Review: The Whale

Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Starring Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink

8.5/10

This is a movie less about obesity and more about self-destruction. It gets into the notion of suicidally ruining your life with excess (in this case, it’s junk food), and it really goes into the detail of how much self-loathing a man can have. It sounds depressing, and it is, but The Whale combats this with a touching and tender tale of family dysfunction.

Set pretty much entirely in his apartment, Charlie (Brendan Fraser) keeps himself in solitude, working as an online literature teacher. He is tended to at times by his nurse Liz (Hong Chau), who is concerned about his weight gain, but at this point can’t seem to convince him to stop. His over-eating is an act of self-hatred because of how he separated himself from his family, cheating on his wife, and leaving her and his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) in disarray and contempt for him.

One of the film’s main draws has been Brendan Fraser’s compelling and deeply felt performance as Charlie, which has attracted so much attention, with this kind of comeback being compared to Mickey Rourke’s comeback in Darren Aronofsky’s own The Wrestler. His towering performance is complemented fairly well by Sadie and Hong, who uphold quite a lot of tension against Charlie’s casually minded self-destruction, though they sometimes dig too deep into the emotions.

There’s not too many complaints to be made about this film other than a couple. As fitting as the conclusion to this film is, it does seem to be derivative of two other certain Aronosfky movies (one might spoil this film by naming them). And also, just a bit too much crying. It’s as if every tear that shoots down someone’s cheek is another step forward to awards season glory (and it’s working).

It may all sound like a stuffy soap opera, but The Whale is immense, with a truly touching main character at the helm, who can so easily love others and as easily hate himself. It’s a sentimental film without going about it the easy way, and it’s sure to impact an audience and have them think differently about not only their lives, but English literature essays as well.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN