Darren Aronofsky has built a career on challenging convention through his unique, often overwhelming visual style. It’s impossible to walk away from one of his films without feeling the experience of it. There is nothing straightforward or simple about Aronofsky’s work. He explores humanity’s darker, more twisted elements, reaching a crescendo with his last film, the 2017 allegory, mother!.
How do you follow up a movie that lives out the entire Bible inside a single farmhouse? Apparently with a Christ metaphor set mainly in the living room of a small apartment. Which is what we have with The Whale, the director’s adaptation of Samuel Hunter’s award-winning play. Taking its title from Melville’s Moby Dick — its own Godly metaphor — the film centers on Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a 600-pound man confined to his small corner of the world. It is a prison of his own making, but is it really his fault?
We meet Charlie as he teaches an online college literature course. Like his students, we hear him but don’t see him. “My camera is broken,” is the excuse he gives to the screen of faces. But the truth is, he doesn’t want them to see him. He hides himself away from his students in the same way he hides from everyone who isn’t already inside his walls. Which is to say, everyone besides his only friend, Liz (Hong Chau).
But his isolation is disrupted in the most humiliating of ways. A young missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) happens to knock on his door at precisely the time Charlie is suffering a cardiac emergency. “Read this to me!” he pleads, thrusting a sheaf of pages into the young man’s confused and panicked hands. It is an essay on Moby Dick, an essay Charlie frequently turns to for comfort when his anxiety and health threaten to overtake him.
There are several things in these opening moments that introduce what The Whale really is. Whether it intends to be or not. Thomas looks upon Charlie with horror and pity. We are asked to do the same. This is where much of the problem lies. Instead of being challenged to put ourselves into the shoes of this broken man, we have no choice but to look down on him. Both Aronofsky and Hunter, through direction and writing, offer some explanations for Charlie’s depression and circumstances, but always through someone else’s words. He never tells his own story, and never really talks about the mental and emotional pain of his situation.
When he cites money as the reason for not going to the hospital, neither he nor anyone else ever addresses the reality of fatphobic medical professionals, or even the logistical challenge posed by moving a man of his size down a flight of stairs and into an ambulance. These, more than cost, are very real considerations for the severely obese. The Whale never acknowledges any of that. Instead, we see Liz yell at him in frustration one minute and then enable him with giant meatball subs in the next. We see him struggle to pick something up off a floor or enter a room. We see all of the tools and aids placed around the house to help him function, but it’s all in service to feeling sorry for him, and disgusted by his life.
Courtesy of A24
And then there are the women in his life. Charlie is divorced. He and his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) split years ago and he has not seen his now-teenage daughter since she was 8. Ellie (Sadie Sink) is 17 now and angry at the world. As his health fails, he wants to spend his final days getting to know her and essentially bribes Ellie to visit. She spits poisonous insults at him and toys with Thomas on his return visits.
“She’s evil,” her own mother says. Charlie, who has absolutely no reason to believe so, insists, “She is good.” It never seems to occur to either of them that she is a child who has also been deeply damaged and hurt by the adults in her life. Where Charlie copes with binge-eating, Ellie copes with cruelty. But the film isn’t interested in exploring that parallel with any real depth. It only wants to make Charlie the unfailingly good Christ figure who loves and forgives whether anyone deserves it or not. And Ellie is the ungrateful recipient of his selflessness. He has similar good will for his bitter ex-wife, and Liz who is also mean at times, although her anger is less focused on him than on their shared pain. Over and again, we watch Charlie love and forgive the women in his life while they are not given any real depth that would make that forgiveness feel earned or welcome.
None of this is the fault of Brendan Fraser or any of the actors with whom he shares the screen. Fraser brings out the humanity in Charlie and saves him from being a flat character. There are moments where Fraser will break your heart, even if Charlie doesn’t.
Like so much of Aronofsky’s work, The Whale sits on the edge of being a meaningful portrait of a suffering outcast. It just never quite reaches what it sets out to be. Ultimately, a movie that is supposed to be about love and empathy fails to achieve either and all we are left with is emptiness. An unfortunate, missed opportunity.