Brendan Fraser’s sensitive performance is the chief highlight of Darren Aronofsky’s limp drama The Whale.
In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, mounds upon mounds of prosthetics transform Brendan Fraser into a character many times his real size. That’s the hook of the movie, and its headline, and also its early controversy. Why, some have wondered, have such great resources been expended to allow an actor of Fraser’s average stature to play a role a naturally larger man could have occupied instead? Are so-called fat suits inherently dehumanizing, or have they just been put to that use in the past? Wherever one lands on such questions, the reality is that the elaborate full-body makeover of The Whale is no less real than anything else in this fatally overwrought melodrama of compulsion and atonement. Its dramatic heft is entirely phony, too.
Fraser plays Charlie, a college English professor who teaches remotely from his home in small-town Idaho. Charlie keeps his webcam off, telling his students it’s a technical error. In reality, he just doesn’t want them to see him, and discover the truth: that he’s a shut-in who weighs over 600 pounds. It’s been years since Charlie’s made any attempt to lose weight, and a new blood pressure reading puts him in the “call 911 immediately” danger zone. His overeating is killing him, rapidly and decisively. But he won’t go to the hospital.
The Whale offers therapy-couch explanations for what Charlie has slowly been doing to his body over the years. (He was always bigger, he explains, but not always this big.) It’s a symptom of grief that became a spiral of shame, and has gradually manifested in an apparent death wish. The film wheels out carts and carts of tragic backstory: an anguished grapple with sexuality, a lover lost to suicide, an abandoned family, an evangelical organization that played its damaging, judgmental part. The only pleasure Charlie seems to derive from life comes from rereading a personal scripture, an old student essay on Moby Dick from which the film draws its dual-meaning title.
