Hard Times,” or Wackford Squeers, in “Nicholas Nickleby”—the first book that Matilda mentions, in the film, when asked what she’s been reading of late. Of all the beneficiaries of Dickens, none have been more influential than Disney and Dahl. Both deal in the heartfelt popular grotesque; turpitude spawns moral and physical gargoyles, whom the virtuous (preferably not simpering but impish, like Matilda) must learn to trounce. It seems fitting, then, that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. Confidently led by Weir, they swarm the screen. Picking up where the urchins of “Oliver!” (1968) left off, they hymn their climactic liberation with an anthem that binds the messy to the insurgent, glorying in the most Dahlian of all words: “We’re Revolting!” ♦

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‘The Whale’ Review: Brendan Fraser Is Sly and Moving as a Morbidly Obese Man, but Darren Aronofsky’s Film Is Hampered by Its Contrivances

The director seamlessly adapts Samuel D. Hunter's play but can't transcend the play's problems.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“The Whale” is based on a stageplay by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the script, and the entire film takes place in Charlie’s apartment, most of it unfolding in that seedy bookish living room. Aronofsky doesn’t necessarily “open up” the play, but working with the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique he doesn’t need to. Shot without flourishes, the movie has a plainspoken visual flow to it. And given what a sympathetic and fascinating character Fraser makes Charlie, we’re eager to settle in with him in that depressive lair, and to get to the bottom of the film’s inevitable two dramatic questions: How did Charlie get this way? And can he be saved?

In case there is any doubt he needs saving, “The Whale” quickly establishes that he’s an addict living a life of isolated misery and self-disgust, scarfing away his despair (at various points we see him going at a bucket of fried chicken, a drawer full of candy, and voluminous take-out pizzas from Gambino’s, all of which is rather sad to behold). Charlie teaches an expository writing seminar at an online college, doing it on Zoom, which looks very today (though the film, for no good reason, is set during the presidential primary season of 2016), with video images of the students surrounding a small black square at the center of the screen. That’s where Charlie should be; he tells the students his laptop camera isn’t working, which is his way of hiding his body and the shame he feels about it. But he’s a canny teacher who knows what good writing is, even if his lessons about structure and topic sentences fall on apathetic ears.

Charlie has a friend of sorts, Liz (Hong Chau), who happens to be a nurse, and when she comes over and learns that his blood pressure is in the 240/130 range, she declares it an emergency situation. He has congestive heart failure; with that kind of blood pressure, he’ll be dead in a week. But Charlie refuses to go the hospital, and will continue to do so. He’s got a handy excuse. With no health insurance, if he seeks medical care he’ll run up tens of thousands of dollars in bills. As Liz points out, it’s better to be in debt than dead. But Charlie’s resistance to healing himself bespeaks a deeper crisis. He doesn’t want help. If he dies (and that’s the film’s basic suspense), it will essentially be a suicide.

It’s hard not to notice that Liz, given how much she’s taking care of Charlie, has a spiky and rather abrasive personality. We think: Okay, that’s who she is. But a couple of other characters enter the movie — and when Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie’s 17-year-old daughter, shows up, we notice that she has a really spiky and abrasive personality. Does Charlie just happen to be surrounded by hellcats and cranks? Or is there something in Hunter’s dialogue that is simply, reflexively over-the-top in its theatrical hostility?

And what a rage it is! Sadie Sink, from “Stranger Things,” acts with a fire and directness that recalls the young Lindsay Lohan, but the volatile spitfire she’s playing is bitter — at her father, and at the world — in an absolutist way that rings absolutely false. Lots of teenagers are angry and alienated, but they’re not just angry and alienated. There are shades of vulnerability that come with being that age. We keep waiting for Ellie to show another side, to reflect the fact that the father she resents is still, on some level … her father.

“The Whale,” while it has a captivating character at its center, turns out to be equal parts sincerity and hokum. The movie carries us along, tethering the audience to Fraser’s intensely lived-in and touching performance, yet the more it goes on the more its drama is interlaced with nagging contrivances, like the whole issue of why this father and daughter were ever so separated from each other. We learn that after Charlie and Ellie’s mother, Mary (Samantha Morton), were divorced, Mary got full custody and cut Charlie off from Ellie. But they never stopped living in the same small town, and even single parents who don’t have custody are legally entitled to see their children. Charlie, we’re told, was eager to have kids; he lived with Ellie and her mother until the girl was eight. So why would he have just … let her go?

There’s one other major character, a lost young missionary for the New Life Church named Thomas, and though Ty Simpkins plays him appealingly, the way this cult-like church plays into the movie feels like one hard-to-swallow conceit too many. This matters a lot, because if we can’t totally buy what’s happening, we won’t be as moved by Charlie’s road to redemption. Near the end, there’s a very moving moment. It’s when Charlie is discussing the essay on “Moby Dick” he’s been reading pieces of throughout the film, and we learn where the essay comes from and why it means so much to him. If only the rest of the movie were that convincing! But most of “The Whale” simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.     

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival, Sept. 4, 2022. Running time: 117 MIN.

• Production: An A24 release of a Protozoa Pictures production. Producers: Darren Aronofsky, Jeremy Dawson, Art Handel. Executive producers: Scott Franklin, Tyson Bidner.
• Crew: Director: Darren Aronofsky. Screenplay: Samuel D. Hunter. Camera: Matthew Libatique. Editor: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Rob Simonsen.
• With: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan.

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The Whale screenwriter on writing about religious fundamentalism, bodies, and hope

Samuel D. Hunter goes deeper with his vulnerable, personal play.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Have you ever been watching a movie and suddenly feel a jolt of recognition so acute that you know you and the writer have something in common? That’s what I felt watching The Whale , which Samuel D. Hunter adapted from his 2012 play. The film (directed by Darren Aronofsky) centers on Charlie (Brendan Fraser), who is in the last week of his life after refusing treatment for congenital heart failure. An eating disorder developed after intense trauma has left him houseridden, but his doorstep is active nonetheless. First a young missionary from the evangelical church down the road shows up; then his best friend; then his estranged daughter. Meanwhile, it rains and rains and rains.

Fraser has deservedly received accolades for his performance, but I spent the whole film with a racing mind because it powerfully embodied a link between the body and religious fundamentalism that I, and many others, have personally experienced. I knew it wasn’t by accident, and I wanted to talk to Hunter about it.

• Inside Darren Aronofsky’s messy movie The Whale is something wise about religious trauma

Hunter grew up in a more liberal Episcopalian family in Moscow, Idaho, but as a teenager he attended a fundamentalist Christian high school. It was there that he was eventually outed as a gay man. The Whale is in part drawn from his experience of self-medicating his depression. He has frequently written plays at the intersection of religion and American life (a rich vein of inquiry in theater these days), mining the topics with a complexity that’s hard to recognize, and maybe even appreciate, if you haven’t lived it yourself.

Hunter is a working playwright (his latest play, A Case for the Existence of God , was produced this year ), so we met in midtown Manhattan to talk about all kinds of things: fundamentalism, bodies, religion in film and TV, the differences between how obesity has been depicted in film and theater, the challenges of adaptation, and a lot more. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Some things really shifted between the play, which was produced a decade ago, and the movie, right? For instance, the young missionary in the play became an evangelical; in the play, he was a Mormon missionary.

When I first started writing the play, I had only recently started writing plays with gay characters in them. Even though I had been out since I was 17, I think I was still struggling with that part of my self-love. There was a lot of residual energy from my experience at my fundamentalist Christian high school, and still a very active fear of hell in my life.

So when I decided I was going to write this play, initially I thought, “Okay, I’m going to put these more personal things on the line.” Obviously, it’s autofiction. It’s not directly autobiographical. But the core thing is that I self-medicated with food for many, many years after being outed.

I think one of the reasons that I made that character a Mormon was in an act of self-protection or distancing, because when I was 27 or 28 and first writing the play, I wanted to believe that I was more emotionally evolved than I was at the time — like many people who are 27. I kept telling myself, “I’m over it. I’m over it. I’m over it. That was years ago. I’m fine. I’m fine.” But I hadn’t really properly unpacked it in therapy and I was still dealing with a lot of self-loathing.

Making the character Mormon allowed me to write about religion, but in a way that didn’t feel too close to home. I had lost a bunch of weight in my early and mid-20s, but after the play was produced, I lost another 70 pounds over the course of three months. I hesitate to even bring that up because talking about numbers — everybody’s body is their own. I’m really just talking about my own body.

I have my own history with religious fundamentalism and the way food issues can come along with them. That really hit me hard watching the movie. Those two things can be tied up so tightly. Especially if you have a body that isn’t a straight male body.

Yeah, exactly.

Everything about you is always wrong.

I’ve really had to come to terms with how I felt like so much of an outsider. This was partially self-imposed but also real, that I felt isolated from the gay community as a 19-year-old in New York City, because I was a big guy. So I was like, “Oh, I guess I don’t belong here either.”

So even though writing the play felt really vulnerable and open at the time, I think having a second crack at it with the screenplay allowed me to go even further.

There was an article in the New York Times Magazine recently about how eating disorder patients who aren’t visibly emaciated have a really hard time getting insurance to cover treatment and have difficulty getting admitted to treatment facilities. The main subject of the article comes from a very fundamentalist religious background, and when I saw that, I was like, “Yeah, of course.”

We are living in a world where we’ve pretended disorders correlate to body size, but they don’t. You can be fat and have a disorder, or not; you can be thin and have a disorder, or not.

I was 21 years old and I was rapidly gaining weight and I was very depressed and I was not getting treatment in any way. I had the love of my parents; shortly after that, I met my husband, in 2005. I had these things in my life that allowed me to teach myself to not believe that I was a terrible person worthy of suffering, which is something I still struggle with. But I also knew I was lucky in a lot of ways. My parents aren’t fundamentalist Christians, they were just Episcopalians who saw that this education in this religious school was a really good education, which it was.

When I watched The Whale , I immediately interpreted it as being about a man who has developed a disorder as a coping mechanism, intertwined with some religious trauma, and it’s causing his body to shut down. But his relationship with the eating disorder has proven to be a tricky thing for people to navigate, I think, in watching the movie. I’m wondering how you think about that, and how much it was on your mind when writing the screenplay.

