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 for having been saved 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.