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Brendan Fraser’s Soft Quizzicality in “The Whale”

By Anthony Lane

Few actors have done more to promote the power of innocence than Brendan Fraser. Go back to the first wave of his fame, and to the gag that ran through his drollest roles. In “Encino Man” (1992), he was an early human, frozen solid during an ice age, defrosted by high-school kids, and invited to party down. In “George of the Jungle” (1997), he was a Tarzanesque vine-swinger let loose in San Francisco. And, in the charming “Blast from the Past” (1999), he was born in a nuclear bunker, raised on pure Americana, and eager, when he emerged after thirty-five years, to marry somebody from Pasadena. In each case, California was held up as the acme of civilization, and Fraser as a figure who knew almost nothing, bore no ill will, and was ready to be happily surprised. Get a load of those peepers, primed to pop! And that cartoon grin! When the meek are built like Johnny Weissmuller, it seems a little easier to believe that they might yet inherit the Earth.

Fraser then swung out of orbit, and partially faded from public view. If you missed him in the confusingly titled “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” (2008), or in “The Poison Rose” (2019), where he was billed below John Travolta and Morgan Freeman, don’t feel too bad. Now, though, Fraser is back, looming large in “The Whale.” He plays Charlie, who lives on his own and teaches literature classes online, explaining to his students, who can’t see him, that the camera on his computer is broken. This is untrue. Charlie doesn’t want to be seen, because his mind, however nimble, is housed in a body so gravely obese—the actor is robed in prosthetic fat—that a simple trip to the bathroom becomes an odyssey. Only when he eats does Charlie move fast, rootling through a drawer in search of chocolate bars, as busy as a jewel thief, or ripping slices from a pizza and hurrying them into his pie hole.

“The Whale” is directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter, who has adapted his play of the same name. Most of the action is set in two or three rooms, and Aronofsky strives to dispel any air of the theatrical; near the start, we are taken on a guided tour of Charlie, circling around him like travellers marvelling at a mountain, and there are times when his bulging features, in closeup, all but congest the screen. No playgoer would be granted such intimate privilege. What stymies the film, though, is not so much the confined space in which it unfolds—Hitchcock made do with less in “Rope” (1948) and “Rear Window” (1955)—as the stagy clunk with which other characters enter and exit that space. I half expected Charlie to exclaim, “Goodness gracious! Who could that be, at this hour?” as we hear a knock on the door.

One visitor is Charlie’s good friend Liz (Hong Chau), who is also a nurse, and makes no bones about the fate of his flesh. Who else would take his blood pressure, announce that he will soon die of heart failure, and bring him a sub to gorge on? Then, we have a young missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who drops in at random, asks Charlie, “Are you aware of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?,” and winds up smoking weed. More challenging is the arrival of Charlie’s daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and later of his ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). Both were estranged from him for years, after he fell in love with a man, but they now show up and embroil Charlie in highly wrought conversation. “You’re disgusting,” Ellie tells him, but he offers to help her with an essay for school, and her anger slowly melts. Could it be that Charlie, alone in his vastness, is valued after all?

“The Whale” is laughably earnest, larded with melodrama, and designed to shut down the long-standing association of human bulk with high spirits. Forget the tumid wit of Falstaff—“that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts,” as Prince Hal calls him—or the sinister bonhomie of Sydney Greenstreet. The film presents us with obesity as tragedy, and as a preventable scourge inflicted on the hero by a hostile and traumatizing world. (The villain, needless to say, is evangelical Christianity.) 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. Returning to the spotlight, he continues to radiate an essential sweetness of nature. His line readings have lost none of their soft quizzicality, and he even ventures a giggle; as Charlie, so often does he apologize that I began to suspect him of being secretly British. Inside the whale is a still small voice of calm.

How does the story of Pinocchio begin? For Carlo Collodi, whose tales of the wooden child were published as a book in 1883, everything kicked off with violence—with a log moaning in fear at being struck by carpenter’s tools, and with two old men fighting over it. Walt Disney, in 1940, plumped for coziness: the carolling cricket, and the mock-alpine fantasy of Geppetto’s shop, its peace broken only by ticking clocks. In the latest retelling, officially titled “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” the tone of choice is pathos. We first meet Geppetto as he mourns a real boy: his son, Carlo, whom he cherished and lost. Pinocchio, in other words, fashioned in a drunken fit, is a replacement .

It’s a hell of a suggestion, and it accounts for the emotional thrust of what ensues. This Pinocchio will behave, throughout his exploits, as if he had plenty to prove and nothing much to lose, like someone who knows he was merely half wanted to start with. His basic locomotion is a kick-and-hop, and that reckless onward rush is an ideal match for the animation that drives the film along. The technique is that of stop-motion, and the effect is far smoother than it was in the old Ray Harryhausen epics—though the jerkiness of the stop-motion skeletons, in “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), made them more spooky, not less—but there remains a welcome smack of the homemade, gnarly and sticklike. This is the kind of movie that Geppetto would create in his dreams.

Parts of the narrative will seem familiar, especially to anyone weaned on Disney. Once again, Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) is lured away from Geppetto (David Bradley) and recruited into the circus by a vulpine rogue (Christoph Waltz). There is still a cricket in the offing, but his name is Sebastian (Ewan McGregor), not Jiminy, and there’s a cruel farce in the way he keeps getting knocked about and smashed. This remorselessness, and the characters’ ability to rise again after meeting the blows of fate, reach a very strange apogee in Pinocchio’s regular deaths. Time after time, he finds himself in a darkling underworld, where rabbits act as pallbearers, and where a glowing blue sphinx (Tilda Swinton), tricked out with buffalo horns and a lashing tail, lectures him on eternity and grief. Whereupon the boy bounces back to life: a rubber soul within a frame of wood.

How to respond to this? Well, readers of Collodi will warm to the blend of fatalism and hope—“When the dead cry, it means they’re on the way to recovering,” as a crow says in the book. And parents will ask themselves if it was quite such a good idea to drag their youngest offspring to the new movie, and what the chances will be, come evening, of getting them to sleep. (It’s certainly more of a nightmare than “Nightmare Alley,” del Toro’s previous work, released last year.) Oh, and be warned: the film takes place during the upsurge of Fascism, and provides a withering cameo for Mussolini, who is taunted by Pinocchio with poop jokes. So, if you are taking the kids, you’ll obviously need to fill them in on twentieth-century Italian political history while you’re lining up for Cherry Vanilla Cokes. No pressure.

To be honest, del Toro has thrown too much into the mix. For no compelling reason, for instance, and to unresounding effect, the movie also happens to be a musical. Imaginative overflow, however, is always more appealing than a dearth, and though the rounded beauty of Disney’s draftsmanship—remember the cathedral-like cavern of the whale’s interior—can never be erased, the angularity of this latest attempt has a piercing punch of its own. Nowhere more so than when Pinocchio, standing in the nave of a church, stares up at a Crucifixion. Like him, it has been carved by Geppetto, and, in honor of that affinity, Pinocchio suddenly cricks and skews himself to mimic the posture of Jesus in his agony. It’s an astonishing moment, undoubtedly blasphemous, yet touched with more wonder than derision. Suffer little children, even the ones made of pine.

Precisely how much Netflix paid, last year, to acquire the Roald Dahl estate is unconfirmed. Low estimates murmur of six hundred million dollars. In the wake of that transaction comes “Matilda the Musical”—a new movie, directed by Matthew Warchus, jammed with larky songs by Tim Minchin, and based on the show that was based on a novel by Dahl. And how deliciously uncomfortable it is, may I say, to observe Mrs. Wormwood (Andrea Riseborough), the heroine’s mother, testifying to her tackiness by waving wads of cash and crying, “Money! Money!” Ugh. Horrible stuff.

If Geppetto was alarmed by the advent of Pinocchio, Mrs. Wormwood and her husband (Stephen Graham) are appalled by their daughter’s birth. Nobody wished for her upon a star. As a young girl (Alisha Weir), she is loathed by her parents, not least for her literacy; following Dahl’s cue, the film is an ode to the bliss of reading (“like a holiday in your head,” Matilda says), which unchains you and renders you dangerous to tyrants. Hitherto self-educated, Matilda goes to school at Crunchem Hall, where she stands out as a freethinker, to the delight of her teacher, Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch), and the thunderous annoyance of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull (Emma Thompson). A former hammer thrower, Miss Trunchbull now contents herself with tossing her pupils into an adjacent field.