It’s so tough. When I write, I don’t sit down to be like, “Okay, what’s the thesis statement about this character?” I struggle with theater and film that arrives at a thesis statement because I’m just like, if it was that reducible, then I don’t know why I needed to watch a character drawing which, by its very nature, does not have one perspective and is about a confluence of perspectives and experiences.

It seems like the actual way we perceive Charlie, the way we’re asked to look at him, has been an issue for some audiences. How much of that do you think is a result of shifting from a stage to a screen? And did you think about it?

There are so many layers to this. Theater by its nature is a little more artificial and suggestive of reality, whereas film — at least a film like this — strives for something more “real.” But I struggle with that because film arguably is way less real than theater. My plays don’t have scores or visual effects. My plays are people in a room talking to each other.

Theater by its nature is a little more artificial and suggestive of reality, whereas film — at least a film like this — strives for something more “real”

Film allows an intimacy with the character — a physical intimacy — that I really understand is making people nervous. But also, the history of theater has a less fraught relationship with obesity than the history of cinema does. And so the moment that somebody hears a movie is employing makeup and effects in order to create the reality of this character, there’s an entire catalog of incredibly abusive filmmaking that comes to the surface. I was very aware of that when I wrote the script.

But at the end of the day, I had to have faith that what I was doing with this was the diametric opposite of the way that obesity has traditionally been treated in film, which is to make them tertiary characters who are the butt of the joke, who are rendered as dullards and as lazy. And I was like, “Look, I’ve fundamentally written a guy who is incredibly vibrant, incredibly joyful, and is loving and deeply intelligent.” I have not seen that rendered in cinema — I just haven’t. I had to have the faith of my own convictions at the end of the day, while recognizing that everybody’s reaction to this is a valid reaction.

Yet it is true that most people watch a movie and think they’re supposed to make a judgment about the characters, right?

Yes. I also wonder if that is a modern concept. I don’t know if we watch Shakespeare looking for our moral center. I don’t even know if we watch O’Neill or Williams looking for our moral center. But if something was written in the last 20 years, I think that’s the No. 1 question on people’s mind. I’ve just never been interested as a writer in creating a moral center for anything, or dictating people’s morality or ethics. All I could do when I decided to write this play was just write it deeply from the inside and imbue as much of myself into it as humanly possible.

I’ve just never been interested as a writer in creating a moral center for anything, or dictating people’s morality or ethics

Beyond that, I have very little control over how it’s received. I think the play and the film are just kind of an invitation. I just open a door and invite you to walk inside. It’s up to you whether or not you want to meet that invitation with a furrowed brow or not. And if you do, that’s fine. Everybody’s experience with this movie is valid.

Charlie has a disease, congestive heart failure, that he is actively refusing to get treatment for, which is, I think, the key thing here. Yes, that is a result of life choices that he’s made, but that’s the fundamental thing: He said, “I’m not going to the hospital for this.” The ultimate self-destruction is in saying, “I’m refusing to get treatment and I’m going to let this run its course.” It’s not just that he’s a guy who got too big or something. It’s way more layered than that.

You also shifted the time period.

I did. Leaving it set in 2009, or whatever it was, felt a little bit like, “Why are we consciously dating this 13 years ago?” So then the question became, “When do we want to set it?” We arrived at the idea of setting it during the 2016 presidential primaries in Idaho. We wanted to set it before Covid so it would make sense that nobody was wearing a mask.

But on a deeper level, I really loved how it makes it feel like we’re on the cliff’s edge of this seismic change, and here comes this kid being like, “The world’s going to end soon.” It feels apocalyptic, and it also zooms the play out of this two-bedroom apartment and reminds you that there’s this whole world outside that is like Charlie on the precipice of oblivion.

Of course, you hear the phrase “the whale” and you think Moby Dick. You think Jonah. But then the fact that it’s raining all the time outside means you’re thinking of Noah as well. All of those stories are apocalyptic in nature.

I’ve always thought that my plays use the lens of realism, but I think they also definitely hover above the surface of realism. They’re definitely not naturalism.

I wrote a play right after The Whale called A Bright New Boise , which is very much, in my mind at least, a companion piece to The Whale . It’s about a father trying to reconnect with his son; the setup is there’s this guy who was involved in an evangelical church in north Idaho, and years ago had put up a kid for adoption and is now working at a Hobby Lobby in Boise where his son works, to try to build a bridge with his son.

But his problem is he can’t let go of the dogma. And so the on-the-ground relationship with his son is fundamentally in conflict with this constant voice inside. At the cost of every relationship in his life, he slides back into the dogma in a deeply tragic moment.

You can play it as a sermon on the mount, kind of like hellfire and brimstone. But I think he doesn’t want to say any of it. It’s incredibly painful for him to say it because it alienates everybody around him — but without it, his life doesn’t mean anything.

It’s hard to explain that fear of coming unmoored to someone who didn’t grow up with it. I grew up in a much more fundamentalist community than my husband — he went to youth group, whereas I would hear sometimes that Focus on the Family was too liberal. It’s hard to unlearn what you learn in those spaces. The voices stick around.

The way that I understand Christ is as a person who enmeshed within the community, and was a pastoral presence to people in all walks of life, and was all about grace and forgiveness and empathy and the love of God and the defeat of tyranny and single-mindedness and myopia. Churches that I really respect and think are doing such good work are doing the same thing. They’re like, “We’re going to build a house in a community that is open to all. It is a place where you can come and receive grace and forgiveness and love and support. We’re going to do Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, we’re going to host community nights. We’re going to be a pastoral force within the community.”

But somebody like the pastor whose community I’d been involved with [through the high school], his theology is like, “No, I build a wall between me and the outside world. And then every so often, I go into the world with blinders on and I grab some people and I coax them behind the wall with me. That is the only way to do it.”

How do you show that kind of thinking, that sort of experience with that sort of figure, on a stage?

I wrote this play once called A Great Wilderness , for Seattle Repertory Theatre. It was about a gay conversion therapist. Every character in the play was a fundamentalist Christian, and so there was not that requisite moment where he gets taken down; it really was just a portrait of this deep tragedy of this man’s life as he’s sliding into dementia at age 70. And people got really angry because the play didn’t have that life preserver for the audience, where the character learns their lesson. But I wrote it that way because the people that I was associated with [in high school], they’re never going to get that moment. If anything, they’re going to just harden.

But we have these narrative fictions that make it seem like everybody who holds these beliefs are eventually going to let go of them and see the light of day. Well, that’s the exception to the rule. And I think it’s our problem that we’re not talking about it.

It almost never happens in an instant.

Yeah, exactly. It takes years. As you know, it took me years as a gay man.

We have these narrative fictions that make it seem like everybody who holds these beliefs are eventually going to let go of them and see the light of day. Well, that’s the exception to the rule.

But it’s funny, I was just moaning about this to a friend of mine — I feel like I’m constantly having TV people come up to me and be like, “Let’s work on something.” And invariably I’m like, “I want to make a show about evangelicals in America.” And they’re like, “Ew.” They have no idea what to do with that. All they know is, “Religion bad, don’t touch it.”

This is bad because we need to have these conversations. These people aren’t going away. If anything, they’re digging their heels in and growing in numbers. It’s happening in my hometown. My family has been in [the movie’s setting] Moscow, Idaho, since 1867. My great-great-grandfather was the first postmaster in my hometown. We’ve been there forever. It has drastically changed since I was 10 years old . Drastically.

Charlie’s not a saint, but there are moments in The Whale that made me think he was sort of the closest thing the movie has to a saint. Is that how you think about it?

Very early on in my notebooks, I was referring to Charlie as a Christ character.

Which I would imagine would be hard to swallow because he clearly is making a self-destructive choice.

Yes. Well, so did Jesus. That didn’t end up very well.

Fair point. The very last moment in the movie is the one that you walk out with, thinking, “What does that mean?”

Narrative used to do it all the time. It goes back to that life preserver of narrative authority: At some point, the author needs to show up and assure everybody that the world still makes sense and that suffering always leads to a reward.

But that is not the truth of it. Over the pandemic, I was trying to remind myself that history is long, so I read this book, A World Lit Only by Fire , about the Middle Ages. It’s beautifully conceived. I wanted to remind myself that we’re living in a moment that’s tiny.

It was so striking to me, reading this book, this brief survey of the Middle Ages, of how much suffering doesn’t lead to reward. That most of the time, suffering sits there and then just falls into the void. It’s a hard thing to swallow about life, but I think it’s why — not to get too rosy-eyed about it — but why having faith in other people is so damned important. Assuming that suffering is always going to lead to some triumphant moment is delusional, and it’s going to lead to tragedy.

Assuming that suffering is always going to lead to some triumphant moment is delusional, and it’s going to lead to tragedy

But if you can learn to hold hope and despair in the same moment, which we all do every day, then I think you will live a life that amounts to something.

I think that’s true of The Whale . It was very important to me that we preserved the sense of humor from the play in the film. I was on set the whole time, and I feel like that was my hobby horse: “We can’t lose the humor. We can’t lose the humor.” Because that’s what life is. Amidst the despair, there is belly laughter.

The Whale opens in theaters on December 9.

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The Whale Reviews

I am certain that as is, The Whale (the film), struggles to say anything meaningful about people and oversells the characterizations and the relationships in a way that doesn’t feel natural.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jul 26, 2024

...a project that, while certainly powerful at points, could have reached further heights if not for some very questionable calls.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 17, 2024

However unsubtle with its messaging, “The Whale” is a devastating ode to the complexity of human beings, and the inner beauty one can find behind even the most destructive of feelings towards self and others.

Full Review | Jul 15, 2024

“The Whale” works because Fraser, particularly his eyes and voice, and the rest of the cast deliver performances that imbue their two-dimensional characters with enough presence and emotion that they feel three dimensional.

Full Review | Jun 8, 2024

Fraser keeps Charlie’s fully formed humanity at the forefront of The Whale, despite various filmmaking decisions that could flatten his character into a saccharine pity case.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2024

It’s Aronofsky’s most blunt and uninspired work yet— an indulgent and strident slice of misery porn that rides a wave of unearned emotion to its underwhelming conclusion.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

If I were to describe this film in one word, it would be melancholy; it is practically flawless, at least in my opinion, and conveys the notion that people are inherently kind...

