The weight of the world
The Whale, essentially, does not work - "does not work as a movie", I am almost tempted to say, in deference to its origins as a well-received stage play by Samuel D. Hunter (adapting the work to a screenplay himself). But frankly, I suspect it's not any great shakes onstage, either; the dialogue and characterisations have the specific kind of florid "theatricality" that just plain doesn't work in movies for the most part, and might be more acceptable in the heightened environment of live theater, but I think you would need an absolutely spotless cast to avoid how much this all feels overwritten.
So back I go: The Whale, essentially, does not work. But it is also the kind of film that does not work in a way that only a very fearless and bold Artist-with-a-capital-A could manage to make it not work. By which I do not mean Hunter, but the film's director, Darren Aronofsky, about whom we could come up with any number of possible descriptors, and they certainly aren't all going to be complimentary. But by God, he does not have little visions, not even in a film like this that's limited to a single location and a deliberately stripped-down assortment of camera angles. None of which at all help to shake the feeling that we're watching something that was conceived for the stage, but Aronofsky (working, as he almost always does, with cinematographer Matthew Libatique), unquestionably thinks in cinematic images, and you can at times feel a much more potent, cosmic-scale version of The Whale than Hunter's script can make room for trying to claw its way in around the edges of the film.
(And just to be clear, I'm not saying that this more cosmic version of the film would obviously be "better". One of Aronofsky's most cosmic and visionary films of all was his last feature prior to this, 2017's mother!, a film which I intensely hated. And also, I confess, a film which I have not been entirely able to shake loose from my brain in the intervening years, much as I haven't really shaken loose any of Aronofsky's films, none of which I have unabashedly loved. Because that's what being an Artist-with-a-capital-A means: making work so dedicated to its vision of the world that "I liked it" and "I thought it was good" are totally useless standards for evaluation, as compared to "whatever it was, it did something to me". And The Whale, no question, did something to me).
The film is about a morbidly obese, gay English teacher trying to reconnect with his awful teenage daughter in the short time remaining before he finally succeeds at his ongoing project of trying to kill himself in the most agonisingly slow-motion way possible, eating himself to death. Meanwhile, he's dealing with the intrusion into his dark fortress of an apartment by a missionary from a sort of new-age fundamentalist Christian cult. That's a whole lot of Dramatic Plot Material, and it gives The Whale the unmistakably stiff, talky quality of self-consciously "literary" writing at it most laboriously worked-out. The Whale has characters who feel more like clusters of adjectives than actual people, and the things that happen to them feel like they were determined to maximise the amount of conflict that those adjective could cause by rubbing against each other. It's certainly at its worst when it brings in the missionary, Thomas, played with no small amount of determination by Ty Simpkins: the character's appearance at the start of the film works on the level of "you can kick off the story with a contrivance", but for him to keep returning as he does would require a very different backstory for the character; at the very least, any version of his arc throughout the film that works would need to end in such a wildly different place than the purely nonsensical final scene he's been given that I really can't even imagine what it might look like. In a script full of concepts rather than ideas, let alone actual story beats, Thomas is the most wholly detached from any dramatic cohesion, a rather blunt way for Hunter to stuff "ooh, and what if the so-called 'compassionate Christian' was actually an egotistical hypocrite?" into a story that needs more shape, not less.
The actual story focuses on Charlie (Brendan Fraser), who has been suicidally depressed ever since his partner died, and who is trying to eat himself to death; by the time we meet him, he's heavy enough that it's all his heart can manage just to keep pumping blood when he's sitting quietly. He fills his days teaching community college students online, studiously leaving his webcam off; when this isn't happening, he's letting his sole friend, Liz (Hong Chau), bring him food and assuage her obvious feelings of guilt over something that will no doubt be revealed approximately two-thirds of the way through the story. Liz is also a nurse, and does what she can to keep Charlie alive, though she really wants him to go to the hospital, something he refuses. Into this sad little corner of the world comes Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie's daughter, who despises him for leaving her and her mother for a man, and who seems to generally have an unspeakably vicious view of humanity. Charlie refuses to allow himself to notice this, desperately needing to believe that Ellie is the proverbial One Good Thing he did in this life, and so he bribes her with all of his savings to keep coming by in the hopes of finding some shared spark of humanity, which involves begging her to write an essay that will be Honest and True.
Absolutely everything about The Whale as written feels overdetermined. Charlie's dogged insistence that there is good in Ellie and his downright saintly willingness to let her rampage about heaping the most pointlessly cruel abuse on him never feels like a complex characterisation, but a rather scrawny attempt at creating a flawless martyr, even when The Whale would clearly benefit from allowing Charlie to be shaded with some darker greys (for example: what if he actually was a shitty dad for abandoning his daughter so he could fuck one of his former students? By which I mean, he was obviously a shitty dad - why not use that to deepen his character, rather than somewhat conspicuously brushing this off?). He's still a much better example of character writing than Ellie, who is a head-to-toe caricature of a monster in teenage form, a spitting cobra disguised as a girl. Sink is totally incapable of finding any toehold here, as every other member of the cast manages to do in fits and starts; she's clearly giving the film's worst performance, though to tell the truth I can't imagine any version of The Whale where Ellie isn't the character who suffers from the worst performance.
