The Whale (4/5 Stars)

Director Darren Aronofsky is cinema’s equivalent of the phoenix. Every ten years or so he spontaneously combusts in a show of flames before rising again from the ashes. The first time around he started with a basic black & white low budget film called Pi (1998) caught fire with the brilliant and intense Requiem for a Dream (2000) and subsequently burst into flames with the over-ambitiously overly complicated box office disaster known as The Fountain (2006). From the ashes, he pulled himself together with a basic low budget film called The Wrestler (2008), caught fire with the brilliant and intense Black Swan (2010) and burst into flames with the overly ambitious and overly complicated box office disasters of Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017). 

Now in 2022, from another pile of ashes, there is The Whale, a stripped down low budget film based on a play. The whole thing takes place in one house over the course of a single week. Despite its back-to-basics feel, the tell-tale sign of Aronofsky are here, the extremes of the human experience. Our main character Charlie (played by Brendan Fraser) is a morbidly obese man. Like the kind of obese where you wonder what the decision making process was a few hundred pounds ago. The other main interest of Aronofsky (at least for the last decade) is religion and there is a fair portion of this movie dedicated to that as well.

I would expect morbid obesity to be a lonely state of affairs. We get a nominal sense of that here: Charlie teaches remote English and Writing community course classes with his laptop camera off. He orders pizza, but tells the delivery man to place it outside the door so he doesn’t have to show himself. Aside from these examples though, the movie is based on a play, so we get a lot of people barging into his house that normally would not be there. There is Charlie’s nurse Liz (played by Hong Chau) who tells him he has congestive heart failure and will be dead within a week if he doesn’t go to the hospital. There is Ellie (played by Sadie Sink), Charlie’s daughter, a cruel girl who is here to guilt her father into doing her homework. Finally, there is Thomas (played by Ty Simpkins) a door-to-door missionary who, upon seeing Charlie, believes that God sent him there to help. 

 The movie takes place in Idaho but has such a  hostility to organized religion you'd think it took place in Portland. Charlie is fine with the presence of Thomas. However, Liz tells him a few times to get out and never come back. Liz is interesting in this regard. She relates that she was adopted by the local sect, New Faith, but left because they were all self-righteous hypocrites (The local sect is against homosexuality). Liz is Chinese. It isn’t explicitly said but one may assume based on her age and gender that this local sect was adopting children, especially girls, from China because of the CCP’s one-child policy. It doesn’t seem to occur to Liz that she should be grateful to organized religion for having saved her from infanticide. Ellie is a bitch to Thomas, but then again she is a bitch to everyone. The local sect is against homosexualilty true, and Charlie is gay, but that doesn’t stop Thomas from trying to help. Could organized religion help someone in Charlie’s condition? I have no idea, but the problem seems to be large enough that it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

Ultimately, Charlie is eating himself into an early grave because that seems to be the plan. Around ten years ago, he left his wife and child to pursue a romance with a younger man. This younger man committed suicide. It is posited that the local sect caused the suicide, although I am unaware of any christian denomination that promotes suicide for homosexuals. Then again, New Faith isn't Catholic. In any event, Charlie has been alone ever since and steadily gaining weight. There are other people in this world that go through similar experiences and they do not end up slowly eating themselves to death. It is not really clear then why Charlie in particular has decided to do it.

Charlie is played by Brendan Fraser. This is the type of role that is so unique it is award worthy simply by being handled competently. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fraser was nominated. I haven’t seen Brendan Fraser in a substantial role since 2004’s Crash. (I did see him in last year’s “Out of Sight” in a supporting role. )You could call it a comeback (and people are) but taking a look at IMDB, it would appear that Fraser hasn’t stopped working during this time. He just hasn’t done anything notable. Well, call it a comeback. 

I recognize Sadie Sink from Netflix’s Stranger Things. I didn’t like her character in that show either. It was nice for Samantha Morton to drop in for a scene. I look forward to seeing Aronofsky’s next film. He should be catching fire on that portion of the phoenix arc by that time which should mean a third masterpiece.

Mother! (3/5 Stars)

The last two movies of writer/director Darren Aronofsky, “Noah” and now “Mother!” Present a point of view that is rarely posited. Believers of God generally think of the deity in an absolutely positive light, whether as fully good or at least fully just. Whereas non-believers don’t have an opinion about God (though they may hold a generally negative of organized religion) because they don’t believe that the deity exists to have an opinion about. Darren Aronofsky, at least in his last two films, believes in God, and finds the deity lacking. For example, in “Noah”, God decides to kill almost everybody on Earth. Some characters in that movie were quite articulate as to the unfairness of it all. If there was a such thing, that movie and this new one would be heretical works.