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

If you didn’t know that The Whale was based on a play, you’d work it out pretty quickly... The immediate distance that this initially creates soon evaporates, however, in no small part thanks to Fraser’s all-in performance.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2023

If it’s as sincere as it purports to be, this is one of the worst movies of recent years, and if it’s not — which is almost preferable — then it’s a landmark exercise in trolling.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2023

A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Earns its place in the "most tearful films of the year" list as it moves slowly yet efficiently towards its overwhelmingly emotional ending, especially elevated by the most subtly powerful & irrefutably moving performance of Brendan Fraser's career.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

A riveting character study of one broken man that transcends compassion, love, pain/regret. A masterpiece Sadie Sink/Hong Chau should be nominated & Brendan Fraser might have turned in one of the best performances of all time

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

I just wished that the film overall was as strong as Brendan Fraser’s acting comeback.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 22, 2023

Charlie [is] played brilliantly by Brendan Fraser...

Full Review | Jun 2, 2023

It has a more or less decent preamble that is propelled by an organic performance from Brendan Fraser on his return, but its psychological marrow is locked into a basic routine of trivial conversations and a lack of substance. [Full reveiw in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Apr 19, 2023

A strangely hopeful story that manages to stay on the surface even as it seems to sink into mediocrity. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 29, 2023

One of the most deplorable elements of The Whale is its near celebration of defeat and resignation. The decision by Charlie to eat himself to death is treated as a meaningful act of self-sacrifice. Why would this possibly be so?

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

All the weight of the story (metaphorically and literally) is carried by its tragic protagonist — the ailing Charlie, whom Brendan Fraser portrays with such depth, nuance, and wit. Nothing in the film's text matches this commitment, and that's a problem.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Two words - Brendan Fraser. He was born to play Charlie and his Oscar award is extremely well deserved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Chamber settings, by their nature, let the acting echo out and Fraser’s central performance speaks volumes about his character’s history.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2023

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The Whale Is a Perfect Comeback Role for Brendan Fraser

I was not at the first Venice press screening of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale , but I did have to see the film that played in the same theater immediately afterward, so I got to wade through a small crowd of still shell-shocked critics as I entered. Before going in, I talked to some colleagues milling about, including a couple of fellow Aronofsky skeptics. They all seemed surprised to have found themselves so devastated by the movie and, in particular, by Brendan Fraser’s performance. The buzz around the movie grew and grew that night and the following day so that, by the time I saw The Whale at its actual premiere in the Sala Grande, the place seemed ready to explode.

And explode it did as soon as the end credits started rolling. The audience response to The Whale , and Fraser, was immediate and immense and sustained. They wouldn’t let him leave . He kept taking bows and bows. He got emotional. Everybody got emotional. It was the kind of total love-in one lives to see at festivals like this.

It felt well deserved. It’s a great comeback story for a beloved box-office star who rarely got the kinds of serious parts that might have led to awards buzz in the past. In his heyday, Fraser had a seemingly effortless charm that allowed him to glide easily through big poppy movies without ever looking as if he were trying too hard or, worse, not taking things seriously. He always seemed like a sweet guy who was just happy to be there, but he never seemed like a joke. (The films sometimes were jokes, but not him.)

That sweetness is on full display in The Whale , though Aronofsky’s film would probably not be described by anyone as “sweet.” Based on Samuel D. Hunter’s play , it’s the story of Charlie, a 600-pound man who doesn’t leave his apartment, teaches English via Zoom (with his camera always turned off, citing technical issues), and is trying desperately to reconnect with his bitter, estranged daughter (Sadie Sink) before he dies from congestive heart failure. He could and should go to the hospital, but he refuses, citing a lack of health insurance. Charlie seems almost ready to die. He has a downright Zen response when his headstrong nurse, Liz (Hong Chau), freaks out about his blood-pressure numbers. He talks about pain in a matter-of-fact fashion. Charlie, we sense, is always in pain. Near him, he keeps an old, mysterious student essay on Moby-Dick , which he starts reading to himself whenever he has a health scare, even though he’s already memorized it, because he wants to go out on a beautiful note. Talk about symbolism!

Fraser and Aronofsky have talked about trying to portray Charlie’s life-threatening obesity in a compassionate manner, including in their use of prosthetics, which has come under some criticism . The Whale is certainly not a movie about “fat jokes” (though there are a couple of them, particularly in the occasionally comic back-and-forth between Charlie and Liz). But here’s the thing: The film is built around the idea of revulsion and extreme consumption. It has multiple scenes of Charlie eating enormous amounts of food. He stress-eats candy bars when he Googles details about his medical condition. At one point, riddled with shame and guilt, he cries, gorges on piles of food, then vomits it out before our eyes. The idea is that this man is killing himself. The food isn’t so much food as it is a metaphor for all the hurt and pain he’s absorbed. The whole thing is a metaphor, and as such, it’s pitched a few degrees off from reality.

Is Charlie presented as pathetic? Well, yes, but in the original meaning of the word: He evokes sympathy and sadness, not ridicule or contempt. When he talks to people, his eyes are wide and inquisitive, and there’s a half-smile on his face. He seems open, kind, curious — and shy. Prosthetic or no, it’s a perfect part for Fraser. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the part, frankly. The character’s demeanor makes sense for someone who doesn’t see much company, who is ashamed to show himself to strangers but still longs to connect.

Aronofsky has made a point of not opening up Hunter’s play, which means that not only does the action of the film take place entirely within the confines of Charlie’s apartment, it also has such theatrical devices as people just wandering in at pivotal moments in the story. It’s a wise choice because The Whale is filled with key elements that would stand out as stagy if its world were rendered more realistically. (Remember that essay on Moby-Dick ?) Through his interactions with his daughter and a young missionary (Ty Simpkins) for a fundamentalist religion called the New Life, we learn about Charlie’s past — he left his family because he fell in love with one of his night-school students nine years ago, and he hasn’t been the same since his lover, Alan, died. Indeed, Charlie has basically been eating himself to death since then.

Despite the director’s formal control and the confined setting, The Whale can, for much of its running time, feel tonally muddled. Dark comedy juts against deep emotion, languor bumps against speed. Characters give speeches about religion, and they deliver blunt passages of exposition that can feel awkward. As open and gentle as Fraser’s performance is, the actors around him, particularly Sink, are stylized and brutal — their cutting, angry remarks are delivered in rapid-fire, theatrical fashion. It all feels, initially, like a mistake. But by the final scene, we realize that what we’ve been watching is akin to a chemical experiment; Aronofsky has brought these disparate elements together to bounce them against one another. At one point, I wondered if there was something wrong with the projection because the film was so visually muddy — until someone finally opened a door and gorgeous, gorgeous sunlight flooded the screen. Once everything finally collides in The Whale , something shattering and beautiful and honest emerges.

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‘The Whale’ Review: May the “Brenaissance” Continue Beyond Darren Aronofsky's Film

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This review was originally part of our 2022 Venice Film Festival coverage .

Brendan Fraser was one of the biggest movie stars for a solid decade. His disappearance was sudden, but it perhaps didn’t register because he was a different type of movie star. He was likable. There was no method acting, bad boy drama. And the movies that made him famous were easily likable, too, without being arthouse favorites. Attentions drift to headline makers and new thunderbolts who balanced complicated fare with blockbusters.

The Whale is Fraser’s first leading role in a theatrical movie in a decade. It’s directed by Darren Aronofsky and has been placed at various film festivals by the biggest indie label of modern times, A24. That’s what the business likes to call a comeback vehicle. And Oscar? They love a comeback story. And Fraser’s comeback doesn’t come from working back through addiction or bad behavior on set it comes from self-care after a retreat inward. The Whale is ultimately about trying to provide the tools of self-care to someone else. People can’t be saved by others. They must save themselves, but they can be helped by others. Therein lies part of the problem of The Whale , the main character is not a vessel for his own journey but for a secondary character, and, by extension, the audience.

Fraser plays Charlie, an English teacher living with extreme obesity. He conducts online lectures with his camera off. He has a set routine, which includes regular visits from his caretaker, who has ties to his past ( Hong Chau ), and Dan, the pizza delivery guy who follows the regular instructions of delivery — leave on the ledge, money is in the mailbox. His routine is disturbed by two young people. An unwanted visitor and a desired visitor. The first is a missionary ( Ty Simpkins ) who knocks on the door the moment that Charlie is close to suffering a heart attack while masturbating to pornography. The young New Lifer decides it’s his mission to check in regularly on the state of Charlie’s soul—before his inevitable death. The other is Charlie’s estranged daughter ( Sadie Sink ), whom he hasn’t seen in eight years and hopes to reconnect with before his inevitable death.

RELATED: Brendan Fraser Explains How 'The Whale' Impacted His Priorities When Choosing New Projects

The estranged daughter story, of course, sounds very similar to Aronofsky’s The Wrestler . And though that tangent of The Wrestler is the weakest angle in that film it does expose who The Wrestler works better than The Whale . The Wrestler had a world to explore. There, it was professional wrestling many rungs down from what’s on television; local fare, low paying, with codes to protect each other but serious bodily harm is a constant threat.

The Whale not only has no outside world and, being contained to one setting, all the characters arrive to make declarations. Single-setting films can definitely feel cinematic and bigger than the location due to well-written characters. But the characters in The Whale only speak direct wants, needs, and desires every moment they are on screen. It does not feel organic or real.

The best moment is when Sink’s mother arrives, questioning the contact that was made because she has full custody (Charlie left the family because he was in love with a man; though blissful for a time, it ended in tragedy). It’s a single scene between Samantha Morton and Fraser. It’s the best scene in the movie because it’s the least predictable. There’s time to reflect, to pause in a doorway to make an offering. And the area to explode through years of shared shattered expectations. Morton, too, was more of a mainstay in the early 2000s and has faded into lesser roles. Fraser’s best emotional acting is opposite her. There’s a flicker of a long faded connection. Outside of this scene, it’s primarily a parade of battling testimonies from the two younger characters, with Chau there to calm down an overbearing musical score.

Aronofsky, too, does seem to amplify Fraser’s manipulated body with some questionable shots. Not quite body-shaming or disgust, but they do have a carnival quality of step right up, folks! See the Whale!! (Reminder: the character is physically introduced through masturbation which signals the desire to shock with his body, right from the get, something opposite of the tear-drenched ending and partially why the ending doesn’t feel earned to me). This could be due to the single-location setting, with the only place for Aronofsky to provide visual flair, but it runs counter to an attempt at empathy. Instead, it feels like gawking.

The Whale did not move me because most of the character interactions announced themselves loudly and with increasing frequency. It is inorganic, gimmicky, manipulative, and its lessons are simplistic. As a character, Charlie remains mostly a body. He has a kindness to him, but this role is mostly to react to the wants and needs of others. The Whale does not engage outside of the known narrative of the actor in the film — it’s his comeback! Despite what the Internet might be broadcasting, it is possible to be happy for a Brendan Fraser “Brenaissance” and still think this is closed-circuit claptrap.

The Whale is now playing in theaters.

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‘the whale’ review: brendan fraser’s comeback is shocking and unforgettable.

TORONTO — Brendan Fraser’s comeback role is as unexpected as it gets.

It’s transformative for the actor. Not only because he plays a 600-pound man who can’t leave his small rural Idaho apartment in “The Whale,” which just had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival , but also due to his wonderful tenderness. 

Running time: 117 minutes. Not yet rated. In theaters Dec. 9.

Fraser wasn’t always so sensitive. In the 53-year-old’s prime during the 1990s and aughts, when he starred in “The Mummy” movies, “Monkeybone” and “George of the Jungle,” he had a comedy/action star swagger and an entire power grid’s worth of energy. He sprinted, he screamed, he swung, he slayed The Rock.

But his Charlie in “The Whale,” superbly directed by Darren Aronofsky, is quiet, contemplative and lonely. And intensely moving. Almost couch-bound, he makes a living teaching an online essay writing course with his laptop camera turned off so no one will see his face and body. He tells the pizza delivery guy to leave the box outside the door. He lives in constant shame. Fraser seemingly always has a tear in his eye .

Charlie hid himself away and began gaining weight after the untimely death of his younger partner, Alan. His ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) and daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) want nothing to do with him because he left them for his new man. Now, Charlie is all alone save for a missionary visitor (Ty Simpkins) who pushes the man to find God and a nurse friend named Liz (Hong Chau), who takes care of him and fruitlessly begs the stubborn guy to go to the hospital. She says Charile only has about a week to live.

A lovely old quality that Fraser has not abandoned whatsoever is his sense of childlike wonder. As an adult action star, his characters had the wide eyes of kids making exciting new discoveries. Charlie has that same twinkle when he speaks of his teen daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), who loathes him and whom he desperately tries to reconnect with while he’s still alive. It’s in those kind attempts at a meaningful relationship that the actor does the finest work of his long career.

There is an abundance of reasons why this movie should not work. It’s based on Samuel D. Hunter’s (also the screenwriter) excellent play, and this sort of heightened material meant for the stage often flops onscreen. Another theater-to-film adaptation at TIFF this year, “ Allelujah ,” failed big-time. And, I imagine, some outraged viewers will call Charlie — and Fraser’s casting — exploitative of overweight people. It isn’t. At its core, “The Whale” is about grief and the search for love.

Still, be warned, the experience can be an extremely uncomfortable one. There are tough, visceral scenes to watch — reminiscent of when Natalie Portman’s toenails started to fall off in “Black Swan.” Aronofsky, after all, doesn’t do “Bedazzled.”

However, the director and Fraser take difficult subject matter and work into something profound.

We never leave the small home, but Aronofsky keeps it ever-changing, mysterious, big and cinematic. Not cheap. And while Hunter’s writing is a better fit for the stage (his “A Case For The Existence of God” was the best play of last season), the director thrives on such exaggeration and style. It never comes across as dishonest.

Rob Simonsen’s fog-horn-like score evoking a storm at sea (Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” plays a major part in the movie) also ups the ante.

Fraser, so good, takes what could be a joke, a flat tragedy, or even a lecture about weight and imbues it with gorgeous humanity. His Charlie is a deeply relatable person, who reminds us how significantly a single day can alter the course of our lives. It’s a testament to the storytelling that a character so different from so many moviegoers can make us so powerfully contemplate our own lives. 

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Venice Review: Brendan Fraser In Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Whale’

By Damon Wise

Film Editor, Awards

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Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice ’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky ? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

Aronofsky first staked his claim at the festival with The Fountain in 2006, but it was the double whammy of The Wrestler and Black Swan (in 2008 and 2010, respectively) that pretty much established Venice as an Oscar launching pad, just when the festival faced a war on two fronts with Telluride and Toronto. After his spell in the self-indulgent wilderness with Noah and Mother! , however, The Whale suggests the director is very much back as that Oscar bellwether, cutting the line to put a never-better Brendan Fraser at the front of the Best Actor race.

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If you didn’t know that The Whale was based on a play, you’d work it out pretty quickly, not from the staging — everything happens in a dingy sitting room — but because of the arch, mannered dialogue and a schematic framing device that involves an essay about Melville’s Moby-Dick . The immediate distance that this initially creates soon evaporates, however, in no small part thanks to Fraser’s all-in performance, which makes adjectives such as “brave” and “fearless” seem almost meaningless.

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He plays Charlie, an online educator who teaches English to students who wonder why his Zoom screen is always blacked out. Charlie claims his webcam isn’t working, but the real reason is that he is ashamed of his body: more than just morbidly obese, he is now at death’s door, reflected in the film’s ominous day-by-day countdown.

Charlie’s best friend is Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who remonstrates with him and indulges him, and their bizarre co-dependent idyll is threatened by two interlopers, one is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a zealous missionary from the end-of-times religious group New Life, the other is Charlie’s teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he abandoned when she was eight years old.

Thomas has his sights set on saving Charlie’s soul, but Ellie couldn’t care less about the old man — until she hears about the many thousands of dollars stashed away for her college funds. To get her hands on it, though, she must first get through high school, so Ellie recruits Charlie to punch up her homework. This, Charlie’s first real chance to bond with his daughter, is kicked to the curb with the arrival of Mary (Samantha Morton), Charlie’s troubled and still wounded ex-wife.

It’s a testament to Fraser’s incredibly soulful portrayal of Charlie that the make-up elements — notably his thinning hair, doughy face and bloated body — become almost invisible once the initial shock of seeing Dudley Do-Right in such terrible shape has passed. But it’s also a mark of Aronofsky’s acuity as director that Charlie never becomes at all freakish or monstrous — that job falls to Ellie, a friendless Facebook bully who is obviously talented but prefers to stew in her own hostility. Ellie takes a particularly cruel interest in Thomas and draws out an unexpected confession from him, but these are by far the weakest scenes in a film that really works best when Fraser is the focus.

While at first glance this might seem a departure for Aronofsky, there are connections at every turn. The twilight hero obviously taps into Wrestler territory, and the religious theme of the righteous path/divine mission echoes elements of 2014’s Noah and, less obviously, The Fountain . Most striking, though, is the correlation with Requiem for a Dream (2000), in the mental disintegration of Ellen Burstyn’s strung-out character Sara: Charlie represents a similar, very literal kind of body horror, trapped by a self-punishing compulsion to eat that becomes more understandable as the film progresses.

Given the industry affection for Florian Zeller’s The Father , a similarly inventive filmed-stage experience, it’s not hard to see The Whale attracting similar awards buzz and not just for Fraser’s lead — there’s the terrific Hong Chau, who can command attention with the mere stubbing of a cigarette, and Samantha Morton, who brings heartbreak to a glorified cameo. Best Picture, too, is well within its sights: a frank and moving depiction of human frailty, but colored by its central character’s perverse or maybe deluded optimism. Suffice to say, there are a lot of interesting questions when the credits roll.

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“The Whale” Portrays Fatness As A Monstrosity

Brendan Fraser is incredible in Darren Aronofsky’s latest drama. But the film is gratuitously fixated on the main character’s fatness.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Brendan Fraser in The Whale

A long time ago , I learned to be skeptical when critics describe a movie as “unflinching.” “Unflinching” is code for “brave,” shorthand for “willing to go there .” But too often, a movie lauded for being unflinching is often a film rather comfortable with the gratuitous. Lee Daniels’s Precious was dubbed an unflinching look at poverty; Crash was called the same but about racism. Neither label has stood the test of time, partially because we have not yet answered some important questions: When does close observation cross the line from empathy into voyeurism? When does careful attention transform into shameless gawking? Depending on how you answer those questions, Darren Aronofsky ’s The Whale might either be a masterful display of compassion or an exercise in the familiar denigration of leering at the lives of fat people.

The Whale stars Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a depressed fat man who lives alone somewhere in Idaho. A committed shut-in, Charlie teaches online writing classes with his camera perpetually off while living in a cluttered apartment. We learn that his life radically changed after his partner died by suicide, and he’s been on the road to ruin ever since. Because of his 600-pound frame, Charlie is restricted in his movement — he uses a walker to get around and a handle attached to the ceiling to pull himself onto his bed; he needs a grabber to pick up the things that fall on the floor. The Whale relishes in the minute details of Charlie’s movements, offering close-ups as a kind of substitute for humanity. The camera stays uncomfortably close, or perhaps as a viewer you’re uncomfortable because of how close the camera is. Put one point in the “gratuitousness” column.

{ "id": 130912577 } The Whale is a movie that doesn’t know when it should have flinched. 

When Charlie is not working, he entertains a range of visitors, from his nurse best friend Liz (an outstanding Hong Chau ) to his estranged daughter Ellie ( Sadie Sink ) to Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young missionary from New Life, a church with a persistent local recruiting effort. But when Charlie learns that his health is failing rapidly and he doesn’t have long to live, these visits take on increasing urgency, and we see how his boundless and occasionally misplaced faith in people transforms the lives of those around him. A reluctant point for Team Compassion, I suppose.

With three months to go until the 2023 Oscars, Fraser is comfortably in the pole position to take home the Best Actor trophy. Before you even factor in his specific performance, this makes some sense: It’s the kind of role that Academy voters love, requiring a profound transformation. There are already elaborate descriptions of the hours-long daily process that Fraser needed to put on prosthetics that weighed 300 pounds. Add to that the underdog nature of Fraser’s casting — a beloved actor who has been away from the limelight for an extended period of time — and you have key ingredients of an Oscar-favorite narrative.

