Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Whale is a work brimming with so much self-hatred that you can almost forgive the complete lack of care it takes with its delicate subject matter. Almost. The subjectivity of its point-of-view leaves little room for contradicting voices, and what’s left is a hefty, wallowing prison of self-loathing. That Hunter also wrote the script for the film adaptation might explain why the movie never overcomes this central paradox: for a story that declares itself to be about searching out kindness and empathy, it’s visual and thematic treatment of its protagonist – a 600-pound English teacher named Charlie – appears to embrace anything but. For all its effort, The Whale‘s main export is contempt aimed squarely at the character we’re meant to have the most sympathy for.

Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, in a performance that garnered him a long standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival and cemented his place atop the Best Actor prediction board for all Oscar pundits. There’s a lot of good will surrounding his work here, lifted by a “comeback” narrative, being Fraser his first lead role in decades. We’ve heard the sobering stories of Fraser’s fall from the Hollywood limelight, including a horrific tale of being sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, who was then the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (Fraser’s already said he will not attend any Golden Globe ceremony should he be nominated). This is all to say that Fraser, and his performance in The Whale, has benefitted from an awards campaign that’s been pretty much on auto-pilot from day one. Many are ready to embrace him again.

With all that in mind, it’s with a heavy heart that I say that Fraser’s work here, while good, is far from transcendent. To create the 600-pound body that Charlie lives with, Fraser is covered in part by prosthetic but mostly by CGI, in an effort to turn the docile Charlie into something of a grotesque. There is a sensitivity to Fraser’s performance that hints at a level of grace that The Whale may be trying to achieve but seldom does. For all of Fraser’s commitment to the part, it’s hard to ignore how it serves (and in turn, legitimizes) a narrative that’s so untenable. It reminds me a lot, actually, of Ana De Armas’ work in Blonde. Both are performances that do neither their movies or themselves any favors by working so hard to find the humanity in a character, only to have the film undermine that humanity at every step.

Which brings me to the film’s director. Darren Aronofsky is an unquestioned talent whose movies all have a healthy dose of brutality. There’s a blatant cruelty to the worlds he builds, even if the scale of his movies toggle between the intimacy of The Wrestler and the grandiosity of mother!. The Wrestler and Black Swan are the two Aronofsky films that most resemble The Whale, both in treacly melodramatic tone and the narrative belief in messianic self-destruction. Wrestler and Swan are his two best films, in part because Aronofsky synthesizes his characters with their occupation, creating a more seamless metaphor for the savagery of our world. In The Whale, Charlie is simply a man, and his choice to eat himself into morbid obesity is given the same grave treatment as Mickey Rourke’s steroid-juicing, death wish-hunting wrestler.

As much as it wants to deny it, The Whale does hold Charlie rigidly responsible for his predicament, and part of that is because Aronofsky can’t seem to fathom it any other way. His films are filled with characters who ultimately face (oftentimes fatal) consequences thanks to their own best intentions. Along with cinematographer Matthew Libatique and score composer Rob Simonsen, he turns The Whale into a horror movie about failing to properly handle your grief and shame. This comes directly from Hunter’s script, to be sure, which takes the severity of Charlie’s judgment of himself and uses it to illustrate the reality of the film. A director of something like this should understand that there’s more power in subverting this self-hatred, but Aronofsky prefers to dwell in bleakness, forever condemning Charlie’s condition.

The film’s plot is structured as the last five days of Charlie’s life, Monday through Friday. He has congestive heart failure, explains his friend and nurse, Liz (Hong Chau), and needs to go to the hospital immediately. Charlie refuses. He doesn’t want to drive himself into life-crippling debt. Instead, he decides to spend his remaining days with his estranged daughter, Ellie (a manic Sadie Sink), whom he hasn’t seen for eight years. When she begrudgingly arrives, she instantly berates him with harsh words about his appearance and his behavior (Charlie left her and her mother for a male student in his class, who has since died). Charlie also gets visited by Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a door-to-door LDS missionary who sees Charlie’s state and decides to welcome him to the kingdom of Heaven before his forthcoming demise.

This confluence of events – the well-timed visits, the personal and religious symbolism – have the kind of obstinate sense of purpose usually reserved for a theater play. On the confines of a stage it perhaps would feel less contrived (I’m dubious of that, actually but I digress), but in the medium of film, where things are made more literal, the narrative template only highlights how shallow the story actually is, conflating novice deduction with profound insight. Take the film’s title, The Whale, which will immediately lead audiences to think of it as a reference to Charlie’s physique, while the film itself might argue a connection to Charlie’s love of Melville’s Moby Dick and a particular essay about the novel that he adores. That A24 and the filmmakers thought this title would be considered symbolism and not a mean-spirited jab at its despairing protagonist tells you everything you need to know about their approach to the material.

I’m not trying to say that people shouldn’t be allowed to make films about the thornier details of obesity, but The Whale obviously lacks even rudimentary understanding of how this film would be perceived, or even why it matters. It’s been said that Hunter based the story on his own battle with weight and self-loathing, and it seems obvious that he equates his former heaviness with physical and emotional devastation. This is reflected in the film, as all the characters spend the whole time screaming at Charlie for being so terrible as to let his weight get out of control. It’s a tough thing to watch. So it makes sense that the PR for this movie has shifted to solely praising Fraser’s performance, which does prove that he’s an actor capable of incredible feeling. I wish that feeling could be displayed in a less dysfunctional movie.

 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky