Darren Aronofsky | The Whale / 2022

 cruelty to animals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel D. Hunter (screenplay, based on his play), Darren Aronofsky (director) The Whale / 2022

 

I like Brendan Fraser as an actor, and was pleased he won an Academy Award for his portrayal in The Whale as Charlie, described in the film credits as “a morbidly obese and reclusive English teacher.” The role was played with the truly wonderful help of make-up artists, who with the help of the prosthetics of Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley, weighing more than 300 pounds convinced us of the supposedly 600-pound human being beneath them.

     But the film itself is terribly problematic. Written originally for stage, Samuel D. Hunter’s script does not even attempt to reform its highly theatrical devices. As anyone knows, reading through my pages, I am a fan of artifice. But when it weighs down upon a motion picture—a medium simply because of its relationship to photography is nearly drowned in realism—in a manner heavier than even its obese central figure, it creaks in the manner of a closet drama.

      We are made to believe that because Charlie has lost his former male lover Alan to religiosity and guilt he has gone on a several year food binge in order to kill himself. Yes, this can happen. But everything else that surrounds his selfish actions seem strained and unbelievable.

      We can well understand that, after having left his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) for another man eight years previously, she might still be mad at him, particularly since, despite child support, she has been left to raise his young daughter, Ellie (Jacey Sink) all alone, and she herself has become something of an alcoholic. And we can imagine that Ellie herself might be confused and terribly hurt by her loving father’s disappearance. Perhaps we can even allow that Alan’s sister Liz (Hong Chau), raised like her brother in the cult-like New Life Church (in the play Alan and Liz were raised Mormon), has now chosen to devote much of her life to Charlie’s care, trying to urge him into hospital care while contradictorily enabling him to devour huge portions of sandwiches and pizzas. But that last is truly stretching our commitment to fictional disbelief.

      But things get quite unbelievably complicated when Ellie, the daughter, visits to vent her hate and a young New Life Church missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins) suddenly and quite inexplicably shows up at Charlie’s door to offer spiritual help. Even the pizza guy Dan, who never gets a glimpse of the human whale Charlie has become, seems to care, or is a least interested in finding out who is behind the man who orders all the nightly pizzas. When he finally gets a look he is totally disgusted.

      We realize now that we have entered a creakingly structured play that doesn’t even try to fully make logical sense.

      Despite the ghosts and figures of his past currently haunting him, moreover, and despite the fact that he is now near death, the central figure of this work remains an impossible optimist about the world around him. His obviously disinterested English students, who even before the COVID crisis he teaches on a zoom room on the internet, are all capable to brilliant thinking—even if we have little sign of it—and he reads their empty papers with deep appreciation. Even his daughter, a girl the mother is convinced is truly evil, is a “remarkable being,” who at age 8 (a talismanic number in this work) wrote a piece on Melville that praised the author’s establishment of his early relationship with Queequeg and is even sympathetic with Captain Ahab, but has utterly no patience with all “that stuff about whales.”

 

    She has visited her father in order to have him write her English papers, and returns because he has promised the 120,000 he has saved up to give her upon his death, guilt money we might describe it.

    Meanwhile, he’s told Liz, his caretaker, that he can’t afford any healthcare and has done little to support her attempts to keep him alive. When she discovers the truth, she too is angry and hurt.

   Moreover, and most improbably, Ellie establishes a relationship with the would-be missionary Thomas who admits the church group to which he belonged had long ago given up missionary work, and has himself stolen church funds to escape and to express his personal zeal, focused now on Charlie.

      We have now entered a world of an August: Osage County like melodrama, drama that wants to be so heavily significant that it loses its way in the process. Guilt, belief, love, and a soupçon of sexuality have been woven together to convince the audience that this is truly great theater.

     But actually, it’s even worse. While Vito Russo long ago argued that in the movies all gay boys must die, this film takes it fully to fruition.

     Alan, Charlie’s former lover has killed himself, as I hinted, out of religious guilt, and Charlie has transformed himself into a kind of monster destined for a quick exit.

       If honesty becomes his theme, the movie hovers behind numerous lies. Loving another man, even as Charlie argues to Thomas, is not a sin but something beautiful; however, Thomas never fully comes to that recognition as Ellie uses her cellphone to ship him back to Waterloo, Iowa (the city, incidentally in which I was born) and his parent’s highly unlikely forgiveness, which for Charlie only convinces him of his daughter’s cleverness. And Charlie remains deluded, it appears, about her honest integrity, even after Mary predicts that Ellie will probably use her inheritance for tattoos and drugs.   

      I’m sorry, but I can’t believe in Charlie’s white-light reformation into eternity. I agree with the Austin Chronicle’s critic Jenny Nulf, who saw the movie as cruel, observing: “Charlie is placed in a hellish purgatory in The Whale. Fraser often brings a warmth to Charlie that the film desperately needs, but his positivity is only an ember in a fire dying in the pouring rain. His daughter, Ellie (Sink), is a nasty character, an angsty teenager whose wrath is caused by her father leaving her at the age of 8. Sink isn’t given much to do but brood in a recliner, cracking jokes at the expense of her father’s stature, a terrible daughter whose hatred is spiteful and cruel. There’s nothing redeemable about her character outside Charlie’s love for her, his insistence that she is his greatest achievement, but nothing outside his innate optimism really shows Ellie’s potential goodness to an audience.”

      Charlie is left to die in what I can only describe as a pure theatrical delusion.

      I so much wanted to like this movie that when I finally saw it I felt like I was slapped in the face.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).