But even without the power of the narrative, Fraser’s performance is worthy of the Oscar buzz. On the whole, The Whale is uneven: Its thesis on religion is muddled, and it’s not quite sure what it wants to say about how faith transforms us. Aronofsky’s conclusions on the meaning of life seem half-baked. The Whale misuses Sink’s talents, relying on her to deliver outbursts that feel cartoonish and miscalculated despite her preternatural gift in subtler emotional performances. The film’s eye on Charlie's body is at times unsettling and feels over-the-top. Yet if you stack all of the flaws of The Whale — and there are dozens more — Fraser's performance is still so genuinely moving that it keeps the movie from falling flat.

It’s all the more remarkable considering the conversation The Whale has generated. In the New York Times, writer Roxane Gay called The Whale ’s writing and directing “ utterly careless ” and criticized the film for treating fatness as “the ultimate human failure, something despicable, to be avoided at all costs.” Meanwhile, Mark Hanson wrote for Slant Magazine that Aronofsky “may think he’s presenting some kind of radically cathartic journey but all he’s doing is bringing a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.”

The Whale may not work on all levels, but the conversation it is generating tells us that the film has become a perfect emblem of Hollywood’s struggles with representation of fat people and fatness. It’s reawakening the debate about fat suits even as it breaks the box office record for limited opening this year.

What appeared to be a well-meaning film has ended up as part of a long line of art about fat people that ends up trafficking in the same tropes around representing fat people. The Whale is a movie that doesn’t know when it should have flinched. It is a movie that fails to understand that in trying to dignify a type of person we rarely see onscreen, it fails to grasp where that dignity comes from. Put another one in the “voyeurism” column.

Jada Pinkett and Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996)

It’s a truly stunning fact that in 1996’s The Nutty Professor , Eddie Murphy plays seven characters and five of them require a fat suit. Murphy didn’t invent the fat suit, but he professionalized it, perhaps even proselytized it. Serious question: What would Murphy’s net worth be if we subtract movies that use a fat suit? Actually, scratch that — what would Tyler Perry’s net worth be without fat suits? Actually, scratch that , what would Mike Myers’s net worth be without fat suits?

What I am trying to get at is that it has always been profitable for Hollywood to deploy fat suits. A character being fat has long been a comedic device, and from time to time Hollywood deemed it funnier for actors who are not fat to dress up as though they are; in these instances, the character’s very fatness was the whole joke.

{ "id": 130912589 } The camera is obsessed with Charlie’s fat, relishing its minuscule movements.

Fatness has long been pathologized in film and television. From Shallow Hal to Precious , from Roseanne to The Drew Carey Show , the fact that fat characters were fat was often a central struggle in their life. But in recent memory, representation of fat people has become much more complex — NBC’s This Is Us was praised for involving actor Chrissy Metz in the development of the arc for her character Kate. Metz spoke openly about the in-depth conversations she had with the producers of the show. Still, critics pointed out the ways Kate represents the worst of Hollywood anti-fat bias . Meanwhile in Pitch Perfect , Rebel Wilson’s Fat Amy reclaimed fatness, and that made her a fan favorite .

But despite whatever progress has been achieved, the fat suit abominations never stopped: There’s Sarah Paulson’s role as Linda Tripp in American Crime Story: Impeachment from last year. In 2017, Gary Oldman won an Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour , in which he wore a fat suit. Fat suits seem, by and large, still acceptable in Hollywood, though it’s worth noting where that attitude may be turning. Paulson has promised to never wear one again and told the Los Angeles Times that she regretted wearing it. “I think fat phobia is real,” the actor told the paper. “I think to pretend otherwise causes further harm. And it is a very important conversation to be had.”

It is unfortunate that we are having this conversation with The Whale as its entry point. This is a movie that has made a spectacle of its prosthetics, both onscreen and off. In the film, the fat rolls spill from Charlie’s torso onto his thighs. The camera is obsessed with Charlie’s fat, relishing its minuscule movements. Offscreen, the Herculean task of applying 300 pounds of fake weight to Fraser has been a central pillar of the press tour. (Fraser called the prosthetics “ beautiful and arresting .”) Aronofsky pushed back against calling it a fat suit ; “I wouldn’t use that word,” he protested. “It’s prosthetics and makeup.”

Fraser, for his part, has been trying to complicate the fat suit story a little more: As he stumps for The Whale , he has been arguing that he’s not a trespasser — that he himself is bigger than he used to be in his days as a younger actor, and that his son is fat, so Fraser is no stranger to the difficulties of navigating the world as a fat person. His comments attempt to insulate the movie from the most potent criticism — that it is telling a story about fat people but made by people who have no business telling a story about fat people.

Fine. Let’s check the tape. The Whale ’s source material is the play by the same name, written by Samuel D. Hunter, who adapted his own work for the screen. Hunter has explained that The Whale draws from his own past, including his sexuality and negative relationship to food; he told the New Yorker that in college, he “started falling deeper and deeper into depression, and—this is not everybody—but for me personally it manifested in pretty rapid weight gain throughout my early twenties.”

When the play debuted to rave reviews in 2012, Hunter told the New York Times that his characters are an attempt to capture “a quotidian America that is often hidden behind curtains and doors.” His characters are meant to be “off-putting,” the Times noted, but Hunter’s skill is that they “become more humanized and relatable as the action progresses.”

But despite the best intentions of playwrights turned screenwriters, the translation from one medium to another requires a sophistication that The Whale does not possess. Onstage, audiences can watch Charlie struggle to move as they’re engrossed in the action of the play. His size becomes a part of a broad tapestry that brings his pain, his grief, and his capacity for love to life. But in a movie theater, audiences will watch Aronofsky’s gaze linger on his body in ways that don’t serve the narrative — ways that seem exploitative and possibly even cruel.

The fat suit debate doesn’t have a satisfying answer. Its roots are in a larger debate over whether it is reasonable to demand that everyone involved in the making of any movie depicting an underrepresented community has to be from that community. Surely this can’t be the case — this would undermine the point of the medium itself, which is to be transplanted into another experience in order to understand it, wrestle with it, and absorb it into our understanding of the world.

But the source of the debate is itself linked to a larger problem, which is that Hollywood so rarely makes an effort to accommodate a diverse range of experiences. The major Hollywood studio roles for fat people, or queer people, or trans people come along so rarely that it feels doubly insulting to then have actors of those communities miss out amid a drought of those roles. The Whale is being positioned as a film made by people who are aware of all these conversations. But their mere awareness doesn’t mean the filmmakers have anything insightful to say about fat representation.

Mickey Rourke, left, and director Darren Aronofsky on the set of The Wrestler in 2008. 

Aronofsky is no stranger to the careful attention/shameless gawking dichotomy: From the fixation on the scars in The Wrestler to the confrontational shots of the calluses and bleeding toes in Black Swan to, oh, I don’t know, literally any scene in Requiem for a Dream , Aronofsky seems to think that zooming in and staying close on a scene is the same thing as shedding light and inviting empathy. The Whale is the strongest piece of evidence that this approach does not work.

The movie opens with a cautious shot that slowly reveals that Charlie is masturbating to gay porn, before it quickly sets up the stakes: just seeking this personal private pleasure might literally kill him. As he climaxes, Charlie’s heart is unable to cope with the exertion. But what is frustrating about this scene is the way the camera approaches Charlie; it’s staged like the monster reveal in a horror film. As critic Sean Donovan put it , the camera goes in “as if it’s afraid to approach him too quickly, a reticence that is hard to distinguish as a fear of what Charlie is doing or a fear of what Charlie is .”

{ "id": 130912752 } Aronofsky seems to think that zooming in and staying close on a scene is the same thing as shedding light and inviting empathy. 

In the throes of a cardiac episode, Charlie receives an unexpected visitor, a young missionary. Gasping for air and exclaiming in pain, Charlie demands that his visitor read an essay aloud. It is here we learn that the title of the film is not only a convenient reference to Charlie’s size, but in fact it refers to Moby-Dick . But death hangs in the air from that moment on: We learn from Liz, Charlie's nurse friend who drops in to check on him, that his heart is failing, and he has maybe a week or so to live.

Charlie’s visitors can’t help but react to his weight. It’s the first thing they notice about him — his estranged daughter, the missionary, his ex-wife, and even the pizza deliverer who finally sees him after months of coming every day to leave the pizza at his front step. Though Liz is deeply familiar with Charlie's size, even she struggles with how to respond to it: She debates giving him a large sub because she doesn’t want to enable his compulsive eating habits.

That conflict bears out in The Whale — multiple scenes where Charlie’s mental health is spiraling has him frantically eating. These scenes are meant as clear displays of self-harm, but still there is something disquieting about anxious horror music swelling as the protagonist shoves a pizza in his mouth. Another point to Team Leering.

As the credits rolled, I kept thinking about the way those binging scenes were shot. One credit line thanks the Obesity Action Coalition for its participation in the film. The OAC’s website states that the organization is “dedicated to giving a voice” to people “affected by the disease of obesity.”

How did the coalition do that in the production of The Whale ? In a written statement, a representative told me that the OAC is “honored” to have participated in the film. “A24 approached us with the opportunity to offer the production team and the film's lead actor, Brendan Fraser, insight into the realities of living with severe obesity,” the statement said. “Our goal was to make sure the representation of severe obesity was realistic and respectful—not the caricature we so often see in movies or television shows.”

The OAC said it shared “the significant physical, emotional and social impacts of obesity, and we see that insight reflected in many of Charlie’s (Brendan Fraser) movements, actions and emotions throughout the film.” The statement described Fraser as “highly receptive to our feedback.”

But what does it mean for The Whale to consult the OAC in the first place? Activist Aubrey Gordon wrote in her book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat that use of the word “obesity” itself is complicated because its definition is “inherently blaming fat people for their bodies.” (BuzzFeed News’ own style guide eschews “obese” and “overweight” in favor of the neutrality of “fat.”) How engaged is The Whale in conversations about fat justice in the first place? And how can it claim to be accountable to them if its preferred source of guidance employs outdated terms?

On the one hand, it sounds like those involved in the production of The Whale at least made an effort to hear about the lived reality of fat people before bringing it to life onscreen. But on the other hand, is The Whale really what care looks like? Is this as good as it gets? ●

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The ‘cathartic release’ of ‘The Whale’ explained by the play’s actors and directors

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The following contains spoilers from the movie “The Whale,” now playing in theaters.

The movie version of “The Whale” ends with a breath, a bright light and a beach. The last visual shows the sun shining, the tide rising and falling, and a younger, slimmer version of the lead character, Charlie, staring out into the ocean as his daughter plays in the sand behind him.

