Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's "THE WHALE" For Film — Page 3

maybe one of the least enjoyable miserable theater going experiences, ever. Fraiser is really good but it doesn't make up for this torture porn of a film.

I saw this the other night sitting with someone who is fat. They hated it, and thought it was fat-shaming. My response was, "this movie is not about being fat. It is about a character who is suicidal and is purposely eating themselves to death, and has gone beyond being any typical standard of morbidly obese. Charlie is not fat, he is in his own category." We agreed to disagree. And seriously, I'm all for "body positivity" but the entire plot revolves around the fact that he is five hundred pounds and is subsequently dying of congestive heart failure.

Anyway, I understand why some people don't like it. It's an upsetting movie on many levels. It is, in a way, a "body horror" movie, is hard to watch, and it is very, very depressing. Also, any perceived "fat-phobia" aside, it's just not a great script. In an intimate theater, I imagine it made for a decent play, but on film it comes across as only a couple notches above a Lifetime movie or something. Hunter's attempts to make some sort of literary or philosophical connection between Charlie and Moby Dick are not really fleshed out (no pun intended), and it's not the "play of ideas" it seems to think it is.

HOWEVER, