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.
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 Charlie’s (Fraser) obsession with a student’s 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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