If the serene seaside scene confused you, you’re not alone: That final flashback was a surprise to playwright and screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, as director Darren Aronofsky tacked it on without discussing it with him. But the ending’s overall effect echoes the final moment of its source material, which actors and directors who’ve staged the popular play consider to be a release that, when performed, feels communal and generally satisfying for the audience in the room.

“The way it’s structured, this play is designed to slowly and repeatedly turn up the pressure until it almost can’t be tolerated,” said Davis McCallum, who directed a 2012 off-Broadway staging at Playwrights Horizons. “And then it has this really cathartic release at the end of the piece — a blackout, a sound effect, and a moment where the audience just lived in that silent darkness together.”

Both the play and the movie “The Whale” center on Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a reclusive, morbidly obese instructor of online writing classes who has been eating himself to death since the passing of his lover, a casualty of religious homophobia.

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

Darren Aronofsky’s intimate chamber drama, adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his own play, navigates a tricky line between empathy and exploitation.

Dec. 8, 2022

The character is an amalgamation of Hunter’s past lives: as a closeted gay kid attending a fundamentalist Christian school in rural Idaho, a depressed adult who silently self-medicated with food, and an expository writing instructor for college freshmen (the piece’s heartbreakingly honest line “I think I need to accept that my life isn’t going to be very exciting” is an actual submission from one of Hunter’s students).

Throughout “The Whale,” Charlie is visited by his estranged and troubled daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink) , and his frustrated ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton), both of whom Charlie abandoned when he ended his marriage and came out as gay; Liz (Hong Chau) , a conflicted caregiver who is also the sibling of Charlie’s late lover; and Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a fundamentalist missionary who is far from home. Hunter doesn’t shy away from any of the issues the characters are dealing with “but doesn’t bury you in [them] either,” said Martin Benson, who directed a 2013 staging at South Coast Repertory. “He’s not advocating anything, he’s just writing what he believes is true.”

These characters and their concerns are similar to those in Hunter’s other plays, which tackle subjects “fundamental to Greek tragedy: the limitation of humanity’s vision, the place of religion in society and the desperate longing for relief from the lonely uncertainty of life,” wrote Times critic Charles McNulty when Hunter received the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2014. “He proceeds not with a moral point but through observation of the way his characters either defend their bunkered existences or attempt to reach beyond them — or more commonly, some combination of the two.”

Throughout the intimate live piece — which is staged without the escape of an intermission — all five characters reveal truths to each other and the audience that raise the stakes of their potential bonds.

“These deeply flawed characters actually care about each other so much, but there are so many obstacles for them to express that love or connect with one another in real ways, however desperately or destructively,” said Joanie Schultz, who directed a 2013 production at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. “So when some of them finally do, it’s gorgeous and almost magical.”

Numerous stagings of “The Whale” accentuate the pressure-cooker effect by designing Charlie’s living room, where the entirety of the play unfolds, with an extra sense of claustrophobia or isolation. For example, the 2014 Bay Area run raised the Marin Theatre Company stage by four feet and angled Charlie’s ceiling so that, from the audience’s perspective, the character appeared to “dominate the space in a way that intimidated the people who visited him,” said director Jasson Minadakis.

Likewise, the off-Broadway version strategically lit the space “so that it felt as if his room were hovering in this dark void,” said director McCallum; the Chicago staging positioned the proscenium “like an island in the sea, which was really effective because they’re all alone on their own islands in some ways, with all these barriers to connection,” said director Schultz.

Darren Aronofsky on ‘The Whale,’ fatphobia and empathy

Director Darren Aronofsky dives deep on “The Whale,” fatphobia, human connection and how he feels about Brendan Fraser and Sadie Sink.

Dec. 13, 2022

Within these confined spaces, the actors who played Charlie — each wearing body suits weighing anywhere from 30 to 100 pounds — charted his arc physically and emotionally. As he attempts to nudge daughter Ellie toward a place of authentic self-expression, he too reveals himself to his students. The intention is that, by the time Charlie shares that he’s giving his life savings to Ellie, and endures great pain to stand up and walk toward her as she reads her “Moby-Dick” essay aloud to him, the audience would feel the overwhelming fulfillment Charlie gets during his final breath in the play.

“Every night, it was a journey, and it wasn’t easy to watch or to perform,” recalled Tom Alan Robbins, who starred in the 2012 world premiere in Denver. “His goal is self-destructive, but you want the audience to understand what has driven him to do this, and that his redemption is in the relationship he tries to forge with his daughter. You want that last second to be a combination of incredible pain and incredible triumph because, however briefly it is that they connect, it’s still an achievement for him.”

“Ellie says terrible, devastating things to Charlie throughout the whole thing, but he loves her so much that it doesn’t even hurt him,” said Matthew Arkin, who played Charlie at South Coast Repertory. “So in that final moment, whatever flaws he had, whatever mistakes he made and in whatever ways he couldn’t love himself enough, he lived a life redeemed, because he gave everything to save his daughter.”

Whether Charlie dies at the end of “The Whale” is up for debate. As written in Hunter’s script, the stage directions of that breath simply read, “A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black.” Many theater makers say that breath could very well be his last inhale, after which he is finally freed from the pains of his body, his loneliness, his grief. “The love and connection that Charlie gives Ellie is a gift, and hopefully she will remain true to her voice and herself in a way that he gave up on,” said Hal Brooks, who directed the Denver premiere.

It also could be considered in a metaphorical way, mimicking “how whales immerse themselves for so long underwater and then they finally come up to the surface,” said Schultz, or “a deep intake of breath before diving in somewhere they’ve never gone before,” said Shuler Hensley, who played Charlie in the New York run as well as a London staging in 2018. “It’s a brilliant ending, because audience members have constantly told me they couldn’t breathe afterwards. They didn’t know what to do, whether to applaud or get up or move because they’ve become so connected to Charlie.”

When asked about the ending, Hunter didn’t clarify Charlie’s status because, he said, it’s not necessarily relevant. “The final moments of this play and this movie abandon realism a little bit, and it’s no longer about this guy in this apartment,” he explained. “What matters is that he’s connected with Ellie, he’s done the thing that he’s been trying to do throughout this entire play, and that connection feels real and genuine. There’s this apotheosis that happens, and in the film, Charlie literally ascends off the ground.”

Though Hunter didn’t write the beach scene that follows Charlie’s onscreen ascension, he called it “marvelous” and shared an interpretation of what it might mean: “If it’s a flashback to the last time Charlie went swimming in the ocean, close to when the family fell apart, what I see in that shot is a man staring down the abyss of self-actualization, contemplating the decision he has to make about the different avenues he can take.

“Maybe he was thinking about what would happen if he stayed in that marriage: Ellie would have grown up with a closeted father, [his lover] Alan would have been miserable and, as Liz points out, would have probably died way before he did when he was with Charlie,” Hunter continued. “Choosing to stay or leave, both paths are complicated and tragic in their own ways, but ultimately, I think Charlie took the more hopeful route, and chose to look for the salvation one can find through human connection.”

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Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and Poynter’s Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others. She is currently working remotely alongside her dog, Oliver.

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Brendan Fraser is marvellous in Darren Aronofsky’s otherwise overinflated drama The Whale

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Brendan Fraser in a scene from The Whale. Courtesy of Elevation Pictures

• Directed by Darren Aronofsky
• Written by Samuel D. Hunter
• Starring Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau and Sadie Sink
• Classification R; 117 minutes
• Opens in theatres Dec. 21

The other week, Roxane Gay’s New York Times essay on the “cruel spectacle” of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale did the expected and went viral. For those paying even half-careful attention to the press cycle of The Whale , a moment like this felt inevitable. Ever since word came around that the polarizing director of Black Swan and Mother! was making a movie starring Brendan Fraser as a 600-lb. recluse named Charlie who is eating himself to death, a backlash started brewing. In Gay’s piece, the writer takes Aronofsky and company to task for their “gratuitous, self-aggrandizing” fatphobic fiction, centering her criticism on “the disdain the filmmakers” have for Charlie, which she writes is “constant, inescapable.”

It is a strongly written piece, fiery and lucid. It also presents such a backward interpretation of what is depicted on screen that I cannot help but wonder if Gay – and others who have latched onto similar arguments – actually watched The Whale in its entirety. This is not an “inhumane film about a very human being,” but rather the opposite: a highly compassionate look at a man struggling with compulsions, a character study that puts its lead under a spotlight of care and tenderness. Charlie is not treated as a freak or object of ridicule, but rather a person in dire need of help, and understanding. The Whale is not an exercise in gawking or finger-wagging – “as exploitative as any episode of TLC’s My 600-lb Life ” – but an attempt to examine dignity and humanity under pressure.

Gay’s piece, and the roiling online conversations that followed, have been so frustrating to witness that it almost makes me want to praise Aronofsky’s film without reservations – which I cannot do, because, well, The Whale is not all that great a movie. Not because of the arguments that Gay and others have made, but rather because Aronofsky cannot unearth the necessary cinema in this adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play. The Whale is not a cruel spectacle – it is just a dull, repetitive one.

Set almost entirely in Charlie’s dank apartment, The Whale follows the English professor over the course of several days as he teaches his students online (keeping his camera off), fends off the help of his closest friend (Hong Chau), entertains the salvation sermons of a local missionary (Ty Simpkins), and attempts a reunion with his estranged teenage daughter (Sadie Sink).

But with a posturing screenplay by Hunter and a fixed location that feels underused even by its purposefully tiny standards, Aronofsky’s drama is an incredibly, frustratingly stagy thing to witness. Certainly, by staying with the confines of Charlie’s depressing apartment – dimly lit and poorly kept, pizza boxes and other junk-food detritus piling up in corners – the director is conjuring an atmosphere that illustrates Charlie’s own fatalistic sense of being trapped within himself.

But the film never even metaphorically moves around, with its characters merely circling each other over and over, delivering faux-insightful banter about regret and renewal. (That whale of the title? Why it’s both Charlie and a reference to his favourite student essay about Moby Dick .) Meanwhile, the moments of high drama that do infrequently arrive – such as when one character’s backstory reveals itself, or when Charlie’s ex-wife (Samantha Morton) arrives – don’t energize the film so much as they simply prolong it.