“Mother!” is an extending and ever-developing metaphor of all the crimes ever committed against Women/Nature. I myself did not quite grasp the overall metaphor until about two thirds of the way through and upon reflection noticed I missed many things early on. Then again, I went into this movie blind. Just reading that its a metaphor will likely help you catch on to the biblical parallels earlier. “Mother!” has received a Cinemascore of F which should give a hint as to what an unpleasant experience this movie can be. However, an unpleasant movie does not necessarily a bad movie. “Mother!” is technically proficient, well-acted, and has more things to say in ten minutes than most movies have in their running time. I cannot say I liked “Mother!”, but when I exited the theater I had a feeling that reminded me of the feeling I had when I exited the theater after watching Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.” It is an intense proceeding.

The movie takes place entirely in a fixer-upper mansion in a picturesque landscape. Here Jennifer Lawrence, doing her best impression of a Renaissance Madonna, works on renovations while her older husband, played by Javier Bardem, tries to get out of a writing block. Nobody actually has names as who they are and what they represent seem to more or less explicitly change over time.

The movie can be broken into three parts: the first is about the neuroses and concerns of a married couple trying to decide when and if to have a child, the second is about fame and what happens to a couple when one of them starts spreading their love in a not exclusive fashion, the third is quite explicitly about God and Mother Nature. In the background, making things complicated and then throwing the whole world into squalor and chaos are the humans. The movie takes a dim view of the humans, and through this dim of view of the humans, places the ultimate blame for the troubles on God, who made them in his image. The only innocent here is Women/Nature. At least that is what I believe this movie is about. Aronofsky does not feel the need to be explanatory. I think that wound in the floor is Original Sin, but there is no way to know for certain. Javier Bardem it should be noted is quite good as God. Not sure how that sort of thing is pulled off, but he does it.

I can’t recommend this movie to anyone who wants to see a movie with anyone else. You are going to have to see this one alone. It’s not a good time. However, it will make you think. It is quite literally a challenging movie. I for one never considered what Mary, mother of Jesus, may have felt about God giving up his only son through martyrdom for our sins. I mean it’s not like God asked Mary for permission or even her opinion on the matter.

NOAH (4/5 Stars)

The time for mercy has past. The time of punishment has begun.

You want faith? How about the faith of the producers behind writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s new film, “Noah.” They have reportedly spent $125 million dollars to make and market it. Sure, Aronofsky is a great filmmaker. But he is not a proven blockbuster filmmaker. His hits have always been these low budget character studies (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan). The one time he did command a large budget for the time travelling obscufated odyssey The Fountain it became a critical and box office failure, a sure poster child for ambitious folly. “Noah,” on paper at least, seem adept at capturing the audiences that filled the theaters for Darren Aronofsky’s previous films but also the people that showed up for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and other money making religious films. But “Noah” was not made by a religious filmmaker at least not one recognized by any church groups as being especially religious and “Noah” is a demonstrably different type of movie than Aronofsky’s earlier work. The producers are hoping to capture both audiences but there is also an outside chance it might not get either. And what will be left is the artwork itself, another ambitious folly or at least the most unique blockbuster (i.e. a movie with an over $100 million dollar budget) I’ve ever seen.

The strangness of “Noah” is born from its dark and primitive source material and the baffling sincerity of its modern makers in telling it exactly as it should be told. The original story can be found in the book of “Genesis” in the Old Testament of the Bible. It is a short story and can be summed up like this. God became dismayed at the wickedness of his creation and wished to eliminate all of it via a huge flood. He ordered Noah to build an ark and save two of each animal to survive. Noah builds the ark and God does exactly what he said he would do. He covers the world in a huge flood and kills every single human and every single animal on earth except the Noah and his family and the animals they have collected on the ark.