Like “Pinocchio,” the saga of Matilda goes where “The Whale” fears to tread, into the murky and Dickensian comedy of abuse. Miss Trunchbull is descended from other principals whose names smell of torture, like Thomas Gradgrind, in “Hard Times,” or Wackford Squeers, in “Nicholas Nickleby”—the first book that Matilda mentions, in the film, when asked what she’s been reading of late. Of all the beneficiaries of Dickens, none have been more influential than Disney and Dahl. Both deal in the heartfelt popular grotesque; turpitude spawns moral and physical gargoyles, whom the virtuous (preferably not simpering but impish, like Matilda) must learn to trounce. It seems fitting, then, that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. Confidently led by Weir, they swarm the screen. Picking up where the urchins of “Oliver!” (1968) left off, they hymn their climactic liberation with an anthem that binds the messy to the insurgent, glorying in the most Dahlian of all words: “We’re Revolting!” ♦

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Movie Reviews

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"The Whale" is an abhorrent film, but it also features excellent performances.

It gawks at the grotesquerie of its central figure beneath the guise of sentimentality, but it also offers sharp exchanges between its characters that ring with bracing honesty.

It's the kind of film you should probably see if only to have an informed, thoughtful discussion about it, but it's also one you probably won't want to watch.

This aligns it with Darren Aronofsky's movies in general, which can often be a challenging sit. The director is notorious for putting his actors (and his audiences) through the wringer, whether it's Jennifer Connolly's drug addict in " Requiem for a Dream ," Mickey Rourke's aging athlete in " The Wrestler ," Natalie Portman's obsessed ballerina in " Black Swan ," or Jennifer Lawrence's besieged wife in "mother!" (For the record, I'm a fan of Aronofsky's work in general.)

But the difference between those films and "The Whale" is their intent, whether it's the splendor of their artistry or the thrill of their provocation. There's a verve to those movies, an unpredictability, an undeniable daring, and a virtuoso style. They feature images you've likely never seen before or since, but they'll undoubtedly stay with you afterward.

"The Whale" may initially feel gentler, but its main point seems to be sticking the camera in front of Brendan Fraser , encased in a fat suit that makes him appear to weigh 600 pounds, and asking us to wallow in his deterioration. In theory, we are meant to pity him or at least find sympathy for his physical and psychological plight by the film's conclusion. But in reality, the overall vibe is one of morbid fascination for this mountain of a man. Here he is, knocking over an end table as he struggles to get up from the couch; there he is, cramming candy bars in his mouth as he Googles "congestive heart failure." We can tsk-tsk all we like between our mouthfuls of popcorn and Junior Mints while watching Fraser's Charlie gobble greasy fried chicken straight from the bucket or inhale a giant meatball sub with such alacrity that he nearly chokes to death. The message "The Whale" sends us home with seems to be: Thank God that's not us.

In working from Samuel D. Hunter's script, based on Hunter's stage play, Aronofsky doesn't appear to be as interested in understanding these impulses and indulgences as much as pointing and staring at them. His depiction of Charlie's isolation within his squalid Idaho apartment includes a scene of him masturbating to gay porn with such gusto that he almost has a heart attack, a moment made of equal parts shock value and shame. But then, in a jarring shift, the tone eventually turns maudlin with Charlie's increasing martyrdom.

Within the extremes of this approach, Fraser brings more warmth and humanity to the role than he's afforded on the page. We hear his voice first; Charlie is a college writing professor who teaches his students online from behind the safety of a black square. And it's such a welcoming and resonant sound, full of decency and humor. Fraser's been away for a while, but his contradictions have always made him an engaging screen presence—the contrast of his imposing physique and playful spirit. He does so much with his eyes here to give us a glimpse into Charlie's sweet but tortured soul, and the subtlety he's able to convey goes a long way toward making "The Whale" tolerable.

But he's also saddled with a screenplay that spells out every emotion in ways that are so clunky as to be groan-inducing. At Charlie's most desperate, panicky moments, he soothes himself by reading or reciting a student's beloved essay on Moby Dick , which—in part—gives the film its title and will take on increasing significance. He describes the elusive white whale of Herman Melville's novel as he stands up, shirtless, and lumbers across the living room, down the hall, and toward the bedroom with a walker. At this moment, you're meant to marvel at the elaborate makeup and prosthetic work on display; you're more likely to roll your eyes at the writing.

"He thinks his life will be better if he can just kill this whale, but in reality, it won't help him at all," he intones in a painfully obvious bit of symbolism. "This book made me think about my own life," he adds as if we couldn't figure that out for ourselves.

A few visitors interrupt the loneliness of his days, chiefly Hong Chau as his nurse and longtime friend, Liz. She's deeply caring but also no-nonsense, providing a crucial spark to these otherwise dour proceedings. Aronofsky's longtime cinematographer, the brilliant Matthew Libatique , has lit Charlie's apartment in such a relentlessly dark and dim fashion to signify his sorrow that it's oppressive. Once you realize the entirety of the film will take place within these cramped confines, it sends a shiver of dread. And the choice to tell this story in the boxy, 1.33 aspect ratio further heightens its sense of dour claustrophobia.

But then "Stranger Things" star Sadie Sink arrives as Charlie's rebellious, estranged daughter, Ellie; her mom was married to Charlie before he came out as a gay man. While their first meeting in many years is laden with exposition about the pain and awkwardness of their time apart, the two eventually settle into an interesting, prickly rapport. Sink brings immediacy and accessibility to the role of the sullen but bright teenager, and her presence, like Chau's, improves "The Whale" considerably. Her casting is also spot-on in her resemblance to Fraser, especially in her expressive eyes.

The arrival of yet another visitor—an earnest, insistent church missionary played by Ty Simpkins —feels like a total contrivance, however. Allowing him inside the apartment repeatedly makes zero sense, even within the context that Charlie believes he's dying and wants to make amends. He even says to this sweet young man: "I'm not interested in being saved." And yet, the exchanges between Sink and Simpkins provide some much-needed life and emotional truth. The subplot about their unlikely friendship feels like something from a totally different movie and a much more interesting one.

Instead, Aronofsky insists on veering between cruelty and melodrama, with Fraser stuck in the middle, a curiosity on display.

Now playing in theaters. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Whale (2022)

Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content.

117 minutes

Brendan Fraser as Charlie

Sadie Sink as Ellie

Hong Chau as Liz

Ty Simpkins as Thomas

Samantha Morton as Mary

Sathya Sridharan as Dan

• Darren Aronofsky

Writer (based on the play by)

• Samuel D. Hunter

Cinematographer

• Matthew Libatique
• Andrew Weisblum
• Rob Simonsen

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Review: Does Brendan Fraser give a great performance in ‘The Whale’? It’s complicated.

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When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? It sees a man named Charlie who weighs 600 pounds and is slowly expiring from congestive heart failure in a drab Idaho apartment. It also sees a familiar Hollywood face attached to a most unfamiliar body, enacting the kind of dramatic, prosthetically enabled transformation the movie industry likes to slobber over.

You might find these two images to be of a piece — an intuitive fusion of performer and role that reaches for, and sometimes achieves, a state of transcendent emotion. Or you may find them grotesquely at odds: the character whose every groan, wheeze and choking fit means to inspire both empathy and revulsion, and the actor whose sweaty dramatic exertions are calculated to elicit praise and applause.

Let’s render that praise where it’s due. There is more to Fraser’s performance than his exertions, just as there is more to Charlie than the corporeal shock value that the movie frontloads him with: The opening scenes find him frenziedly masturbating to gay pornography on his couch, then doubling over with searing chest pains. It’s a lot for an actor to come down from, but in a grueling chamber piece that tends to wield a dramaturgical cudgel, Fraser attempts, and mostly achieves, a symphony of surprising grace notes. He shows us Charlie’s suffering, but also his sweetness; his grief, but also his good humor.

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He laughs easily, though also with great difficulty. He can mope and rant, but caught at the right moment, he’s an out-and-out charmer, a patient listener, a good storyteller. He teaches an online college writing class, hiding his obese frame from his students (his webcam’s broken, he tells them), but giving full voice to his love for words, his keen understanding of the pleasures and potential manipulations of language. His favorite piece of writing is an essay on Moby-Dick — the actual whale of the title — that he often reads or demands that someone read to him, a device whose ludicrous backstory Fraser just about makes convincing. And after a while, as doors slam, tension mounts and Rob Simonsen’s score broods and surges, you might feel a curious tingle of recognition. Charlie, after all, is a character in a Darren Aronofsky movie, which means he’s destined for a crucible of suffering that, however emotional and spiritual in nature, exacts its most grievous torments in the flesh.

