The Whale is a no good, very bad movie with a collection of very good, admirable performances in service of an unworthy screenplay. The film doesn't appear bad until we've had a chance to think about it: its director, Darren Aronofsky, is no fool with this sort of emotionally wrenching drama, having delivered such truly raw tragedies as Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler. It's the sort of movie that's very good at tricking you into thinking it's profound, with its cathartic confrontational dialogue and its carefully crafted authentic performances. But make no mistake: it's as empty as its main character's chicken buckets and pizza boxes.
It garnered an Academy Award for Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a college professor who's housebound with extreme obesity, barely able to move without assistance. The win is not undeserved. Fraser's performance is a marvelous, genuine display of despair and submission. Some have questioned the ethics of whether Fraser, who appears comfortably overweight but not dangerously obese, should have donned a fat suit to appear larger than he is. That isn't quite as troubling as the fact that the character he's playing is a phony concoction to force the audience into pity.
When his friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who also happens to be the sister of his recently deceased boyfriend--and don't worry, all of this backstory is explained in full detail in long exchanges of dialogue--tells him that he's in congestive heart failure and will die if he doesn't seek medical help, Charlie instead contacts his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) to try to make things right before he goes. She resents him, of course, as he left her and her mom (Samantha Morton) when he came out of the closet. But he offers to ghost-write a few essays for her to make sure she graduates high school, in exchange for her company and for the inheritance he's about to leave her.
It's only because of the honesty in the two actors' approaches that this arrangement is believable at all. Ellie is a cipher who's a boomer's idea of what a zoomer behaves like (TV programming in the background reveals that the film takes place amid the 2016 election, a setting which adds absolutely squat to the story). She takes odd pictures for her Facebook page (strike one right there), and gives little hints of a sense of humor beneath a tough exterior, sure to project to everyone around her that beneath every traumatized youth is a Gal Friday just begging to be let loose. Compare Ellie to Stephanie, the daughter of Randy "The Ram" Robinson in The Wrestler, another estranged kid whose strained relationship with her father is believable and relatable at every step. Aronofsky has proven that he knows how to do this sort of thing; it's unthinkable that he'd struggle so much here.
The other main character who pops in and out at convenient times is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young door-to-door evangelist from a nearby church who happens to knock on Charlie's door at a crucial moment. Thomas, like all of the others who Charlie interacts with, has a journey that seems cathartic but is only contrived: the plot twists surrounding his character are unrealistic even by this movie's standards, and his final revelation to Charlie negates a lot of what the movie seems to have been using him to say all along. His whole arc might have just been removed and the movie would have been no worse.
Sometimes a good melodrama can strain credibility and still work wonders. Look at Dark Victory, or Now, Voyager. Maybe if this movie were in black & white and starred Bette Davis I could take it more seriously. I'm not familiar with the source material, a play by Samuel D. Hunter, but it's not surprising that The Whale originated as a stage play. It takes place entirely in one location: Matthew Libatique's cinematography, complete with the choice to frame the film tightly in a 4:3 ratio, does a good job at enhancing Charlie's locked-in environment. But Hunter, also the screenwriter, fails to adapt his play in any significant way for film. Characters speak as if they're beholden to Aristotle's three unities, loading themselves with exposition and emotional heft, to speak out loud what Aronofsky might otherwise have depended on, say, film techniques to reveal. Every scene has at least one character baring at least one monumental revelation. This may be the first film constructed entirely out of audition monologues.
The conclusion comes with a moral lesson--Hunter works in a perfunctory theme about being honest and writing your heart or something like that--but it barely reads amid the machinations and emotional manipulation. Those unfamiliar with Aronofsky's work might find the last act somewhat effective. I found it infuriating. It ends with one of those sudden magical-realist transitions where a character's tragedy is ironically transformed into a victory. Aronofsky is very good at this, in a way that many directors aren't. But it's the same trick he pulled in Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, and Black Swan, and The Wrestler. Slapping it onto this maudlin wreck is little respite.
But again, the performances from Fraser, Sink, and Chau, even Simpkins as the movie's least believable character, and Morton as another function of the plot, always threaten to elevate it. It's the sort of Oscar movie that might have appeared as a trailer in Tropic Thunder, between Simple Jack and Satan's Alley. It might have lost the award to Home for Thanksgiving.
* 1/2 out of ****