Still: The one overwhelmingly positive thing that you’ve heard about The Whale is true: Fraser does a remarkable job . Playing Charlie under layers and layers of next-generation prosthetics – if we’re to get rid of fat suits, as Gay urges in her piece, we should do away with all kinds of makeup and costumery going forward, no? – Fraser not only brings a level of tenderness to the proceedings but genuine excitement and spirit. By channelling heretofore unseen depths of emotional strength, Fraser accomplishes something far more impressive than simply resurrecting his career – he resurrects his own moribund movie, which without him would evaporate.

While Chau and Morton are just as good as their comeback-kid co-star – tough and mad and boiling with grief, the both of them – the rest of the cast are failed by both Hunter’s deadening dialogue and Aronofsky’s static direction, which is seemingly focused solely on Fraser. Simpkins cannot help but annoy in a role that is meant to be at least mildly sympathetic, while Sink turns her petulant teenager into someone impossibly shrill and embarrassing to stomach. It is simply one of the most unpleasant performances I’ve had to witness all year long. Now where are all the essays and think-pieces about that?

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Can a Movie Both Cause Harm and Have Merit? Reckoning with My Love for The Whale

What do we do when we like a movie that causes pain.

I went into the theater expecting I would not like Darren Aronofsky’s most recent movie. The trailer had been evasive; all I knew was that Brendan Fraser was wearing a prosthetic fat suit and the title was The Whale , which already seemed fraught and emanated a vibe of depressing Art Film.

Plus, I still hadn’t totally forgiven Aronofsky for Mother!. But as a heart-wrenching and—what most caught my attention—even humorous yarn was spun, The Whale thoroughly won me over. Now that’s left me wrestling with the intense ire it has provoked in other critics.

The Whale follows a reclusive online English instructor named Charlie (Brendan Fraser), who is extremely overweight and suffering from congestive heart failure after letting things “get out of control,” as he says, in the aftermath of his partner’s death. He is saved from an initial cardiac episode by a young missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who happens by and acquiesces to Charlie’s urgent desire for Thomas to read aloud from an old student essay on Moby-Dick to help lower Charlie’s stress levels. Charlie’s nurse-friend Liz (Hong Chau) predicts that Charlie will not make it through the weekend.

As he faces his own mortality, Charlie embarks on a mission to redeem himself in the eyes of his estranged teenaged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), who is on the verge of flunking out of high school. The strengths of each of these actors—Fraser’s grace, Sink’s fieriness, Chau’s brutal honesty, Simpkins’s lost soul—play off each other in surprising and witty ways, making each character’s convictions and frustrations and longings all the more passionate and real.

Character development in The Whale is based on pairs: Missionary and Heretic, Science and Religion, Optimist and Pessimist, Overweight and Underweight. On a more fundamental level, these are not doubles at all: each character is fighting the same battle as Charlie, each with their own vice: binge eating, evangelism, alcoholism, truancy. They are different takes on the same old story, adding depth and universality to Charlie’s tale. These, the true whales of the story, distract the characters from their senses of abandonment and grief, their quests for love and honesty and acceptance.

Like Ahab, America too often focuses on symptoms rather than the real problems (which we see playing out through the red wave on Charlie’s TV). As the story unfolds, we witness the ways that conservatism, Christianity, and a failing public education system come together to embody the isolation of a cast-aside rural America. In a deeply personal manner, this film subtly taps into so many aspects of societal negligence.

The Whale is a true classical tragedy in the Aristotelian/Shakespearean sense, but one for the modern age. While we’ve often settled for bleak, one-note films about the ills of modern society, The Whale elevates political critique to operatic storytelling. This film will not answer all of your questions. It will not make you feel comfortable. And it will not allow you to watch passively. Really, The Whale invites you to untangle the threads of its own yarn, to bear a million little twinges as each knot between these characters is carefully massaged and undone.

Although tragic, The Whale avoids doom; little rays of joy shine through even its gloomiest moments. The characters manage to seize any moment to be funny, to laugh at themselves. My emotional response to The Whale was similar to that of another A24 2022 release, Everything Everywhere All at Once —the kind of rare movie that articulates the feelings we can’t express to our loved ones in real life without inflicting pain and misunderstanding.

Set entirely within Charlie’s apartment, this film could easily have been claustrophobic and as banal as the exterior shot of the building, but the sophistication of the set design draws us into a space as psychologically complex as the film’s studies in character, lending Charlie’s environs an almost mystical quality foreshadowing the dash of magical realism to come.

How could I read articles like Gay’s and still like this movie? How could anyone?  

During a talk at The Roxy Cinema in New York, Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote both the original play and its film adaptation) explained the oblique allusions to the sea that wash over The Whale : the constant references to Moby-Dick , the torrential rain, the water-stained ceilings, the wave-like wallpaper, the lilting ship-like sensation evoked by characters’ and the camera’s movements, the nautical artwork, and more. The details of the space rock from heavy to cozy, dreary to homey: the fireplace, the mossy hue of the living room walls, the coffered ceiling.

We’re not peering into a space as banal as the exterior shots of the building, we’re in an apartment that someone once worked to make into a home. Later, we learn that behind a locked door is a charming and well-kept bedroom Charlie and his partner once shared, with a painting of mountains above the bed. The attention to detail and contrast in the scenery lend the film a mystical quality (perhaps foreshadowing the ending) that makes The Whale utterly captivating to watch.

For all the beauty and attention to detail in the set and its intrinsic relationship to Charlie and his cohort, other details went too far: I found myself rolling my eyes at the umpteenth time the camera lingers on the strained motion of Charlie, with limited mobility, using a grabber tool to try to reach something. Aronofsky, who has luxuriated in the marvels and bruisings of the body throughout his oeuvre, leers at Charlie’s body through unnecessary shots that emphasize his struggles with movement, amped up sound while he eats, and a horror-esque score heightening Charlie’s physicality.

Many of these moments that seem overdone in The Whale are also key moments of emotional intensity. But for many critics, that intensity is unearned or goes too far. Herein lies the source of tension in the critical response to The Whale : while Fraser’s performance in particular is stunning, the controversial handling of fatness coupled with a style that some critics found overwrought made the movie dismissible.

Roxane Gay enumerates the dangers and insensitivity of Aronofsky’s approach to Charlie’s story in her New York Times review , and Buzzfeed News offers an in-depth history of the problem of Hollywood’s reliance on the fat suit. Comparing this essential criticism to my response to the film, I began to wonder if a movie could both have merit and cause offense. How could I read articles like Gay’s (or this review from The Conversation , headlined “ The Whale is a horror film that taps into our fear of fatness”) and still like this movie? How could anyone?

Aronofsky cannot be the The Whale ’s devil and Fraser can’t be its savior.

One of the most compelling pans of The Whale came from Justin Chang at The LA Times who reminds us of an obvious but often ignored truth of the film industry: movies arise from collaborative processes between many people. Aronofsky cannot be the The Whale ’s devil and Fraser can’t be its savior. While the film ultimately didn’t work for Chang, his point speaks to one of my own: what or who is working or not working in this film is inextricably linked. We cannot have Fraser’s star performance without Hunter’s theatrical language or Aronofsky’s fetishizing vision.

Upon a second viewing of the film, I paid more attention to the troubling moments I noticed the first time: the fat suit, the strained reach, the cuing of a horror movie soundtrack as Charlie moves or eats, the amplified sound of Charlie’s aggressive chewing. While the “cruelty” (as some have called it) of these moments is apparent, it’s also not straightforward. Each moment represents a point of rising tension and intensifying conflict in the film. I’m not convinced The Whale would be as emotionally gripping without these moments of augmentation.

Where a stage play can rely on quippy and heartfelt dialogue alone, a movie needs cinematic tools to heighten the drama. That might not be enough of a justification for the shots of Fraser’s looming body rising above us with the crescendo of the eerie music, but elements of melodrama that often seem degrading on the surface can also provide the most powerful means of exploring ills and injustices—often more so than films more concerned with sensitivity. It’s not only that The Whale borrows from horror, camp, and melodrama to create emotional intensity; it’s that these moments also ask us to take the hardest look at too-often overlooked or neglected experiences.

While the conversation playing out in the criticism regarding fatphobia and responsibility is absolutely necessary to have, especially with regards to a film walking such a moral tightrope, what’s frustrating is the lack of acknowledgement of the psychological nuance found in Charlie’s grief over his partner’s death, over his estrangement from his family, and how this connects in multiple (positive and negative) ways to his physical state and surroundings.

Criticism of The Whale extends beyond issues of fat-shaming. The film’s psychological nuance is often impugned: Is it nuanced or sentimental? Is it emotionally belabored, reductive, and thematically inconclusive? All points I couldn’t disagree with more. The writing and its emotional intensity only seem over the top because we’re more used to that style on the stage than on film, one of the perils of stage-to-screen adaptation. I would argue that Aronofsky’s willingness to embrace these theatrical elements—and to actually pull them off as cinematic—is to his credit.

Although the traditional screenplay values white space, I’d much rather watch a film with plenty to say, and I appreciate that Hunter, together with Aronofsky’s vision, challenged the limitations of the screenplay in order to prioritize character development above all else. That, for me, was the film’s saving grace: it’s about characters who are so much deeper than their first presentation that we must contemplate the unjust ways we dismiss people upon first impression.

The writing and its emotional intensity only seem over the top because we’re more used to that style on the stage than on film, one of the perils of stage-to-screen adaptation.

This challenge also addresses the issue of sentimentality. In a 2014 interview with The Atlantic , Leslie Jameson explores the benefits of the sentimental when coupled with real emotional labor on the part of the viewer: “[When] art makes us feel deeply, often in ways we can’t explain, there can be a sort of second stage to that feeling where we reflect on why those feelings happen and how they might guide us going forth.” “Sentimentality” may be among the most pernicious buzzwords of criticism. There are few other words that, in their definition, can seem so benign, and yet once dropped have done the labor of a thousand-word, thumbs-down review.

Questioning whether a film has earned the emotions it inspires (or whether we have earned them by watching the film) is fair enough, but isn’t it ironic that once that word is used, no further critical analysis becomes necessary? In Creating Flannery O’Connor , his exemplary guide to dealing with critical response, Daniel Moran warns against favorite watchwords of critics that could mean so many things and often say less than we think they do at first skim (in the case of O’Connor criticism, Moran singles out the word “grotesque” in both positive and negative reviews—a word that also occasionally shows its face in Whale reviews and other Aronofsky reviews as well).