That’s not to suggest that he is kin to the tortured performers of “The Wrestler” and “Black Swan,” who pushed their athleticism to brutish extremes, or the strung-out kids from “Requiem for a Dream,” even if Charlie knows the pain of a different kind of addiction. The differences extend beyond the fact that Charlie is mostly immobilized, only occasionally rising from his couch to stumble, with a walker, toward the fridge or the bathroom. (At times the camera, wielded by Aronofsky’s regular collaborator Matthew Libatique, almost seems to mock Charlie, moving around him with an ease and agility that he cannot muster.) There’s also the fact that, in contrast with most Aronofsky characters, Charlie is born of another writer’s imagination: Like more than a few studies in confinement, “The Whale” is based on a play, this one written and adapted for the screen by Samuel D. Hunter.

But while we may be confined with Charlie, we are not alone with him. “The Whale,” straining to both honor and break free of its source material, unfolds over a few consecutive days, during which Charlie receives a series of visitors. Their regular appearances at once modulate the drama and expose its artificiality, none more obviously than Thomas (Ty Simpkins), an earnest young Christian missionary who turns up at Charlie’s door at a seemingly opportune moment. He’s there to save this man’s soul, and also to facilitate a load of exposition concerning Charlie’s late partner, Alan, whose untimely death hastened his own downward spiral. Thomas is also there to annoy Charlie’s tough-loving best friend, Liz (a wonderful Hong Chau), a nurse who stops by daily to bring him food, check his vitals and nag him to take better care of himself. She knows that Charlie doesn’t need religion; he needs to go to the hospital.

But Charlie refuses, citing a lack of health insurance and the general hopelessness of his cause. Which doesn’t mean he has nothing to live for, judging by his concerted recent renewal of ties with his 17-year-old daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink). Almost nine years ago, Charlie abandoned Ellie and her mother, Mary (a briefly seen Samantha Morton), to be with Alan. The teenager who now sits before him is more than a resentful child; she’s the personification of spite, vindictive and verbally abusive. Sink’s emotional ferocity is impressive, but Ellie, as written, amounts to one angry note struck with relentless, ultimately misapplied force. As a character, she’s about as subtle as the ultra-dim lighting — not just realistically dim but fastidiously, oppressively dim — that suffuses Charlie’s apartment, an all-too-literal embodiment of his inner darkness.

“You’d be disgusting even if you weren’t this fat,” Ellie snarls at the man she refuses to acknowledge as her father. And her ugly words find a painful echo in the question that Charlie at one point asks Thomas: “Do you find me disgusting?” It’s a question the camera seems to foist in turn upon the viewer, most emphatically when it shows us Charlie, in a miserable fury, devouring and vomiting up an entire pizza. It’s unsurprisingly unpleasant to watch, not least because Aronofsky seems to be shoving the camera in Charlie’s face with one hand while wagging his finger at us with the other. His question might prompt your own: Is this raw, unvarnished scrutiny of a difficult subject tilting into exaggeration, even exploitation? If we’re disgusted by what Aronofsky shows us, is that our fault or his?

Or is it Fraser’s? I’m reluctant to suggest it, and not just because I’m as fond as anyone of an appealing, long-underappreciated actor returning to prominence, after several years’ absence, in the industry that made, broke and allegedly abused him . But I’m also reluctant to fall into the default critical pattern of lauding an actor for what works about a movie or a performance and blaming a filmmaker for everything that doesn’t, especially since it just feels a little too easy. Movie performances are often more collaborative achievements than we (or actors themselves) care to admit, and a performance as reliant on external wizardry as Fraser’s — on the strange, seamless alchemy that welds an actor’s expressive tools to an array of digital and prosthetic tricks — doesn’t come into being without a director’s firm hand at the wheel. What’s good and bad about the performance is surely the responsibility of actor and director both.

The movie’s crudest moments, the ones in which Charlie’s body is treated as not just a matter-of-fact physical reality but a dare-you-to-look-away spectacle, have already raised legitimate questions and accusations of fatphobia — a debate that tends to arise whenever a Hollywood actor packs on some artificial pounds. Often this kind of transformation is done for comically villainous effect, whether it’s Colin Farrell’s Penguin in “The Batman” or Emma Thompson’s imposingly evil Miss Trunchbull in “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical.” But do these prosthetic encumbrances feel more or less cheap when applied to someone like Charlie, who isn’t a violent caricature but a sympathetically drawn human being? Is the grindingly self-conscious realism of a movie like “The Whale” a more empathetic gesture or a crueler, uglier one?

To return to the question at the outset: When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? I think it sees a good actor giving a well-meaning, unevenly directed and often touching performance in a movie that strives to wrest something raw and truthful from a story that’s all bald contrivances, technological as well as melodramatic. But if “The Whale” is a weird conflation of the unflinchingly honest and the unbearably phony, Charlie’s own sincerity is undeniable: “Tell me the truth,” he says and reiterates on multiple occasions, whether he’s urging his students to write from the gut or engaging Thomas in a genial theological debate. As he demonstrated in his recent “Noah” and “mother!,” Aronofsky is a skeptic who’s more willing than most to meet God halfway.

And God, in this movie, surely has a lot to answer for: hypocrisy, homophobia, depression and suicidal ideation, for starters. But if we can think of God as synonymous with goodness, and I think we can, then he also seems to turn up more often than expected — not just when Thomas comes thumping at the door with a Bible in hand, but also whenever Liz returns. Hong, not for the first time proving herself a movie’s secret weapon, gives perhaps “The Whale’s” finest, least forced performance. Whether she’s scolding Charlie, passing him a meatball sub or snuggling next to him on the couch, Liz lays bare her uncertainty: Should she be trying to save her friend or making his last days as joyous as she can? It’s OK that she doesn’t know. It’s enough that she sees him and loves him — and more fully, ultimately, than the movie around him can manage.

‘The Whale’

Rated: R, for language, some drug use and sexual content Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 9 at AMC Burbank 16; AMC Burbank Town Center 6; AMC the Grove 14, Los Angeles; AMC Century City 15

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Brendan Fraser Deserves an Oscar for ‘The Whale.’ He Also Deserves a Better Movie

• By David Fear

Charlie is 600 lbs. This is the first thing you notice about him; this is the first thing you are meant to notice about him. He’s always been a big guy, he says, but he “let it get out of control.” On the Zooms in which Charlie teaches online English courses — he’s a professor — his voice is always emanating from a solid square of black, the video permanently disabled, the word “Instructor” the only visual his students associate with him.

But when we first see Charlie in The Whale , director Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s award-winning 2012 play, we get to observe all of him: a bulk of a man, his body bloated and swollen, sitting deep in the corner of his couch, masturbating furiously to online porn. Severe chest pains interrupt his endeavor. Only the arrival of a random stranger, who happens to find the apartment door unlocked, saves his life.

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Fraser is a dream collaborator in that respect, and yet The Whale seems hellbent on making you view Charlie as a grotesque. There’s something monstrous about the way it keeps framing him, how it seems to almost fetishize every roll of his flesh and put the sound of his greasy chomping on fried chicken so high in the sound mix. What this man is experiencing — a horrible sense of shame that’s metastasized into self-destruction — is not pretty. But the movie seems to revel a little too enthusiastically in its own ugliness. That doom-laden score by Rob Simonsen keeps rubbing the despair even deeper into your face. For every sunbeam of humanity Fraser lets shine through this soul, the film summons a half-dozen dark clouds to try and dampen it.

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‘The Whale’ Review: Brendan Fraser Is Towering in a Lesser Darren Aronofsky

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. A24 releases the film in theaters on Friday, December 9.

There are two things to be a little worried about and one thing to be extremely excited about when coming into “ The Whale .”

The first element of concern is director Darren Aronofsky, who admittedly has made exceptional films like “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi” and gotten career-defining performances out of his leads in “Black Swan” and “The Wrestler.” But his last two films, “Noah” and “mother!,” succumbed to all his worst instincts, creating bloated self-indulgent nonsense that was actively painful to sit through.

