Featuring a powerful and unforgettable performance from Brendan Fraser and an utterly heart-wrenching tale about redemption, The Whale is an absolute masterpiece of a film, but it’s one that I will probably never watch again.
Overall Score: 10/10
Image: A24
“Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring? People are amazing.”
Wow. Just wow. I still get emotional whenever I think about or hear that line. It’s from The Whale, a film that’s both incredibly powerful and equally just as sad. And although viewing it was an experience that was quite special and memorable, much like other heartbreaking movies (like The Green Mile), I don’t think I have it in me to ever watch it again — or at least not for a very long time.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Brendan Fraser, The Whale follows Charlie, a reclusive and morbidly obese man who’s in the process of eating his way to death, as he attempts one last shot at redemption by reaching out to and trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. Fraser himself summed up the character and his story perfectly while accepting the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, stating that Charlie is “someone who is on a raft of regrets, but he’s in a sea of hope.” Indeed, while very much on a path of regret-fueled self-destruction, the protagonist of The Whale never ceases to be optimistic about everything and everyone around him. In other words, he sees the goodness in the world and other people (even when they don’t necessarily do).
But despite Charlie’s optimism being a big part of it, overall, The Whale is very hard to watch. Some might say that Aronofsky shouldn’t have directed it in the first place, but I, on the other hand, would argue that he’s the perfect director for this film. Although I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Requiem for a Dream or The Wrestler, having seen Black Swan, I know that Aronofsky’s very good at crafting movies that delve into the minds and mental states of each of their respective main characters. And in the case of The Whale, while yes, Charlie is a sympathetic character whom we end up caring for, in order to understand him fully, all of this needs to be balanced out with a dark and bleak tone, a sense of claustrophobia, and a couple of upsetting (and even traumatizing) scenes. Speaking of upsetting, later in the film, there’s a scene in which we see Charlie go through a binge-eating episode. Aronofsky, of course, more than purposefully aims to make us uncomfortable, so it’s unsurprising that it’s fairly difficult to watch. However, I think that its inclusion is of high necessity. It’s one thing to inform your audience that a character is eating his way to death, but it’s another thing to show them or make them sit through it, and only the latter will make you truly understand their internal psychological state.
Now, while I can understand why some people may feel that a scene like this (along with The Whale’s general portrayal of obesity) is exploitative and fatphobic, I honestly think that the point of making us feel uncomfortable isn’t to get us to fear or feel disgusted by overweight people, but that it’s to get us to understand and see what Charlie’s grief and depression have done to him and to show us that he’s indeed spiraled out of control. And as seen with all the other characters in the film, different people have different ways of dealing with grief and pain, and Charlie’s is just one of many methods that real people use to cope with these things.
Of course, the effectiveness of the execution of all of this also depends on the actor in the role, and had it been anyone other than Brendan Fraser, this movie might not have worked. I’ve seen plenty of great performances throughout my life, but the one Fraser gives here absolutely floored me. He does so much with his voice and eyes, impressively using them to convey the many different things that Charlie feels throughout the film (like sadness, self-hatred, and hopefulness). Furthermore, although much of the creation of Charlie comes courtesy of The Whale’s mind-blowing prosthetics, Fraser also physically commits to the role, which allows him to sell the authenticity of Charlie as a person. It’s a performance of utmost sincerity, and it’s the kind that I think that actors probably have in them to deliver only once in their lives. This man deserves to win the Oscar, and if you told me ten years ago that the guy from George of the Jungle, The Mummy, and Journey to the Center of the Earth would one day deliver a performance as powerful and as unforgettable as this, I would’ve never believed you. Talk about a comeback!
The rest of the cast is also brilliant. Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, and Samantha Morton all do terrific jobs of playing their respective characters, but of the four of them, Sink and Chau — the latter of whom rightfully earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — are the two that really stand out. Both of them play complex characters, and throughout the film, they prove time and time again that they’re more than capable of going toe to toe with big-screen veterans like Fraser.
Another standout element of The Whale is Samuel D. Hunter’s writing. His characters are rich and feel like real people, and his dialogue is powerful and impactful. Also, Hunter’s work deals with and has a lot to say about many different things: redemption, forgiveness, religion (and its hypocrisy), the harmfulness of judging others by their appearances or sexual identities, loss, grief, anger, the belief that nobody else but you can save yourself, seeing the goodness in the world and in people, and the importance of being honest. That’s a long list of themes, but Hunter tackles them skillfully and weaves them all together to form a cohesive story about the human condition.
Additionally, and this is as much to Aronofsky’s credit as it is to Hunter’s, the film takes plenty of cues from stage plays — which is only fitting because it’s based on one. There’s only one location, one main character (Charlie), and a rotating cast of supporting characters that come into and out of the protagonist’s life. And though it’s not a storytelling style or format that’s going to be for everyone, personally, I think it complements the movie very well.
The last thing I’d like to talk about is the film’s score. Many seem to be arguing that it’s manipulative, to which I say, “So what?” It’s highly effective, and in terms of being beautiful, powerful, and achingly sad, it perfectly matches Fraser’s performance. Emotional scores like this are not something new to me (heck, the ones from Somewhere in Time and The Bridges of Madison County always bring me to tears), but what composer Rob Simonsen’s created for The Whale is truly something else. His string-led compositions, for example, are some of the most heartbreaking pieces of music I’ve ever heard, and they do an excellent job of relentlessly pulling at your heartstrings. The entire score, for that matter, is on another level, and I feel happy saying that it’s now become one of my all-time favorites.
And with that, we’ve come to the end of my review. I’m going to go ahead and just say it: The Whale is a masterpiece, and how it missed Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score, I will never understand. I honestly think it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen, but it’s also undeniably one of the saddest and most devastating ones in recent memory. And while it’s normal for movies to make me cry, none have ever torn me apart and made me sob so uncontrollably like this before. It’s a film that I may not particularly want to watch again anytime soon, but its beautiful, powerful, and unforgettable exploration of redemption will make it one that I will continue to remember and cherish for the rest of my life.
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