Everybody else finds something human in their brittle parts, and when Fraser and Chau are the only people onscreen, there's actual psychological depth going on here: she's the only actor giving him something he can actually play against, and their interactions feel like two very badly hurt people fueling each other's worst parts, rather than emblems of abstract misery that the characterisations mostly are outside of this. Fraser's performance, swaddled in latex, is obviously not free of gimmickry, but he's doing everything in his power to play Charlie as a human being who is tired and sad, someone who craved suffering and is now rather sanguine about having gotten exactly what he wanted - there's something quietly peaceful in the elaborate slowness of Fraser's movements, and while we can tell that he's constantly uncomfortable, he never comes across like somebody who resents his discomfort. The martyrdom angle is clearly what most excited Aronofsky about the project - he's a filmmaker with a career-long tendency towards Old Testament "angry God" cosmology, even in his stories that aren't explicitly about religion - and he's obviously done the most to help shape Fraser's performance out of the whole cast.
Aronofsky's directing is, if nothing else, odd. This was not a journeyman job for him; he clearly has a lot invested in this project. Weirdly, though, he seems entirely unconcerned with the script per se (certainly, he doesn't care about Ellie or Thomas enough to help the actors find their way through those malformed roles). Insofar as he cares about the character arcs, it's so he can stage the final scene (which is by far the best part of the film, and indeed the only part that I am 100% sure works) as a kind of ecstatic triumph in which pain and willpower coalesce into a singularity, blinding and purifying. This is, in other words, a film that absolutely believes that suffering leads to moral cleansing, and it believes this somewhat independently of the actual material in the script. Instead, Aronofsky is focused on how he can film Fraser to exaggerate the character's depression and pain, starting with a full-frame aspect ratio that emphasizes the fat suit and the actor's sluggish movement in wide shots, the pasty skin and sweat in close-ups. He uses a strictly limited number of different shot scales, visually enforcing the idea that the apartment is a dead space - not dying, dead - and there's no ability to move around it organically. It is a harsh, ugly-looking film, very obviously on purpose.
This is not, one hardly needs to say, at all fun to watch. It's not even very cathartic, frankly - maybe if Ellie worked as a character, that would be more of an option, and now that I've typed that out, I'm entirely willing to believe that this is exactly why Aronofsky let Sink get away with that performance. Because I don't think he wants to make a cathartic movie, at least not in that sense. He wants to make a movie about suffering, and there's no question The Whale succeeds on that front. Whether succeeding makes it worth watching... I'm not planning to revisit it, let's just say. But I won't be forgetting it, either.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
So back I go: The Whale, essentially, does not work. But it is also the kind of film that does not work in a way that only a very fearless and bold Artist-with-a-capital-A could manage to make it not work. By which I do not mean Hunter, but the film's director, Darren Aronofsky, about whom we could come up with any number of possible descriptors, and they certainly aren't all going to be complimentary. But by God, he does not have little visions, not even in a film like this that's limited to a single location and a deliberately stripped-down assortment of camera angles. None of which at all help to shake the feeling that we're watching something that was conceived for the stage, but Aronofsky (working, as he almost always does, with cinematographer Matthew Libatique), unquestionably thinks in cinematic images, and you can at times feel a much more potent, cosmic-scale version of The Whale than Hunter's script can make room for trying to claw its way in around the edges of the film.
(And just to be clear, I'm not saying that this more cosmic version of the film would obviously be "better". One of Aronofsky's most cosmic and visionary films of all was his last feature prior to this, 2017's mother!, a film which I intensely hated. And also, I confess, a film which I have not been entirely able to shake loose from my brain in the intervening years, much as I haven't really shaken loose any of Aronofsky's films, none of which I have unabashedly loved. Because that's what being an Artist-with-a-capital-A means: making work so dedicated to its vision of the world that "I liked it" and "I thought it was good" are totally useless standards for evaluation, as compared to "whatever it was, it did something to me". And The Whale, no question, did something to me).
The film is about a morbidly obese, gay English teacher trying to reconnect with his awful teenage daughter in the short time remaining before he finally succeeds at his ongoing project of trying to kill himself in the most agonisingly slow-motion way possible, eating himself to death. Meanwhile, he's dealing with the intrusion into his dark fortress of an apartment by a missionary from a sort of new-age fundamentalist Christian cult. That's a whole lot of Dramatic Plot Material, and it gives The Whale the unmistakably stiff, talky quality of self-consciously "literary" writing at it most laboriously worked-out. The Whale has characters who feel more like clusters of adjectives than actual people, and the things that happen to them feel like they were determined to maximise the amount of conflict that those adjective could cause by rubbing against each other. It's certainly at its worst when it brings in the missionary, Thomas, played with no small amount of determination by Ty Simpkins: the character's appearance at the start of the film works on the level of "you can kick off the story with a contrivance", but for him to keep returning as he does would require a very different backstory for the character; at the very least, any version of his arc throughout the film that works would need to end in such a wildly different place than the purely nonsensical final scene he's been given that I really can't even imagine what it might look like. In a script full of concepts rather than ideas, let alone actual story beats, Thomas is the most wholly detached from any dramatic cohesion, a rather blunt way for Hunter to stuff "ooh, and what if the so-called 'compassionate Christian' was actually an egotistical hypocrite?" into a story that needs more shape, not less.