In “The Whale,” also slightly worrying is the use of “fat suits,” which contemporary audiences are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with. Much of the use of these so-called fat suits has been to create fat-phobic jokes, particularly by turning thin movie stars like Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, and Courteney Cox into walking punchlines. Even when the usage itself is fat-phobic, in the case of Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp in “American Crime Story,” there’s also the consideration that heavier actors who often struggle to get roles aren’t getting the opportunity to play fat parts.

However, most of those coming to “The Whale” may brim with goodwill because of Brendan Fraser. Having suffered well-documented injury and abuse from the film industry, Fraser retreated from Hollywood, leaving behind heartbroken Gen X-ers and millennials who adored him in a wide range of roles, from delightful himbos to tragic underdogs and wise-cracking action heroes. After a few tentative steps back into the spotlight in small roles and television appearances, the comeback was further solidified when he was cast in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Steven Soderbergh’s “No Sudden Move.” Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” makes it official: The Brendanaissance is on!

Fraser gives a towering performance, in every sense of the word, as Charlie, a 600-pound man who teaches writing courses online and never leaves his apartment. Despite the best efforts of his nurse best friend Liz (Hong Chau), Charlie refuses to go to the hospital, even though he is displaying signs of congestive heart failure and has a blood pressure of 238/134. Charlie has never recovered since the death of Alan, the “love of his life,” a few years prior and has spent the time since on his sofa, slowly eating himself to death. This final week almost operates like an introvert’s companion piece to “Leaving Las Vegas,” a similar journey in self-destruction, but here with a quiet commitment to loneliness. The action of “The Whale,” true to the play it’s based on, never leaves Charlie’s small apartment.

The fat suit is what it is. There are plenty of valid reasons to think this film has unacceptably fat-phobic undertones and positions, particularly a scene where it seems to suggest a person could overdose on mayonnaise like it’s uncut heroin. And many could be triggered by a central fat character being openly called “disgusting” throughout. But in terms of practical effects, it’s hard to not be impressed by the prosthetics, particularly around Fraser’s face, as they do appear reasonably realistic. He’s able to give a funny and devastating performance seemingly without hindrance.

Charlie knows that he’s only got a few more days, so he decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he left behind when he fell in love with Alan eight years ago. She’s now 16 and flunking high school. The pair’s only contact has been through child-support payment and sporadic updates via her mother. Ellie is a nightmarish caricature of a teenage girl. Sink unwisely keeps her performance at a 10 in every moment, which is cumulatively grating. Respite comes when her mother, played by the always-excellent Samantha Morton, comes to see Charlie about their troubled daughter landing the film’s biggest laugh in a well-timed “Charlie! She’s evil!”

Despite the hilarity of that cutting assessment, “The Whale” actually works best at its least cruel. When Fraser gets to show off Charlie’s wit in a back-and-forth with a persistent and hypocrite missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins), gently smiling as he reassures him, “I’ve read the Bible. I thought it was devastating.” Or indeed when Liz jokingly threatens to stab him, and he gives her a hug and tenderly makes her laugh by whispering, “What’s that gonna do? My internal organs are two feet in at least.” When his confrontation with Morton is so filled with mutual compassion, it’s hard to believe that this is from the same film that framed Charlie slovenly eating a chicken wing with such brazen disgust.

Without Brendan Fraser’s innate charm and ability to project gentle sadness through the slightest flicker of his huge blue eyes, “The Whale” wouldn’t have that much else going for it. Faultless performances from Morton and Chau illuminate complicated relationships with Charlie, a man at once lovable, frustrating, and dishonest.

Aronofsky’s direction is cautious but brings a cinematic flair, which plays into Charlie’s claustrophobic existence rather than just feeling burdened by the story’s origin on the stage (where it is confined to a single set). Samuel D. Hunter’s script has elements to recommend it. The “Moby Dick” allusions, which seem onerous in the film’s beginning, build to something moving and, in the film’s final moments, even profound.

For Fraser, “The Whale” is a confident leap forward into the movie-star status that he rightfully deserves. For the normally more muted Venice audience who typically scramble for the exit the moment the film ends, just the sight of Fraser’s name at the end credits made the crowd turn back to the screen to cheer and applaud the actor’s triumphant return. If that rapturous applause carries on throughout awards season, that may prove the most wonderful and moving moment of this whale’s journey.

“The Whale” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. A24 will release it in theatres on Friday, December 9.

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The Whale review: Brendan Fraser shines in a overwrought, underbaked drama

The actor is better than director Darren Aronfosky's stagey adaptation.

In every awards season, there are certain movies whose heat index seems to rise almost solely because of a central performance: actors so indelible in the part they transcend the flaws and missteps of the film formed around them. (Renée Zellweger in Judy was one a few years ago, or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody ; both won Oscars.) Brendan Fraser 's astonishing turn in The Whale often feels like that to the n th degree: a tender, modest, and momentously human piece of work plonked in the midst of a drama so masochistically stilted and stagey it often feels less like a movie than an endurance test, or even worse, a parody.

The staginess, to be fair, is at least partly because it was in fact a play, one that director Darren Aronofsky spent the last decade trying to bring to the screen (the playwright, Samuel D. Hunter, also penned the adaptation). Why the man who helmed Black Swan , The Wrestler , and Requiem for a Dream would find a bleak psychological drama about deeply broken people appealing is not a mystery; what he found irresistible here though, is less easy to see. Fraser's Charlie, in the opening scene, is just a voice inside a black Zoom screen. That's because he teaches remotely at an online college, but his excuse of a broken laptop camera is a lie: The truth is he's morbidly obese, so large that he can't leave his shabby apartment or even stand up without a walker. He can just about manage to bathe and feed himself, but other activities (masturbation, laughing) leave him too clammy and winded to breathe.

There's a gadget for nearly every physical thing he can't do on his own — handles and pulleys in the shower, a special seat in the bathroom, even a little clawed picker-upper for whatever he might drop on the floor. And a friend named Liz ( Watchmen 's Hong Chau ) comes faithfully every day to check his vitals and bring him groceries. Liz is also a nurse, and she keeps telling him plainly that he's dying. But she's often interrupted by a knock at the door: First an earnest young missionary (Ty Simpkins) named Thomas hoping to spread the good word, and later, Ellie ( Stranger Things ' Sadie Sink), his estranged teenage daughter whose only words for him, primarily, are sneered f-bombs. Ellie, hissing and venomous, hates him because he left her mother ( Samantha Morton ) years ago for another man, but mainly she hates everything.

Aside from a single brief flashback, the action, such as it is, is confined entirely to Charlie's drab apartment and the small roundelay of guests who steadily come through to drop chunks of story exposition or settle scores. Fraser — encased in elaborate prosthetics that Aronfosky revels in shooting like a Caravaggio, all shadows and moody, milky light — welcomes them, down to the missionary kid. Charlie knows that he's killing himself and he knows why, but there's hardly any complaint or self-pity; instead he's emotionally generous almost to a fault, a man still eager to spread his love of Walt Whitman and Moby Dick and only connect, even if his efforts are met with mockery or disgust.

He and Chau, who brings a bright acidity and affection to Liz, often seem to be drawing from a different well than their castmates. But all the actors are left to mine their own layers in characters who have only the scantest backstories and broad traits: Hellish Teenager, Troubled Soul, Man Too Big to Live. Those dynamics may have played out better on stage, where a certain kind of bold underlining serves a live audience. Here it often feels clumsy and maddeningly inconsistent, stranding Fraser in a melodrama undeserving of his lovely, unshowy performance. Whatever he wins for The Whale — and early prizes have already come — he deserves. The rest is just chum. Grade: C

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The Whale Reviews

Fraser keeps Charlie’s fully formed humanity at the forefront of The Whale, despite various filmmaking decisions that could flatten his character into a saccharine pity case.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2024

It’s Aronofsky’s most blunt and uninspired work yet— an indulgent and strident slice of misery porn that rides a wave of unearned emotion to its underwhelming conclusion.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

If I were to describe this film in one word, it would be melancholy; it is practically flawless, at least in my opinion, and conveys the notion that people are inherently kind...

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

If you didn’t know that The Whale was based on a play, you’d work it out pretty quickly... The immediate distance that this initially creates soon evaporates, however, in no small part thanks to Fraser’s all-in performance.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2023

If it’s as sincere as it purports to be, this is one of the worst movies of recent years, and if it’s not — which is almost preferable — then it’s a landmark exercise in trolling.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2023

A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Earns its place in the "most tearful films of the year" list as it moves slowly yet efficiently towards its overwhelmingly emotional ending, especially elevated by the most subtly powerful & irrefutably moving performance of Brendan Fraser's career.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

A riveting character study of one broken man that transcends compassion, love, pain/regret. A masterpiece Sadie Sink/Hong Chau should be nominated & Brendan Fraser might have turned in one of the best performances of all time

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

I just wished that the film overall was as strong as Brendan Fraser’s acting comeback.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 22, 2023

Charlie [is] played brilliantly by Brendan Fraser...

Full Review | Jun 2, 2023

It has a more or less decent preamble that is propelled by an organic performance from Brendan Fraser on his return, but its psychological marrow is locked into a basic routine of trivial conversations and a lack of substance. [Full reveiw in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Apr 19, 2023

A strangely hopeful story that manages to stay on the surface even as it seems to sink into mediocrity. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 29, 2023

One of the most deplorable elements of The Whale is its near celebration of defeat and resignation. The decision by Charlie to eat himself to death is treated as a meaningful act of self-sacrifice. Why would this possibly be so?

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

All the weight of the story (metaphorically and literally) is carried by its tragic protagonist — the ailing Charlie, whom Brendan Fraser portrays with such depth, nuance, and wit. Nothing in the film's text matches this commitment, and that's a problem.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Two words - Brendan Fraser. He was born to play Charlie and his Oscar award is extremely well deserved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Chamber settings, by their nature, let the acting echo out and Fraser’s central performance speaks volumes about his character’s history.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Though The Whale has captured the interest of the public, I can’t say that it’s earned. I hated this movie, but not for the reasons you may think.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Aronofsky’s film of this joyless play was a hit, so I guess it touched something in the moviegoing public. It had to use a bodega claw to do it because it couldn’t get off the couch, but it touched them.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Aronofsky uses The Whale for easy, unsightly, virtue-signaling.

Full Review | Mar 15, 2023

At times, it feels like they had a list of difficult themes they wanted to include, which makes for an uneven experience. But we also can't deny the power of Fraser's performance, which some would argue is superior to the film. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 15, 2023

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘The Whale’: Brendan Fraser is great, the movie not so much

The actor’s smart, humane and vulnerable central performance is weighed down by Darren Aronofsky’s mawkish adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play

It’s impossible — and, frankly, surpassingly uncharitable — not to root for Brendan Fraser, one of Hollywood’s most likable actors, whose comeback has been one of the most heartening movie stories of 2022. But admiring Fraser’s performance as a man paralyzed by grief and self-loathing in “The Whale” doesn’t necessarily mean liking the movie he’s in. Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play is a murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

Brendan Fraser’s comeback says less about him than it says about us

Fraser plays Charlie, an online writing teacher who as “The Whale” opens is meeting with his class on Zoom; unlike his students, he’s a black box — in more ways than one. A 600-pound recluse, Charlie has been rendered virtually immobilized by shame, itself the result of numbing the losses of his life in trancelike binge-eating sessions. Played by Fraser with the aid of prosthetics and a 300-pound “fat suit,” Charlie is obsessed with “Moby-Dick” — a recurring motif of the movie centers on a student’s paper about the novel that he especially admires — but is he the elusive leviathan or Captain Ahab, set upon vanquishing his own delusions? It’s a tantalizing thematic conundrum, made more promising when Charlie’s nurse Liz (Hong Chau) pays a visit. She and a motley group of misfits and wanderers will fetch up at Charlie’s cramped apartment over the next few days, like so many crew members of the Pequod. (Aronofsky has filmed “The Whale” with squared-off framing, making the walls seem like they’re constantly closing in.)

At first glance, “The Whale” looks like it’s right up Aronofsky’s alley as a character study on par with his 2008 drama “The Wrestler,” not to mention a queasily candid portrait of addiction reminiscent of 2000’s “ Requiem for a Dream .” This requiem for a heavyweight doesn’t reach those heights of realism or depths of compassion, however, as Charlie veers from being a thoroughly sympathetic protagonist to an object of voyeuristic pity and almost zoolike fascination.

In the 1995 film “Leaving Las Vegas,” Nicolas Cage played a man determined to drink himself to death. Here, Charlie’s on the same course, except that he’s drowning his existential sorrows in buckets of fried chicken, candy bars, pizza and whipped cream. The eating scenes in “The Whale” are staged with horrified detail, the sound design tuned to accentuate every gloppy slurp. Aronofsky and Hunter leave little to the imagination, emphasizing at every graphic turn that, for Charlie, food isn’t the stuff of life-giving nourishment, but a vector for compulsion and self-annihilation.

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It’s a pathetic form of pageantry that, at its worst, feels shamefully exploitative, even as Fraser imbues Charlie with the tenderness and dignity the best actors know they owe their characters. His interactions with Chau, as the spiky but sincerely loving Liz, crackle with the kind of deadpan gallows humor that comes from genuine intimacy. But as more outsiders enter Charlie’s world, the dialogue becomes increasingly strident and talky. A pivotal moment with a young woman played by Sadie Sink plays at an insufferably harsh and hysterical pitch; the too-pat dialogue, combined with an orgiastic rock-bottom scene, finally undercuts whatever authentic feeling Fraser succeeded in building up, a sense of falsity that culminates in a literalistic misfire of a final image.

Like “ The Banshees of Inisherin ,” in which playwright Martin McDonagh goes to similar extremes to make what turn out to be relatively unremarkable points about existential misery, radical acceptance and human connection, it could be that “The Whale” is simply too stagy a premise to work on film. Aronofsky’s facility with both gritty realism and visionary fever dreams can’t elevate material that wants to bear witness to suffering but reflexively reverts to manipulative spectacle. “The Whale” might start out being about a man struggling to break free of his corporeal and spiritual bonds. But it’s Fraser’s smart, humane, vulnerable performance that too often seems trapped, in this case by a film whose mawkishness so oppressively weighs him down.

R. At area theaters. Contains coarse language, some drug use and sexual material. 117 minutes.

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Venice Review: Brendan Fraser In Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Whale’

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Who would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice ’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky ? His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.

Aronofsky first staked his claim at the festival with The Fountain in 2006, but it was the double whammy of The Wrestler and Black Swan (in 2008 and 2010, respectively) that pretty much established Venice as an Oscar launching pad, just when the festival faced a war on two fronts with Telluride and Toronto. After his spell in the self-indulgent wilderness with Noah and Mother! , however, The Whale suggests the director is very much back as that Oscar bellwether, cutting the line to put a never-better Brendan Fraser at the front of the Best Actor race.

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If you didn’t know that The Whale was based on a play, you’d work it out pretty quickly, not from the staging — everything happens in a dingy sitting room — but because of the arch, mannered dialogue and a schematic framing device that involves an essay about Melville’s Moby-Dick . The immediate distance that this initially creates soon evaporates, however, in no small part thanks to Fraser’s all-in performance, which makes adjectives such as “brave” and “fearless” seem almost meaningless.

He plays Charlie, an online educator who teaches English to students who wonder why his Zoom screen is always blacked out. Charlie claims his webcam isn’t working, but the real reason is that he is ashamed of his body: more than just morbidly obese, he is now at death’s door, reflected in the film’s ominous day-by-day countdown.

Charlie’s best friend is Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who remonstrates with him and indulges him, and their bizarre co-dependent idyll is threatened by two interlopers, one is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a zealous missionary from the end-of-times religious group New Life, the other is Charlie’s teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he abandoned when she was eight years old.

Thomas has his sights set on saving Charlie’s soul, but Ellie couldn’t care less about the old man — until she hears about the many thousands of dollars stashed away for her college funds. To get her hands on it, though, she must first get through high school, so Ellie recruits Charlie to punch up her homework. This, Charlie’s first real chance to bond with his daughter, is kicked to the curb with the arrival of Mary (Samantha Morton), Charlie’s troubled and still wounded ex-wife.

It’s a testament to Fraser’s incredibly soulful portrayal of Charlie that the make-up elements — notably his thinning hair, doughy face and bloated body — become almost invisible once the initial shock of seeing Dudley Do-Right in such terrible shape has passed. But it’s also a mark of Aronofsky’s acuity as director that Charlie never becomes at all freakish or monstrous — that job falls to Ellie, a friendless Facebook bully who is obviously talented but prefers to stew in her own hostility. Ellie takes a particularly cruel interest in Thomas and draws out an unexpected confession from him, but these are by far the weakest scenes in a film that really works best when Fraser is the focus.

