The Whale (2022)

A tragically overweight man feels the stings that flesh is heir to

The Whale (2022)

Brendan Fraser pleads for understanding as the housebound Charlie in The Whale

It takes nothing from the emotional power of The Whale to point out that it isn’t a “movie-movie”, an opulent feast for the eyes.  It unapologetically looks, sounds and is performed like a play.

I think it’s one of the most shattering pictures of the year, but the ways it got under my skin are only subtly cinematic.

The script is co-written by the movie’s director, Darren Aronofsky, and Samuel D. Hunter, based on Hunter’s play. It pushes us disturbingly close to the behemoth Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a grotesquely obese instructor of English composition who, fortunately in our day and time, is able to teach remotely.

His dozen or so students are arrayed across his computer screen’s display in thumbnails, their faces peering out quizzically.  They’re puzzled because, though Charlie can see his students on his screen, he deliberately keeps the center square in the shared display, the one labeled Instructor, black.

Thus, his students can’t see what we do, the 600-pound catastrophe he’s become.  Pathological over-eating has made Charlie vanish from the lives of all but a handful of reluctant visitors to his large, untidy apartment.

One faithful drop-in is his caregiver, Liz (Hong Chau), who has a bitter tie to Charlie, and, luckily for him, is also a trained nurse.

Though Charlie married and became a father when young, he’s gay, and more than a decade ago fell in love and ran off with Liz’s brother.  That second “marriage” ended disastrously when the younger man committed suicide.

Now Liz looks after Charlie in bitterly ironic memory of her brother, whose loss she blames on this fat man she can’t, and isn’t sure she wants to, convince he should stop killing himself with food.

Liz (Hong Chau), a compassionate nurse, stifles her anger to help Charlie in The Whale

After recording Charlie’s vital signs and urging him to go to the hospital, Liz departs, knowing he’ll stay at home and keep filling himself with false hopes and buckets of fried chicken.

A sudden knock on the door reveals Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a runaway Christian fanatic who’s randomly chosen Charlie to minister to.  Thomas will turn out to be hiding troubles of his own beneath his Bible-blathering.

Once Thomas leaves, Charlie’s most abrasive adversary enters, sneering with disdain.  She’s his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom Charlie abandoned all those years ago to run off with his male lover.

Now a rebellious teenager, Ellie has come back into Charlie’s life only because she needs him to compose essays she can pass off as her own to her teachers.

If he’ll do that, not only will she be able to graduate from high school, but she can also permanently exit his life.  The same way he long ago shunted her aside.

Ellie’s mother and Charlie’s ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) eventually shows up, too, still fuming at the way Charlie left her alone to raise their daughter but hoping he can at last do something for their child.

Good luck with that.  Charlie’s blood pressure is skyrocketing, his breathing is frighteningly irregular, he easily tires, and he fears he’s dying.  Still helplessly stuffing himself, Charlie in the mirror sees only an expiring fat failure.

You might think this pile of recriminations and ruinous lack of discipline would do Charlie in.  As he lumbers about, pleading for understanding from those he’s wronged, struggling to forgive himself, it’s hard to see how he’ll find serenity.

Yet Charlie, a self-described “disgusting” human, doesn’t want to remain the flailing grotesque everyone sees.  It’s not that there’s a “thin” man inside Charlie fighting to get out.

It’s more complicated than that.  For one thing, his disparagement of himself conversely helps him to ferret out strength in others.

And more importantly, there’s the question we ask before Charlie does, can he muster empathy for himself?  Can he rescue the person inside this thrashing mound of flesh?

Fraser’s finely honed performance gets us our answer.  The actor has obviously been encased in prosthetics and a fat suit, but he makes these trappings cohere into a sad reality, a body in absurd flight from itself.

And his work is a vocal triumph, too. Listen closely. Charlie talks, enunciates, like an English teacher.

Fraser’s intelligent, frantic eyes kept me hoping Charlie could find release.  And for all the hostility those around him direct toward Charlie, they haven’t entirely given up on him either.

Ellie (Sadie Sink), abandoned early by Charlie, slowly tempers her rage in The Whale

Sink at first is lacerating as the spiteful Ellie. At one point she screams at her father, “Why don't you just go ahead and die?”

But we slowly realize that she’s fearfully concealing the child who wants to be reunited with Charlie.  Sink helps us understand that Ellie’s rage is burning too hot to last.

Chau turns Liz’s mourning for her late brother into a test of whether there’s one life she still could save, Charlie’s.  She’s surprisingly credible as a nursing professional who simply can’t let her patient quietly murder himself.

Mary, the ex-wife who’s given Charlie the cold shoulder since he left her to raise their daughter alone, isn’t shocked to see all the weight he’s gained.  To her, his gluttony mirrors his selfishness, and she feels no pity.  Morton is chillingly unforgiving as a woman who thinks she’s entitled to every ounce of bile she can spew.

Aronofsky has clearly urged his fractious cast to go all out, and the volatility of their work may put off some viewers. Everybody’s got a chip on their shoulder.

But I didn’t want any of them to shut up.  I thought all their hysteria, anger and exasperation made sense. Trapped in self-loathing, Charlie seems resigned to feeding his demons and watching his despair bloat. He’s an appalling sight.

What’s surprising about the script and, especially, Fraser’s restless, questing performance, is that it turns self-defeat into a sort of wisdom.  Charlie’s very immobility begins to offer him opportunities to re-connect.

Though physically he can barely move, it’s also true that his conscience can’t easily run and hide.  There’s no fat-burning pill for hurts that have festered. They finally have to be voiced. And nothing helps so much as being heard.

For anyone willing to hang in with the movie’s flailing characters, the story’s message is, well, too big to miss.  To be rid of woe or weariness, it helps to care for someone outside yourself, as Charlie does in reaching out to sullen, wary Ellie.

This movie isn’t just character driven. It drops us inside people and leaves us there to squirm.

It strikes me that these days fewer Hollywood movies are posing these kinds of challenges to audiences. Revealing the inner life not just as spectacle, but as our only enduring home.

The Whale suggests that reserves of “pity and compassion and sacrifice”, to pluck a phrase from William Faulkner, can still flourish in Hollywood, and they surely live in Aronofsky.  I hope more mainstream movie makers will go to that same well.