The Whale
In cinemas now
The Whale and I didn’t get off to the best start. There I was, in a completely empty cinema, when an admittedly apologetic but doubtlessly clumsy woman insisted on walking past me to get to her seat, only to knock my large glass of Malbec all over me. In fairness, she did replace my drink, but couldn’t stop me from smelling like a bottle of vinegar for the entire screening.
Given those circumstances, perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for a film about a reclusive English teacher with severe obesity. But director Darren Aronofsky had labelled his adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play as a ‘small movie with a big heart’, so I was a little surprised to discover The Whale to be one of the most relentlessly bleak pictures I’ve seen in some time.
On reflection, I shouldn’t have been. Aronofsky’s films (particularly more recent works such as this and the desperate Mother!) have always confused profundity with heavy-handed moralism, but that tendency is made all the more problematic here because The Whale is eminently preoccupied with an incredibly complex and, more importantly, personal topic.
Having listened to more than one interview with lead actor Brendan Fraser about his performance as the aforementioned central character, it’s clear that both he and Aronofsky had good intentions when making this picture. Fraser was particularly committed, spending four hours each day being fitted with heavy prosthetics and also consulting regularly with the Obesity Action Coalition, but the intent does not stop The Whale’s depiction of obesity from being knotty at best.
Aronofsky appears to be suggesting that the condition can only ever be the cause of some sort of deep-seated psychological trauma (in this case grief), but that does not tally with the lived experience of many plus-sized people. And, for my money at least, it’s a borderline incendiary thing to suggest. Fraser’s character is undeniably portrayed as being physically grotesque, and no amount of clumsy religious allegories or literature references will stop that from being troubling.
It's a shame because Fraser is excellent, as are his co-stars Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, and Samantha Morton. Their performances lend themselves well to the stage-play environment that Aronofsky contains his film’s events within, a stylistic choice which, while being faithful to its source material, does make the central motivations of its characters difficult to penetrate. That, coupled with the mawkishness of the film’s aesthetic, make for a mostly miserable viewing experience.
Fraser is more than deserving of the plaudits coming his way, but that doesn’t stop this from feeling like an unnecessarily ugly and depressing film.