While at first glance this might seem a departure for Aronofsky, there are connections at every turn. The twilight hero obviously taps into Wrestler territory, and the religious theme of the righteous path/divine mission echoes elements of 2014’s Noah and, less obviously, The Fountain . Most striking, though, is the correlation with Requiem for a Dream (2000), in the mental disintegration of Ellen Burstyn’s strung-out character Sara: Charlie represents a similar, very literal kind of body horror, trapped by a self-punishing compulsion to eat that becomes more understandable as the film progresses.

Given the industry affection for Florian Zeller’s The Father , a similarly inventive filmed-stage experience, it’s not hard to see The Whale attracting similar awards buzz and not just for Fraser’s lead — there’s the terrific Hong Chau, who can command attention with the mere stubbing of a cigarette, and Samantha Morton, who brings heartbreak to a glorified cameo. Best Picture, too, is well within its sights: a frank and moving depiction of human frailty, but colored by its central character’s perverse or maybe deluded optimism. Suffice to say, there are a lot of interesting questions when the credits roll.

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TORONTO — Brendan Fraser’s comeback role is as unexpected as it gets.

It’s transformative for the actor. Not only because he plays a 600-pound man who can’t leave his small rural Idaho apartment in “The Whale,” which just had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival , but also due to his wonderful tenderness. 

Running time: 117 minutes. Not yet rated. In theaters Dec. 9.

Fraser wasn’t always so sensitive. In the 53-year-old’s prime during the 1990s and aughts, when he starred in “The Mummy” movies, “Monkeybone” and “George of the Jungle,” he had a comedy/action star swagger and an entire power grid’s worth of energy. He sprinted, he screamed, he swung, he slayed The Rock.

But his Charlie in “The Whale,” superbly directed by Darren Aronofsky, is quiet, contemplative and lonely. And intensely moving. Almost couch-bound, he makes a living teaching an online essay writing course with his laptop camera turned off so no one will see his face and body. He tells the pizza delivery guy to leave the box outside the door. He lives in constant shame. Fraser seemingly always has a tear in his eye .

Charlie hid himself away and began gaining weight after the untimely death of his younger partner, Alan. His ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) and daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) want nothing to do with him because he left them for his new man. Now, Charlie is all alone save for a missionary visitor (Ty Simpkins) who pushes the man to find God and a nurse friend named Liz (Hong Chau), who takes care of him and fruitlessly begs the stubborn guy to go to the hospital. She says Charile only has about a week to live.

A lovely old quality that Fraser has not abandoned whatsoever is his sense of childlike wonder. As an adult action star, his characters had the wide eyes of kids making exciting new discoveries. Charlie has that same twinkle when he speaks of his teen daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), who loathes him and whom he desperately tries to reconnect with while he’s still alive. It’s in those kind attempts at a meaningful relationship that the actor does the finest work of his long career.

There is an abundance of reasons why this movie should not work. It’s based on Samuel D. Hunter’s (also the screenwriter) excellent play, and this sort of heightened material meant for the stage often flops onscreen. Another theater-to-film adaptation at TIFF this year, “ Allelujah ,” failed big-time. And, I imagine, some outraged viewers will call Charlie — and Fraser’s casting — exploitative of overweight people. It isn’t. At its core, “The Whale” is about grief and the search for love.

Still, be warned, the experience can be an extremely uncomfortable one. There are tough, visceral scenes to watch — reminiscent of when Natalie Portman’s toenails started to fall off in “Black Swan.” Aronofsky, after all, doesn’t do “Bedazzled.”

However, the director and Fraser take difficult subject matter and work into something profound.

We never leave the small home, but Aronofsky keeps it ever-changing, mysterious, big and cinematic. Not cheap. And while Hunter’s writing is a better fit for the stage (his “A Case For The Existence of God” was the best play of last season), the director thrives on such exaggeration and style. It never comes across as dishonest.

Rob Simonsen’s fog-horn-like score evoking a storm at sea (Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” plays a major part in the movie) also ups the ante.

Fraser, so good, takes what could be a joke, a flat tragedy, or even a lecture about weight and imbues it with gorgeous humanity. His Charlie is a deeply relatable person, who reminds us how significantly a single day can alter the course of our lives. It’s a testament to the storytelling that a character so different from so many moviegoers can make us so powerfully contemplate our own lives. 

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The Whale review – Darren Aronofsky’s latest is a contrived disappointment

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Brendan Fraser’s morbidly obese English teacher in this much anticipated but underwhelming return to movies

D arren Aronofsky’s vapid, hammy and stagey movie, adapted by Samuel D Hunter from his own 2012 play, is the festival’s biggest and most surprising disappointment: the writing clunks; the narrative is contrived and unconvincing and the whole film has a strange pass-agg body language, as if it is handling its own painful subject matter with kid gloves and asking us to do the same. Brendan Fraser is Charlie, an English teacher in charge of an online study course, run via Zoom. He claims to the group that his laptop camera isn’t working, which is why the square on the screen where his face should be is blank. But actually he doesn’t want them to see what he looks like: Charlie is morbidly obese, a giant pool of flesh, hardly able to leave the couch with a walking frame to get to the lavatory, gorging delivery pizzas and fried chicken, with a stash of chocolate bars in the desk drawer. Our first view of Charlie is of him masturbating to gay porn, culminating in a heart attack that almost kills him.

But this isn’t supposed to be ironic black comedy and Charlie isn’t supposed to be greedy or lazy or selfish (although these uncaring talking points are not really aired). He is depressed after the death of his partner, a former student from an adult night-school class for whom he left his wife and young daughter; it was a desertion for which he is still guilt-stricken.

Charlie’s only friend now is his late partner’s sister Liz (Hong Chau), a tough-minded nurse exasperated at his refusal to go to hospital. His fragile, lonely life becomes more complicated still with the arrival at his door of a strange young man, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a Christian evangelist from the church of which Charlie’s partner was a member. His angry, conflicted daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), also appears to want to reconnect.

Alongside it all, there is Charlie’s love of literature, especially Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Charlie is glumly aware that he is the whale, the huge bloated entity that no one wants to hunt down or obsess over or even think about at all. Or perhaps it is that Charlie is hunting the elusive meaning of his own wrecked life, deep in the ocean of loneliness.

Fraser brings a definite gentleness and openness to the role of Charlie, and his performance is good, although of course it is upstaged by the showy latex and the special effects, which are there to elicit a mix of horror and sympathy and awards-season love, like a very serious male version of the “ Fat Monica ” prom video scene in Friends.

There is a too-good-to-be-true sheen to Charlie’s sweet saintliness; his emotional yearning and wounded niceness are underlined by the coercive orchestral score, and this movie’s concept of death is sentimental and even sneakily religiose. But even this isn’t exactly the problem – it is the convoluted plot that surrounds Charlie: the weird and implausible shenanigans around Thomas’s background and Ellie’s unhappiness and bad attitude, all indirectly and clumsily revealed. Charlie believes in Ellie’s essential goodness to the very end, but any supposed ambiguity about her intentions and behaviour is unsatisfying and uninteresting. Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

• Darren Aronofsky
• Drama films
• Venice film festival 2022
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Brendan Fraser is marvellous in Darren Aronofsky’s otherwise overinflated drama The Whale

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Brendan Fraser in a scene from The Whale. Courtesy of Elevation Pictures

• Directed by Darren Aronofsky
• Written by Samuel D. Hunter
• Starring Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau and Sadie Sink
• Classification R; 117 minutes
• Opens in theatres Dec. 21

The other week, Roxane Gay’s New York Times essay on the “cruel spectacle” of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale did the expected and went viral. For those paying even half-careful attention to the press cycle of The Whale , a moment like this felt inevitable. Ever since word came around that the polarizing director of Black Swan and Mother! was making a movie starring Brendan Fraser as a 600-lb. recluse named Charlie who is eating himself to death, a backlash started brewing. In Gay’s piece, the writer takes Aronofsky and company to task for their “gratuitous, self-aggrandizing” fatphobic fiction, centering her criticism on “the disdain the filmmakers” have for Charlie, which she writes is “constant, inescapable.”

