Mark Reviews Movies: THE WHALE (2022)

The Whale, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 8, 2022

The first sight of the main character in The Whale is a genuine, discomforting shock. At first, we only hear him, speaking to an online college class about writing that he teaches, but after some words about the importance of a thesis statement in an argumentative essay, director Darren Aronofsky shows him to us. Sitting on the couch and groaning as he engages with some pornography on his laptop, the man seems incapable of doing much else, and even the second part is a struggle. Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is obese to a degree will be fatal—and soon—if he doesn't do something about it. He has no plans to do anything about it.

The shock of this introduction has multiple factors. First, there's the fact of Charlie's body, which is unavoidable and would garner some kind of reaction regardless of everything else. The man is huge, and Aronofsky makes a point of communicating that his size is more than a matter of pounds. On the few occasions when Charlie stands, the director frames the struggling movements in steps of close-ups of various body parts and appendages, of medium shots of his progress, and with sounds that suggest some seismic forces at work within his body and upon the world itself.

The title is a bit more than a provocation, because there is something almost mythical about this man in those moments—as if his very existence is on some metaphorical level that the movie hints at but struggles to make clear. It's ironic that the man has a few speeches about how to present a convincing argument. Screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter (adapting his stage play) doesn't quite seem to know which argument of the many possibilities here he actually wants to make, let alone develop.

The second major component of the initial shock is that we're watching Charlie in an incredibly private and intimate moment. It's something to which we have to become accustomed, because the entire story, set inside the character's apartment (with a single scene barely removed from the space on the balcony outside), is about the private and intimate process of Charlie trying to figure out what his life has meant, now that he knows almost for certain he will be dead within a week.

Visitors arrive to offer advice, rebukes, and maybe a little bit of hope about his present circumstances or the potential for some kind of circumstances after death. Because the situation that led to this was Charlie's decision to make, the meaning is, ultimately, his to determine. Again, that kind of keeps us out of the loop of fully understanding this character, the full extent of his back story, and the rationale for all of the ideas Hunter includes here.

The final piece of what makes the introduction to Charlie such a shock is that the character is played by Fraser. His career up until this point—even after he left Hollywood fare behind for smaller parts in smaller movies—hasn't suggested him playing a character such as this one or giving a performance as devastating as this.

A person could argue that the extensive and convincing prosthetic work accomplishes much of the performance here, but Fraser still has to sell the moment-to-moment struggle, as congestive heart failure slowly kills Charlie. Beyond that, the actor transcends the makeup effects here, taking us deep into Charlie's existential angst and emotional turmoil as a dying man refuses any help, continues in what has become the suicidal behavior of binge eating, and reckons with the major choices he has made.

Fraser and some foundational honesty about this scenario offer some grounding to a story that raises far more notions than it can address in any satisfactory way. When it's about Charlie and his isolated life, the movie has Fraser to maintain some sense of honesty. That extends to the relationship between Charlie and his best friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who has another connection to the man that's kept—like a few important details—a secret for questionable reasons.

Matters become trickier when it comes to Charlie's teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), who resents and basically despises her father for leaving her, as well as the girl's mother (played by Samantha Morton), when she was 8 years old, so that he could have a romantic relationship with a man, one of his adult students. Ellie is bitter and angry, not only with Charlie, but also with just about everything and everyone in the world. While Sink plays the part with emotional authenticity, the character is such a one-note complication and obstacle that it's difficult to find much sympathy for her—no matter how many times Charlie insists that there's a good person beneath her manipulative and potentially destructive ways.

The most confounding element of the story arrives pretty quickly with Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary from a local doomsday church, who wants to provide some spiritual aid to Charlie. The Whale starts down that path, too, adding yet another possible layer as to how we're supposed to interpret this character and his dilemma. It's never clear, making the movie's near-Biblical finale more a cop-out than an explanation.

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