The Whale The Whale

*** RATING CTC - 2022 - Psychological drama - 1h 57m

With the help of prosthetics and CGI Brendan Fraser balloons to become Charlie an online literature professor who has been eating himself to death since his lover's suicide some years earlier. Darren Aronofsky has not tried to open up Samuel Hunter's original play instead emphasising the claustrophobic confinement of its one set - Charlie's dreary apartment. Maintained by his dead partner's sister Liz (Hong Chau) Charlie cuts a tragic even saintly figure. Other characters - his stroppy wife even stroppier daughter and a bizarrely determined door-to-door missionary - are barely credible but Fraser's Oscar-buzzed performance fills the frame in more ways than one. Opens February 2.

Cast: Brendan Fraser Sadie Sink Ty Simpkins

Release date: 2 February 2023

Official Trailer

Review

8/10 IMDB
65% TOMATOMETER
73% AUDIENCE SCORE


Fraser's choices are so subtly intelligent that we barely notice what amounts to his costume so attuned are we to the way his Charlie teeters on the brink of life and death.


Fraser's portrayal ... is utterly transformative. Bearing witness to Fraser's genius is well worth the existential torment The Whale may inflict.

The performances are good across the board (especially from Fraser who should earn every male lead acting award this year) and the film certainly delivers an emotional wallop particularly at the end.

Heavy going for a hopeful soul

"Do you ever get the feeling people are incapable of not caring?"

The man asking this loaded question in The Whale may not be around long enough to hear it truthfully answered.

His name is Charlie (played by Brendan Fraser). Though a fundamentally kind person, life has not shown Charlie much kindness in return.

In particular, one cruelly tragic event in his past has sent Charlie slowly but surely down the path towards certain self-destruction.

Charlie has spent more than a decade wilfully embracing an eating disorder that all but guarantees a premature death. His emotionally triggered gorging has seen his weight balloon past the 250kg mark.

Despite his big, open-hearted belief in how great the world and everyone in it can be, Charlie lives the smallest, most closed-off life imaginable.

Confined to his apartment out of both personal shame and physical immobility, Charlie spends his days teaching literature online to students who cannot see him (he pretends his webcam is broken beyond repair) and giving in to the last, damning urges of his food addiction.

One of the few people who encounter Charlie on a regular basis is his longtime friend Liz (Hong Chau). A trained nurse, she can sense that he has now almost certainly ventured past the point of no return with his obesity problem.

And yet, faced with the prospect of possibly not even seeing out the month ahead, Charlie avoids seeking the help that may save him.

Instead, he is seeking a different form of salvation in the short time he may have left.

Charlie has a teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink). The pair have barely spoken since Charlie withdrew from family life over a decade ago.

Ellie hates him with a passion that must be painful for someone so young to carry around every day. An irrepressible optimist, Charlie believes the best gift he can give her is to relieve her of that spite - and the damage it will do to Ellie later in life - before it is too late.

There is no way to sugar-coat the experience offered by The Whale. It is indeed tough going for the most part, with its emotional intensity amplified by a cramped principal setting (the camera rarely leaves Charlie's home) and a confronting physical condition.

What saves the movie from either overwhelming or alienating its audience is the mighty performance of Fraser in the lead role.

Much has been made elsewhere of the prosthetic "fat suit" donned by Fraser to fill out his character, as if it were the layers of rubber that are doing the real acting here.

No, the humanity that pours out of Fraser throughout The Whale - particularly through his eyes and voice - is irrefutably the work of a gifted talent (and a talent that has rarely shone through Fraser's earlier works).

Leigh Paatsch

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