SummaryA reclusive English teacher (Brendan Fraser) living with severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.
SummaryA reclusive English teacher (Brendan Fraser) living with severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.
IN A NUTSHELL:
This touching film is based on a theatrical play also called “The Whale.” It’s about a reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher who attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter before his imminent death. It is brutally honest, raw, and heartbreaking.
After the movie debuted at the Venice Film Festival, he was given a six-minute standing ovation by the audience. He deserved every minute of it and more. It brought him to tears and has ignited new love and appreciation for him from Hollywood and fans around the world.
TIPS FOR PARENTS:
This movie is not appropriate for children.
The first scene shows a man pleasuring himself.
Profanity, crude language, and F-bombs
Talk of a **** relationship
THINGS I LIKED:
Brendan Fraser gives an Oscar-worthy performance. I could relate to him as an online professor. One of the classes I teach at a university is English, just like his character. While people have talked about his real-life weight gain, he wore a bodysuit to appear morbidly obese in this film. About the fat suit prosthetic, Fraser stated, “I developed muscles I did not know I had. I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed; it was like stepping off the dock onto a boat in Venice. That [sense of] undulating. It gave me appreciation for those whose bodies are similar. You need to be an incredibly strong person, mentally and physically, to inhabit that physical being.”
It’s heartbreaking and fascinating to watch Brendan Fraser’s character vacillate between giving up on himself and having hope for a better life.
The entire cast gave excellent performances and includes Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau, and Samantha Morton.
Sadie Sink’s little sister in real life plays young Ellie in the flashback scenes. Sweet.
The movie illustrates very well how we all fill our lives with something to reduce our pain, whether it be food, religion, relationships, sex, hatred, money, or something else.
The screenwriter, Samuel D. Hunter, grew up in Moscow, Idaho where the movie takes place. Brendan Fraser’s character keeps ordering pizza from “Gambino’s”, which is an actual pizza place there. The story is loosely based on Hunter’s real life as a **** man who taught writing at Rutgers University and who struggled with an eating disorder.
One-room movies are extremely difficult to film and keep an audience’s interest, but I was hooked the entire time (whale pun intended.)
Director Darren Aronofsky loves to use symbolic images and characters to get audiences to think, as he did in his dramatic film Mother! in 2017. It’s an effective storytelling technique that allows him to create layers of understanding. I love it. He also creates connections between mathematical numbers and religion in his movies. Have you noticed that too?
Samuel D. Hunter, the writer, does a fantastic job slowly revealing each character’s motivations.
THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:
It’s a rough movie to watch.
Buried in a “fat suit,” his physical acting limited to the life of immobility Charlie has sentenced himself to, Fraser will break your heart playing the character’s pain and compassion.
Here, in short, is a self-regarding drama of self-loathing: hardly the most appetizing prospect. If it proves nonetheless to be stirringly watchable, we have Brendan Fraser to thank.
In The Whale, Aronofsky posits his sadism as an intellectual experiment, challenging viewers to find the humanity buried under Charlie’s thick layers of fat. That’s not as benevolent of a premise as he seems to think it is. It proceeds from the assumption that a 600-pound man is inherently unlovable.
The director of shockers such as Requiem for a Dream and Mother! has had his mainstream moments, but he has never before been quite so at home to tawdry soap opera.
Simply an extraordinary film. Having seen Aronofsky’s previous works, I anticipated excess in camera work, jarring editing, and self-indulgence but was left stunned at his conscious restraint. There are certainly moments where his particular style shines through - namely in the face-forward, almost testimonial-like character shots - but overall, he’s willingly taken a backseat to his actors and their sole, bleak yet masterfully nuanced backdrop. Brendan Fraser’s portrayal of Charlie is masterful - so complex, so poignant, so powerful. The supporting cast - especially Hong Chau - similarly rise to the occasion. There has been much debate about what message Charlie’s story is supposed to send. Is it hope? Is it redemption? Is it love? Is it pain? Is it desperation? Is it rejection? Is it despondence? Is it a loss of faith in humanity? Is it a criticism of organized religion? The answer is “yes.” It’s all of these things. Aronofsky has chosen to leave the viewer responsible for reconciling the contradictions therein, and in doing so, has created a film worthy of infinite interpretations.
Brendan Fraser deserves a 10, but the movie a 6. The story lacks that, story. Yes, the story is beautiful, but it doesn't go much further, we see the case of a devastated person after a loss and how he tries, through rebuilding his relationship with his daughter, to redeem himself from his mistakes and "heal". But it doesn't go beyond that.
(Mauro Lanari)
Blackmail and manipulative theater pièce, further weighed down by a quintal of prosthetics and even more spiritually sick than "The Fountain" [2006]. Another crap of the couple Aronofsky and A24.