For me, the sentiments aroused by The Whale are inextricably linked with the intellectual and philosophical rumination that lasts far beyond the film—tying into Jameson’s belief that sentimentality can be earned if we continue to work on and with and over the emotions it inspires. For The Whale , we cry because it makes us think as much as it makes us feel. Or at least, that’s how it should work when at its most effective.

So, are The Whale’ s merits enough to override its offenses? For me, the answer is yes, but that leads to another question: What do we do when we like a movie that causes pain? This reckoning is a delicate task. It’s one thing to watch a movie and have an emotional response. It’s another thing, as Jameson explains, to ask why we had that emotional response. For me, the ideas on faith, family, and ostracization that The Whale presents will stay with me, which makes the film truly valuable, beyond the emotional response it evoked in the moment of viewing.

If we can’t see past Charlie’s weight, is the real problem with the movie itself, or is the problem with how we see the movie?

Interestingly, I found critical responses closer to my own experience in reviews of the original play over the past ten years—but I also found the language thoroughly off-putting, replete with demeritorious dwellings on Charlie’s weight. “Charlie is so fat that he eats, works and sleeps on his couch, a stained horror of abused upholstery,” is the opening line from The Dallas Observer in 2015.

“Charlie (Matthew Arkin) can barely get up from his sofa to go to the bathroom,” begins The Hollywood Reporter . From The Chicago Tribune : “Charlie, the dying, pathetic, 600-pound man stuck on the couch in the middle of Samuel D. Hunter’s beautifully devastating drama ‘The Whale,’ is familiar with blubber.” CurtainUp found the story “touching yet repellent” and described Charlie as “grossly obese.” And The New York Times declared, “There may be no more startling image on a New York stage right now” as they went on to describe Charlie as a “bulbous behemoth of a man.”

It is positive to see how the conversation has shifted so drastically over the years to much more sensitive criticism regarding bodies, and yet the focus—the obsession, even—remains on Charlie’s weight rather than the rich character and his poignant tale. If the reviews are still primarily focused on the portrayal of weight rather than on how weight is one reflection of a fully dimensional character and his complex story, then the criticism is only superficially more sensitive, and has the potential to become another form of fatphobia.

The deeper, more interesting story of grief and mourning (and the ways our homophobic, fatphobic, conservative society leaves little room for it) has little to do with Charlie’s weight at all, despite his weight being used to propel plot and metaphor. This might seem to beg the question, why center the story around Charlie’s weight at all? To which I would say, why not? All good storytelling needs something concrete, specific, physical (at least in some ways) to hinge on, to get going with. Charlie is a complex protagonist who happens to be overweight. If we can’t see past Charlie’s weight—no matter how carefully we talk about it—is the real problem with the movie itself, or is the problem with how we see the movie?

While occasionally I critiqued Aronofsky for taking his view of Charlie too far, mostly I found myself thinking about how I was responsible for taking Aronofsky’s view of Charlie too far. We must ask what our own role is when watching a film. When it comes to questions of a filmmaker’s moral responsibilities, I sometimes wonder if we are displacing those responsibilities because we are an unhealthy, celebrity-idolizing culture that wants to believe someone or something bigger than us can take the blame.

The Whale invites you to make some of your own calls. Between the tension of faith and doubt, condemnation and redemption, the film settles in a strangely cathartic moral ambiguity. It is this oscillation between good and evil—and between characters who are honest or dishonest (with each other and themselves)—that saves the film from sappy (read: crappy) sentimentality. We settle somewhere on the spectrum between the extremes, incapable of knowing if any moment or gesture is truly what it seems or what we aim for it to be, or even if we know our own aims.

That inability to know for sure, that perpetual doubt, speaks to the critique that the film eludes thematic conclusions, but to that I would ask: Why do we need our stories to give us firm answers and clear themes and specific morals? Ellie and Thomas, the characters who are most desperate for clear reasoning and sure things, are also the most disappointed to learn that part of adulthood (and faith) is accepting and coping with the doubt. It seems reductive that the closest thing we get to answers from The Whale are the simple concepts of love, caring, and honesty—but really, in the face of doubt, what else can you have faith in except those things?

Periodically, a bird alights on Charlie’s windowsill, and we, along with Charlie, draw a deep, satisfying breath. The Whale may not offer answers, but it does offer coping mechanisms, reprieves that allow us to keep doing the heavy lifting involved in love, care, and honesty in the face of the unknown and the uncontrollable.

Laura Valenza

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Mattituck actor’s latest film ushers in spooky season.

By Melissa Azofeifa

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For Mattituck resident and actor, Steve Montague, becoming famous was never a goal; he does film for the love of the craft.

“It was never a major thing for me to become a great actor,” he said.

Regardless, thanks to his latest movie, “For Sale,” his career is on an upward trajectory.

“For Sale” is a dark comedy perfect for those impatiently awaiting the arrival of spooky season. In the film, Mr. Bendt (played by Mr. Montague) tasks a shady salesman, Mason McGinness (played by Andrew Roth), with selling a haunted house. Directed by Christopher Schrack, Mr. McGuinness encounters ghosts along the eerie journey. The film is available to stream on Amazon Prime.

“I’ve done all different kinds of independent films,” Mr. Montague said. “But this particular one took off.”

Mr. Montague shared some of the plot with the Suffolk Times, including just how his character Mr. Bendt came to be in possession of this haunted home.

“I had a secret and the secret was that I won this old house in a poker game,” Mr. Montague said. “The guy that lost put the deed to the house on purpose … because the deed was cursed, I inherited a haunted house and no matter who went there, they didn’t last more than a day and a half, two days and they went away screaming because the ghost would come pay them a visit.”

Prior to this role, Mr. Montague was a radio personality at WRIV 1390 AM for 16 years. He has done stand-up comedy shows at New York Comedy Club as well as off-broadway work. Mr. Montague is also a voice-over artist and was vice president of the board for Riverhead’s historic Vail-Leavitt Music Hall and one of the community members responsible for the re-opening of the hall in the early aughts.

The opportunity for Mr. Montague to act in this film came through a friend, Michael Shershenovich, who plays Manco, a ghost in the film. Mr. Montague did an initial read through for those in charge of casting virtually and then had a formal in-person audition.

“I come to find out that they had auditioned quite a few people,” he said. “A couple of days later, we did the audition again, and they said, ‘Yeah, you got the part.'”

Mr. Montague said the movie took four weeks to film, with shoots in Maryland and Florida.

Mr. Montague said he learned to transition into a southern gentleman for the role. He describes his character as smart and lively.

“He knows how to sell houses, make money, make deals, buy houses as cheap as you possibly can,” Mr. Montague said of his character. “It was a lot of fun to film. I believe that the people who wrote and produced it are great.”

Mr. Montague is now working on getting his play, “The Judge and the Janitor” written in 2001, turned into a film. He considers himself lucky. 

“It’s just great,” he said. “I couldn’t be more happy than I am right now.”

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‘Between the Temples’ Review: A Widower Walks Into a Bar

And meets his former music teacher, upending his life, in Nathan Silver’s touching comedy, starring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane.

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By Manohla Dargis

Ben Gottlieb — the touchingly soulful hero of the soulful, delightfully tetchy “Between the Temples” — is a mess. He needs a haircut and a shave; he could do with better-fitting clothes. He’s having problems at work. He also lives in his family’s basement, that much-derided refuge of the eternal man-child and terminal loser. Yet because the filmmaker Nathan Silver has an appreciation for life’s ironies and likes putting a topspin on his comedy, Ben lives with both his mother and stepmother. He lives, in other words, in his mothers’ basement.

Ben — a perfect Jason Schwartzman — is a sad sack, but he’s also just sad and for a very good, excruciating reason, too. His wife died not long ago, leaving him bereft and, increasingly, without an evident sense of self or purpose. He seems to have lost his bearings, but he’s also lost his singing voice, which proves a problem given that he’s the cantor at a local synagogue. He still teaches there, working out of a cramped, shambolic classroom in which he helps boys and girls prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies that formally announce the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Set in the present in an upstate New York hamlet, this coming-of-middle-age story follows Ben during an eventful time in his life, which takes a turn after he runs into his former elementary-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane, divine). They reconnect in a bar, where she helps the soused, deflated Ben, a kindness that takes an unexpected turn when she shows up at the synagogue. Carla wants to take his class, explaining that she never had a bat mitzvah. Ben is reluctant because, well, she isn’t a child, but after consulting with his boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), Ben relents. A friendship blossoms and perhaps something deeper does, too, and the movie gets its blissfully offbeat groove on.

Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, introduces Ben without preamble, immediately dropping you into a conversation that started before the movie did. Ben and his mothers, Meira and Judith (the nicely synced Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon), are in the family’s dining room having an apparently serious heart-to-heart. Judith says they think he “needs to start seeing a doctor,” a suggestion that Ben says he’s open to. As the camera zooms out, Ben keeps talking only to be cut off by the doorbell. The moms jump up, and a pretty female doctor enters and almost immediately begins hitting on Ben, a shift that abruptly gives new meaning to the advice the moms have just voiced.

With the doctor’s entrance, the movie turns straightaway from the plaintive to the humorous. The scene is characteristic of how Silver changes up the tone and mood, creating an unexpected pacing that’s complemented by Sean Price Williams’s agitated cinematography and the jumpy rhythms of John Magary’s editing. The movie is laced with absurd setups, slapstick and some silly props, all of which converge in a scene at a restaurant called the Chained Duck (the name of a satirical French newspaper). There, Ben and Carla have dinner with her belligerent son, Nat (Matthew Shear), a hostility that Silver slyly deflates when the waiter hands everyone menus as large as battleground shields.

The outlandish menus undercut the son’s disproportionate, clenched-jaw anger at Carla without draining the scene of its tense realism or turning the son into the butt of the joke. Silver is a sharp, cleareyed observer of human nature, and while he pokes at his characters, including Ben, it’s more teasing than cruel. If there’s a mean joke in “Between the Temples,” I missed it, which helps explain where Silver is coming from. He and Schwartzman make Ben’s pain palpable without sentimentalizing it; you see the hurt in the sag of Ben’s shoulders and in the melancholy that clouds his eyes. Yet there’s a fundamental resilience to the character who, while he’s sometimes off on his own, is never really alone.

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