Now a modern audience would perhaps object to God’s malevolence in this story. Surely not every person on earth is wicked and even if they were, how is it okay to kill them all without warning or due process? Where is the justice in that? And by the way how is collecting two of each animal saving the species? Won’t they all become degenerate and hopelessly inbred in a few generations after the flood? Really the only way this story would make moral sense is if you were living in prehistoric times and continually witnessed the wrath of Mother Nature without knowing the science behind it. Surely, if you do not understand how the storms work, you may imagine that a deity was creating the weather in response to the behavior of humans. Or if you did not know the world was round and had not the slightest idea how big it was and thought the rain came from holes in the ceiling of the sky like the Bible describes (and not say the evaporation of existing water) you may have no trouble believing a flood could raise the ocean level for 40 days above all the existing land in the world and then sink to its original level after the rain stopped falling. These concerns are generally so prevalent in modern society that any Old Testament tales are generally eviscerated beyond all recognition from the original worldview of the author. Take for example the movie, “Evan Almighty” that starred Steve Carell as a U.S. Congressman who is told by God (Morgan Freeman) to build an ARK. Turns out in that movie, ARK, represents ‘Acts of Random Kindness.’ Oh the original Noah was rolling in his grave.

But Darren Aronofsky is telling this tale as it should be told: that is dark and weird and catastrophic. And he is using computer generated visual effects for all the animals. And he is creating incredible storms bashing up entire landscapes, and he went and built a huge ark out of gopher pitch and wood. In essence he poured the money only possible in modern society with a completely developed economy into a tale that only people in a primitive society with no scientific knowledge could take seriously. Who is the primary audience for this movie? Nobody? That is why I think the producers committed a great act of faith in this movie. I would not have done it. And I liked it.

The casting for this movie is pitch perfect. Russell Crowe plays Noah. Anthony Hopkins plays Methusala, Noah’s grandfather. Jennifer Connelly plays Naameh, Noah’s wife, and Emma Watson plays Ila, an adopted daughter. Finally Ray Winstone plays Tubal Cain, descendant of the original Cain and self-proclaimed king of this prediluvain Earth. Biblical acting is not your normal kind of acting. It is reminiscent of Shakespearean acting but with less humor. I think there is but one and only one joke in this movie. (But of course who could joke when the apocalypse is at hand.)  They all pull it off very well. Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins both seem more at home in movies that take place a long time ago than they are in modern settings. We are reminded of their roman gladiator movies for good reason. I could praise the acting of Jennifer Connelly but I would prefer merely to dwell for some time on how beautiful she is in this movie. She is of that group of few women like Jodie Foster and Sandra Bullock that seem to have hit their peak of physical perfection in their mid-forties, not an easy thing to do. Emma Watson is cute too but we all already know that. Stealing the show though is Ray Winstone as Tubal Cain. The character is completed invented and a definite improvement from the original tale. Tubal Cain questions his Creator. Did you not cast my ancestors out of the Garden of Eden to live in hardship in the desolate wilderness? And is it so wicked for me to survive as best I can with what you have given me? Why does you not speak to me? Am I not made in your own image? I think he has a good point.

Other interesting things to dwell on: The production design of Noah’s Earth suggests a world that has been untouched. That is the landscape is flat and spare. It does not look like Earth as we know it but an Earth just formed. Creationists are of this view and that the great flood is what formed everything like the Grand Canyon. However when Noah tells the story of creation to his children, when he speaks of the seven days, we instead see several billions of years starting with the Big Bang in very fast forward. That’s not quite right I thought. Also the wickedness of man is linked to environmental degradation. This too is not quite right. I would bet anything that the original author’s did not give a hoot about the squandering of Earth’s resources and was far more concerned with sodomy and other like things. I know it is sort of better this way, but if you are going to go so far to be faithful with the source material, might as well go whole hog huh.

Black Swan (5/5 Stars)

Excuse me while I catch my breath.

Suppose that you wanted to be perfect. What would it take? Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a NYC Lincoln Center’s production of Swan Lake. It’s an incredibly difficult role, one of the most challenging in ballet. The Swan Queen is simultaneously two characters at once, the innocent and pure White Swan and her evil twin the sensuous and seductive Black Swan. The story of Swan Lake is simple. An evil beast casts a spell on a woman that transforms her into a swan during the day. The spell can only be broken by true love. Her prince see her at night, learns her secret, falls in love, and promises to use his true love to break the spell. But before they elope, the evil beast presents the evil twin of the woman to the prince. The evil twin tricks the prince who pledges his love to her instead. Bereft of true love and left with no hope that the spell will ever be broken, the woman kills herself.