The actual story focuses on Charlie (Brendan Fraser), who has been suicidally depressed ever since his partner died, and who is trying to eat himself to death; by the time we meet him, he's heavy enough that it's all his heart can manage just to keep pumping blood when he's sitting quietly. He fills his days teaching community college students online, studiously leaving his webcam off; when this isn't happening, he's letting his sole friend, Liz (Hong Chau), bring him food and assuage her obvious feelings of guilt over something that will no doubt be revealed approximately two-thirds of the way through the story. Liz is also a nurse, and does what she can to keep Charlie alive, though she really wants him to go to the hospital, something he refuses. Into this sad little corner of the world comes Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie's daughter, who despises him for leaving her and her mother for a man, and who seems to generally have an unspeakably vicious view of humanity. Charlie refuses to allow himself to notice this, desperately needing to believe that Ellie is the proverbial One Good Thing he did in this life, and so he bribes her with all of his savings to keep coming by in the hopes of finding some shared spark of humanity, which involves begging her to write an essay that will be Honest and True.
Absolutely everything about The Whale as written feels overdetermined. Charlie's dogged insistence that there is good in Ellie and his downright saintly willingness to let her rampage about heaping the most pointlessly cruel abuse on him never feels like a complex characterisation, but a rather scrawny attempt at creating a flawless martyr, even when The Whale would clearly benefit from allowing Charlie to be shaded with some darker greys (for example: what if he actually was a shitty dad for abandoning his daughter so he could fuck one of his former students? By which I mean, he was obviously a shitty dad - why not use that to deepen his character, rather than somewhat conspicuously brushing this off?). He's still a much better example of character writing than Ellie, who is a head-to-toe caricature of a monster in teenage form, a spitting cobra disguised as a girl. Sink is totally incapable of finding any toehold here, as every other member of the cast manages to do in fits and starts; she's clearly giving the film's worst performance, though to tell the truth I can't imagine any version of The Whale where Ellie isn't the character who suffers from the worst performance.
Everybody else finds something human in their brittle parts, and when Fraser and Chau are the only people onscreen, there's actual psychological depth going on here: she's the only actor giving him something he can actually play against, and their interactions feel like two very badly hurt people fueling each other's worst parts, rather than emblems of abstract misery that the characterisations mostly are outside of this. Fraser's performance, swaddled in latex, is obviously not free of gimmickry, but he's doing everything in his power to play Charlie as a human being who is tired and sad, someone who craved suffering and is now rather sanguine about having gotten exactly what he wanted - there's something quietly peaceful in the elaborate slowness of Fraser's movements, and while we can tell that he's constantly uncomfortable, he never comes across like somebody who resents his discomfort. The martyrdom angle is clearly what most excited Aronofsky about the project - he's a filmmaker with a career-long tendency towards Old Testament "angry God" cosmology, even in his stories that aren't explicitly about religion - and he's obviously done the most to help shape Fraser's performance out of the whole cast.
Aronofsky's directing is, if nothing else, odd. This was not a journeyman job for him; he clearly has a lot invested in this project. Weirdly, though, he seems entirely unconcerned with the script per se (certainly, he doesn't care about Ellie or Thomas enough to help the actors find their way through those malformed roles). Insofar as he cares about the character arcs, it's so he can stage the final scene (which is by far the best part of the film, and indeed the only part that I am 100% sure works) as a kind of ecstatic triumph in which pain and willpower coalesce into a singularity, blinding and purifying. This is, in other words, a film that absolutely believes that suffering leads to moral cleansing, and it believes this somewhat independently of the actual material in the script. Instead, Aronofsky is focused on how he can film Fraser to exaggerate the character's depression and pain, starting with a full-frame aspect ratio that emphasizes the fat suit and the actor's sluggish movement in wide shots, the pasty skin and sweat in close-ups. He uses a strictly limited number of different shot scales, visually enforcing the idea that the apartment is a dead space - not dying, dead - and there's no ability to move around it organically. It is a harsh, ugly-looking film, very obviously on purpose.
This is not, one hardly needs to say, at all fun to watch. It's not even very cathartic, frankly - maybe if Ellie worked as a character, that would be more of an option, and now that I've typed that out, I'm entirely willing to believe that this is exactly why Aronofsky let Sink get away with that performance. Because I don't think he wants to make a cathartic movie, at least not in that sense. He wants to make a movie about suffering, and there's no question The Whale succeeds on that front. Whether succeeding makes it worth watching... I'm not planning to revisit it, let's just say. But I won't be forgetting it, either.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