It is a strongly written piece, fiery and lucid. It also presents such a backward interpretation of what is depicted on screen that I cannot help but wonder if Gay – and others who have latched onto similar arguments – actually watched The Whale in its entirety. This is not an “inhumane film about a very human being,” but rather the opposite: a highly compassionate look at a man struggling with compulsions, a character study that puts its lead under a spotlight of care and tenderness. Charlie is not treated as a freak or object of ridicule, but rather a person in dire need of help, and understanding. The Whale is not an exercise in gawking or finger-wagging – “as exploitative as any episode of TLC’s My 600-lb Life ” – but an attempt to examine dignity and humanity under pressure.

Gay’s piece, and the roiling online conversations that followed, have been so frustrating to witness that it almost makes me want to praise Aronofsky’s film without reservations – which I cannot do, because, well, The Whale is not all that great a movie. Not because of the arguments that Gay and others have made, but rather because Aronofsky cannot unearth the necessary cinema in this adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play. The Whale is not a cruel spectacle – it is just a dull, repetitive one.

Set almost entirely in Charlie’s dank apartment, The Whale follows the English professor over the course of several days as he teaches his students online (keeping his camera off), fends off the help of his closest friend (Hong Chau), entertains the salvation sermons of a local missionary (Ty Simpkins), and attempts a reunion with his estranged teenage daughter (Sadie Sink).

But with a posturing screenplay by Hunter and a fixed location that feels underused even by its purposefully tiny standards, Aronofsky’s drama is an incredibly, frustratingly stagy thing to witness. Certainly, by staying with the confines of Charlie’s depressing apartment – dimly lit and poorly kept, pizza boxes and other junk-food detritus piling up in corners – the director is conjuring an atmosphere that illustrates Charlie’s own fatalistic sense of being trapped within himself.

But the film never even metaphorically moves around, with its characters merely circling each other over and over, delivering faux-insightful banter about regret and renewal. (That whale of the title? Why it’s both Charlie and a reference to his favourite student essay about Moby Dick .) Meanwhile, the moments of high drama that do infrequently arrive – such as when one character’s backstory reveals itself, or when Charlie’s ex-wife (Samantha Morton) arrives – don’t energize the film so much as they simply prolong it.

Still: The one overwhelmingly positive thing that you’ve heard about The Whale is true: Fraser does a remarkable job . Playing Charlie under layers and layers of next-generation prosthetics – if we’re to get rid of fat suits, as Gay urges in her piece, we should do away with all kinds of makeup and costumery going forward, no? – Fraser not only brings a level of tenderness to the proceedings but genuine excitement and spirit. By channelling heretofore unseen depths of emotional strength, Fraser accomplishes something far more impressive than simply resurrecting his career – he resurrects his own moribund movie, which without him would evaporate.

While Chau and Morton are just as good as their comeback-kid co-star – tough and mad and boiling with grief, the both of them – the rest of the cast are failed by both Hunter’s deadening dialogue and Aronofsky’s static direction, which is seemingly focused solely on Fraser. Simpkins cannot help but annoy in a role that is meant to be at least mildly sympathetic, while Sink turns her petulant teenager into someone impossibly shrill and embarrassing to stomach. It is simply one of the most unpleasant performances I’ve had to witness all year long. Now where are all the essays and think-pieces about that?

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Cruise ship sails into New York City port with 44-foot dead whale across its bow

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NEW YORK (AP) — A cruise ship sailed into a New York City port with a 44-foot (13-meter) dead whale across its bow, marine authorities said.

The whale, identified as an endangered sei whale, was caught on the ship’s bow when it arrived at the Port of Brooklyn on Saturday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries spokesperson Andrea Gomez said.

A spokesperson for MSC Cruises said the whale was on the MSC Meraviglia, which docked at Brooklyn before sailing to ports in New England and Canada.

“We immediately notified the relevant authorities, who are now conducting an examination of the whale,” officials with the cruise line said in a statement.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of any marine life,” the officials said, adding that the Geneva-based MSC Cruises follows all regulations designed to protect whales, such as altering itineraries in certain regions to avoid hitting the animals.

The dead whale was relocated to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and towed to shore there to allow for better access to equipment and to conduct a necropsy, Gomez said.

The necropsy, an autopsy on an animal, was conducted on Tuesday, Gomez said. Samples collected from the whale will help biologists determine whether it was already dead when it was struck by the ship, she said.

Sei whales are typically observed in deeper waters far from the coastline, Gomez said. They are one of the largest whale species and are internationally protected.

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Book Reviews

'whale fall' centers the push-and-pull between dreams and responsibilities.

Kristen Martin

Elizabeth O'Connor's spare and bracing debut novel Whale Fall opens with an isolated Welsh island on a precipice. It is September 1938, and the community's fishermen have begun encountering the Royal Navy out at sea.

When a whale washes ashore, the minister, who shares developments from out-of-date newspapers at mass, suggests that submarine radar could explain its fate. To the elders, the beached whale seems to be an omen, though they're not sure if it portends good or bad. Either way, "it felt as though something was circling us, waiting to land against the shore," O'Connor writes.

We gain entrée to this remote, superstitious world through Manod Llan, Whale Fall 's gimlet-eyed, 18-year-old narrator. Her family is one of 12 left on the tiny fictional island, where livelihood revolves around the roiling sea — men like Manod's father, a lobsterman, do the fishing, and women prepare the catch for sale on the mainland. Each year, some men are lost at sea, and some young people move to the mainland for the promise of a better life.

Manod dreams of such a life. She has newly completed her studies at the island's single-room schoolhouse, where she learned English from reading the Bible and distinguished herself as especially bright. But in her culture, as her mother often lamented before her death, "There's no job for a woman to get except wife." Manod's life is even further circumscribed — with her mother gone, she must raise her 12-year-old sister Llinos and tend her father's house. Images from magazines left behind in the chapel fill her daydreams of the kind of life she could lead on the mainland.

When the whale beaches, Manod's options appear to broaden. A pair of English ethnographers from Oxford University soon arrive, eager to see the whale and to document the island's customs. Edward and Joan barely speak Welsh, so they employ Manod as a translator, giving her newfound power through language and stoking her desire to lead a worldlier life. But she struggles with being an object of their anthropological gaze, with their romantic misrepresentations of her culture, and with what it would mean to leave the island — and Llinos — behind. In bringing us to this world through Manod's eyes, Whale Fall provides a stark reckoning with what it means to be seen from the outside, both as a person and as a people, and a singular, penetrating portrait of a young woman torn between individual yearning and communal responsibilities.

In a note on the text, O'Connor writes that she based her fictional island on her research into "an amalgamation of islands around the British Isles," including Bardsey Island off the coast of the Llŷn Peninsula in Wales, where the long-term population in 2019 was just 11. As she told Publishers Weekly , she was also inspired by her "family connection to people who live with the sea and shore," particularly grandparents who were raised in coastal enclaves in Ireland and Wales and moved to English cities during World War II.

From this solid foundation, O'Connor constructs her setting with precise, atmospheric detail that captures a world slowly being eroded. Damp invades everything from the moss-covered chapel to a romance novel whose pages are "shaped in waves." The sea is close enough "to spray the house with water at high tide, and eat away at the paint." Month by month, the whale's body decays on the beach. It invades the women's dreams, where it appears alongside "a woman coming out of the water"; it animates the children's play, as they place flowers around its body and paint pictures of it.

Joan and Edward find the islanders' customs and myths charming, and over their months-long stay, they make phonograph recordings of songs about shipwrecks and tales about the sea jealously stealing daughters and returning them as whales, which Manod translates and O'Connor intersperses between short, impressionistic chapters. For all their efforts to meticulously document, the ethnographers' assumptions about the island and its people cloud their depictions from the start. In her first conversation with Manod, Joan compares the island to Treasure Island , which she presumes Manod has never heard of (Manod has read it). The island fulfills Joan's dream "of a place untouched by cities, where the people were like wildflowers" — a gross simplification of the arduous way of life there.

Through Manod's relationship with Joan, O'Connor grapples with the dark side of idealizing isolation. Manod initially looks up to Joan for her university education and fine clothing — she represents the kind of feminine role model Manod lost when her mother died. She thrills to Joan's attention, and strives to represent herself and the island in the best possible light, lying that she "was named after a kind of coastal herb" and concocting inaccurate tableaus for Joan's photographs. Gradually, though, Manod becomes aware of that Joan's pride in Britain and its Isles — and her conscious refusal to see the island as it truly is — is rooted in fascism. By exploring the looming threats of World War II through the personal, O'Connor concretizes the stakes for the island, avoiding what might otherwise be a plodding rehashing of history.