The only way I think to understand the horrific things that happen to Nina Sayers in this movie is through the prism of a performing technique called Method Acting. Method Acting is employed when an actor seeks a great performance by not acting at all. Instead of pretending to be character, they attempt to become that character. For example if an actor were to play a taxi driver, a method actor may actually get a license and drive a taxi for several months before the shoot (which is exactly what Robert De Niro did to prepare for his role “Taxi Driver.”) The most ridiculous preparer of all is perhaps Christian Bale, who was to play a thin person in “The Machinist,” and of his own initiative dropped his weight to an awfully unhealthy 110 pounds for the role. But lets say that you wanted to try Method Acting out for the role of the Swan Queen. Well, you would need two things. 1) You would need to be a Swan, and 2) You would need to be Split Personality Schizophrenic. How else are you going to be two people at once? And this is basically what happens to Nina Sayers. She goes insane. Nobody catches it in time because the deeper she descends into madness, the better a performer she becomes.

Helping her through the downward spiral of perfection are several other people. The first is Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey. She gave up her own ballerina career to have Nina and now lives vicariously through her daughter. She makes sure Nina’s life is ballet and only ballet. Nina eats grapefruits, takes the subway to Lincoln Center, practices all day, goes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep. It is a workaholic life bereft of all pleasure. Then there is her tough instructor played by Vincent Cassell. He mercilessly informs Nina that her dispassionate perfectionism is perfect for the White Swan but terrible for the Black Swan. She needs to let go and feel the music. His idea of the best way to help her achieve this is through sexual harassment, both psychological and physical. The harassment doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the fact that her instructor doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself while doing it. All she wants is to be perfect. A fellow ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, has a much more common sense way of going about it. She invites her to dinner, gets her drunk, gives her a rufi (which Nina sees being put into her drink), and takes her to one of those clubs where you can’t see or hear anything but strobe lights and a rhythmic pulse. This works. The result is well, ahem, the result is a sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. There is heavy breathing...among other things. Meanwhile Nina keeps seeing a doppelganger of herself dressed entirely in black pop up in the most inconvenient places. First on the subway, then on a city street, and then in the mirrors of her dance studio. Seriously scary shit. 

The Director of this picture is Darren Aronofsky. If you’ve seen any of his other movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “The Wrestler,” you will notice that no other director is so artfully mean to his characters. The same is true of “Black Swan.” There are plenty of similar techniques from both of those previous movies. Like “The Wrestler,” this movie shows the real physical costs of a performance. Nina breaks a toenail in one scene. In another she has to pry her toes apart. Weird scars start forming on her shoulder blades. And like the drugs in “Requiem for a Dream,” the scenes of ballet are shown in spectacular fashion, hallucinations included. The score was done by Clint Mansell, the same person who composed the Requiem, and like “Requiem for a Dream,” the climax of this story (the performance of Swan Lake on opening night) matches incredible visuals and super-emotional acting with a very powerful piece of music (Tchiakovsky played very loudly) that goes on for about fifteen minutes and left me emotionally exhausted. Truth be told, my heart rate and breathing had actually accelerated so much that I had to wait through half the credits in order to calm myself down. If the Great Intellectual Experience of the year was “Inception,” than the Great Emotional Experience of the year is “Black Swan.” It should easily receive nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Makeup, Costumes, Score, among other things. Natalie Portman, who trained for an entire year and did most of her own ballet, has pulled off the performance of a lifetime. She would be a lock for the Oscar in almost any other year that didn’t also have Lisbeth Salandar lurking around in the background.

One thing people repeatedly tell me when I recommend movies such as “Black Swan,” is that they aren’t in the mood for a “good movie.” They would much rather just unwind on the couch and watch junk. In the past the best I could do was simply persuade people to not watch anything at all. For instance, I would argue that if you don’t want to hear a good story or be affected in any way, why don’t you just stare at a blank wall or meditate. Better yet, if you’re too tired to watch a good movie, take a nap. But that line of reasoning only stops people from watching junk. So let me rephrase the argument in this way. Lets say you are at an amusement park. Junk TV is like the merry-go-round, the Tea Cups, the bumper cars, etc. “Black Swan,” is the highest roller coaster in the park. Now you have a choice: You can take your good money and precious time and spend it all day on the merry-go-round doing something you’ve done a thousand times before or you can stop being a wimp and go see the ballerina movie. True the height of the drops should make any reasonable person apprehensive and true it may be “hard to watch” as you are racing toward the bottom at very high speeds but, come on, everyone said it was fun (Black Swan has a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and inside you know its just a movie. You will be exiting the ride alive and intact with but a sense of giddiness and awesome that is perfectly normal given the adrenaline rush. You may even want to experience something quite like that again. Perhaps skydiving next time. (Have you seen “Requiem for a Dream”?) If you’re embarrassed to be affected by something so deeply with other people around, I suggest you go and see the movie alone. And if it takes you awhile after the movie to compose yourself before exiting the theater, that’s fine too. That’s what the end credits of good movies are for.