In the end, Manod is pulled between her feelings of being seen by Edward and Joan and being wholly misunderstood by them, between her yearning to leave the island and her obligations to protect her family, her community, and her culture from exploitation and even extinction. It all makes for a haunting and lucid exploration of the moments leading up to immense change.

Kristen Martin is working on a book on American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent .

Watch CBS News

Cruise ship arrives in NYC port with 44-foot dead endangered whale caught on its bow

Updated on: May 9, 2024 / 11:41 AM EDT / CBS/AP

A cruise ship sailed into a New York City port with a 44-foot dead whale across its bow, marine authorities said.

The whale, identified as an endangered sei whale , was caught on the ship's bow when it arrived at the Port of Brooklyn on Saturday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries spokesperson Andrea Gomez said. A necropsy conducted later confirmed the whale's species and determined that the creature was a mature female, said the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit organization that conducted the exam on an marine mammal.

A spokesperson for MSC Cruises said the whale was on the MSC Meraviglia, which docked at Brooklyn before sailing to ports in New England and Canada.

"We immediately notified the relevant authorities, who are now conducting an examination of the whale," officials with the cruise line said in a statement.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of any marine life," the officials said, adding that the Geneva-based MSC Cruises follows all regulations designed to protect whales, such as altering itineraries in certain regions to avoid hitting the animals .

The dead whale was relocated to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and towed to shore there to allow for better access to equipment and to conduct a necropsy, Gomez said.

The necropsy, an autopsy on an animal, was conducted on Tuesday, Gomez said. Samples collected from the whale will help biologists determine whether it was already dead when it was struck by the ship, she said.

Basic results of that exam showed evidence of tissue trauma in the area of the whale's right shoulder blade and a fractured right flipper, said the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society. In a post shared Wednesday to its Facebook page, the organization also said those tests revealed the whale's gastrointestinal tract was "full of food." Samples of its organs will undergo toxicology reviews and analyses to identify any potential tissue diseases.

"The tissue and bone samples collected will help biologists determine if the vessel interaction occurred pre or post mortem," said the conservation society.

Sei whales are typically observed in deeper waters far from the coastline, Gomez said. They are one of the largest whale species and are internationally protected.

According to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation , sei whales eat 2,000 pounds of fish and plankton per day. They can grow up to 60 feet long, weigh as much as 50 tons and live on average between 50-70 years.

The incident marks the latest endangered whale to be found dead along the East Coast.  Last month, federal authorities said a North Atlantic right whale that was found floating 50 miles offshore east of Virginia Beach, Virginia, was killed in a collision with a ship .

In March, NOAA said the first  North Atlantic right whale  baby born this season had  died after being hit by a vessel .

Environmental groups have called for tighter regulations on commercial fishing and shipping to try to save the whales.

In Massachusetts, there's a proposal to put  speed limits on fast ferries  to Cape Cod and the Islands to protect whales. The ferry companies counter that this would drastically reduce service, and say their captains have never seen a right whale on the job. 

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‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ Review: An Accomplished Pressure-Cooker Thriller That’s Like a Tarantino-Fueled Noir, 30 Years Later

In Francis Galluppi's lean, tight, and stylishly clever B-movie, two bank robbers take over an Arizona diner. Violence and greed ensue.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Thirty years ago (in fact, it will be 30 years to the day this Sunday), Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and cinema was never the same. Tarantino’s 1994 epic-crime-pretzel-meets-pop-monologue masterpiece smashed open one door after another, and an inevitable result is that we saw a great many movies in the ’90s that were Tarantino knockoffs — underworld capers of baroque violence and exuberant scuzz, movies that not only bent the dirty hedonism of film noir into new shapes but did it with a special brand of self-consciousness, a “Look at what we’re up to!” effrontery.

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The man in the car is handsome in a nervous-geek way, with a very straight haircut, and he’s toting a small rectangular case. He’s got an unmistakable Norman Bates vibe (something the film makes reference to). While twiddling with the radio, he hears about the bank robbery (the fact that the men drove off with $700,000 in a green Pinto), and he then flips the radio onto a song that, to me, was needle-drop heaven: the 1968 Paul Mauriat version of “Love Is Blue.” I confess that this instrumental French ditty of tinkling rapture is one of my all-time favorite pop songs, and the film uses it in heavily ironic counterpoint, laying it over shots of an orange truck turned on its side, post-crash, dripping gasoline. Love is blue, and in this movie so are blood, guts, bullets, and octane.

The Norman Bates-in-the-’70s fellow is played by Jim Cummings , the gifted indie actor and filmmaker who is, among other things, a wicked chameleon. Even those who relished his performance as a trainwreck of a small-town cop in “Thunder Road” (which he also directed) might not immediately recognize him here. His character, it turns out, is a knife salesman (which evidently was a thing back then, sort of like selling encyclopedias), and he’s on his way to visit his young daughter. The audience thinks: neo-Anthony Perkins + knife salesman + divorced dad = big loser. But Cummings invests the character, who is never named, with a spooky awareness. He’s a scaredy-cat soul who absorbs everything.

Mostly, he’s trying to survive. So is Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), the pretty waitress — this is back in the age when everyone refers to her as a “pretty waitress,” as if it were a job description — who says goodbye to her doofus Southern-hippie local sheriff of a husband (Michael Abbott Jr.) and then starts serving coffee.

That’s when Beau (Richard Brake) and Travis (Nicholas Logan) walk in. They’re the bank robbers, and it doesn’t take long for them to figure out that Charlotte has already made them. (Even in the ’70s, a green Pinto stands out.) Galluppi has an exceptional eye for actors, and he scores a real coup by casting Richard Brake as the alpha crook. As Beau, Brake is tall and gaunt, with burning eyes, a rotter who looks like Steve Buscemi crossed with David Byrne crossed with a human rattlesnake who’s a lifelong junkie. Yet he speaks in a voice that’s bone-dry with logic. He’s the one who’s going to keep this situation on the down-low. As for Travis, his partner, he’s the hothead, like Steve Zahn on steroids, doomed to make it all explode.

Reviewed online, May 8, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 90 MIN.

• Production: A Well Go USA Entertainment release of a Local Boogeyman, XYZ Films production, in association with Carte Blanche, Random Lane. Producers: Matt O'Neill, Atif Malik, Francis Galluppi. Executive producer: James Claeys, Brian Dahlin, Kyle Stroud, Jim Cummings, Nicholas Logan, Joe Heath,
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Francis Galluppi. Camera: Mac Fisken. Editor: Francis Galluppi. Music: Matthew Compton.
• With: Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake, Sierra McCormick, Nicholas Logan, Michael Abbott Jr., Connor Paolo, Alexandra Essoe, Robin Bartlett, Jon Proudstar, Sam Huntingotn, Ryan Masson, Barbara Crampton, Gene Jones, Faizon Love.

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‘Film Geek’ Review: A Cinephile’s Guide to New York

The director Richard Shepard details his lifelong obsession with movies in this enthusiastic video essay.

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By Calum Marsh

Richard Shepard, the director of the black comedies “Dom Hemingway” and “The Matador,” is a lifelong cinephile with a voracious appetite for movies.

“Film Geek,” a feature-length video essay composed primarily of footage of films that Shepard saw growing up in the 1970s in New York City, delves deep into his obsession. In a voice-over, he recounts his childhood, when he was “addicted to movies, to watching them, to making them.” He is enthusiastic, and the movie aspires to make that enthusiasm infectious.

I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying. For minutes at a time, he simply rattles off the titles of various movies that he saw as a child. I appreciate that seeing “Rocky” made a strong impression on him. I did not need to know that he lost his virginity in the apartment building where John G. Avildsen, the director of “Rocky,” once lived.

“Film Geek” has been compared to Thom Andersen’s great documentary from 2003, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” and on the level of montage, they share a superficial resemblance: “Film Geek,” like Andersen’s essay film, is brisk and well edited.

But “Los Angeles Plays Itself” is also a thoughtful and incisive work of film criticism, whereas Shepard describes movies in clichés, when he describes movies at all. More often he is talking about himself, a subject of interest to far fewer viewers.

Film Geek Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.

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