The Wrestler (4/5 Stars) 02/07/09

As I was watching this movie I couldn’t help but remember the prophetic line in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s final movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Faced with a newer sleeker computer generated special effect driven terminator Arnold flatly admits that he is no match for the newer design. “I am obsolete,” he mechanically intones. How true I thought. Just this year several great films have sounded the death knell in the age of the Schwarzenggerian model of the American action hero. The movement reached its height in the eighties with such stars as Ahnold, Sly Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Steven Segal. But as special effects have taken over the modern day action blockbuster, these great hulking muscle men have been supplanted with newer sleeker models. Twenty years ago the ‘Incredible Hulk’ was a role for the muscle man Luc Ferrigno. Today, aided with computers, that role has been taken over by an actual bona fide actor, Ed Norton. The ascendance of such relatively diminutive actors like Tobey Maguire (Spiderman), Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), and Shia Lebouf (Transformers) has made apparent that real acting skill is now more important than steroid-toking ability. Even in the Terminator franchise, Arnold has officially been replaced. In his stead is Christian Bale (Batman) who may have a great physique but is certainly more impressive because of his acting chops. 
The Wrestler is a noble swan song for the eighties muscle man. It would make a great double feature with the fine documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster* which takes on practically the same subject. It was in the news in December that Mike ‘Mad Dog’ Bell, a has-been wrestler in the documentary, had committed suicide. Knowing this The Wrestler was especially meaningful to watch. The Wrestler is about a wrestler named Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (played beautifully by Mickey Rourke) who had his hey-day in the late eighties. Since then he has fallen on hard times. He now performs in smaller venues like community centers. At his age, wrestling has a very noticeable effect on his body. He walks with so much pain. Wrestling may be fake in the sense that the outcome is determined beforehand, but what this movie really makes apparent is that people are really getting hit in the ring, they really do fall from high places, and when they bleed they really are bleeding. Wrestling, in that sense is very real. So real, in fact, that when Randy suffers a heart attack after an especially brutal bout, it seems like the appropriate reaction to what he has just been through. The Wrestler does for muscle men what Sunset Boulevard did for silent film stars. It is an empathetic story of a person stuck in thier own obsolescence. Even if Randy’s health didn’t fail, he still would have no chance for a comeback. The era is over and he is left behind. What makes the movie a tragedy is that Randy has severed any personal ties he has had with his family and thus has nothing to fall back on now. His only relationship is with a stripper (Marisa Tomei) who maybe is only being nice to him because he’s a customer. His daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) hates him. The movie is comprised of attempted reconciliations and mistakes. But it seems Randy can’t live without wrestling, something the doctor has told him to avoid. 
This is called Mickey Rourke’s comeback movie. That’s ironic to say after his character’s failure to comeback in the movie itself. Still it is a great performance, which should put him in contending for the Best Actor Oscar. Marisa Tomei also is worthy of her nomination. It is my personal opinion that she looks better right now than she did almost fifteen years ago when she first won an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny. My god is she smoking. It’s ridiculous to be in such great shape at her age. Evan Rachel Wood also does good work. The entire movie is wall-to-wall good performances. 
The director for this movie is, quite surprisingly, none other than Darren Aronofsky. Seeing any of his other films you would never have guessed. All the trademark Aronofsky camera moves and edits are gone. What is present is a completely different style. He has completely reinvented himself. Consider for a moment that his last movie was The Fountain. Wow, this is definitely the opposite of that movie in every way. As always I’m very interested in what the guy is doing next. 
One last thing: Bruce Springsteen’s soulful ballad at the end of the film should have been at least nominated for an Oscar. The fact that it isn’t is a true disappointment. If I were NBC I would be so pissed off at the Academy this year. The fact that neither Wall-e nor The Dark Knight was nominated for Best Picture probably cost them 30 million viewers already. To have the chance for Bruce Springsteen to perform at the ceremony and not have him nominated probably cost them another 10 million. What could have been a record setting viewer ship has all but disappeared. Instead we have The Reader and a couple of unknown Indian songs from ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ which frankly I didn’t think were impressive enough to remember. At least Robert Downey Jr. was recognized for Tropic Thunder.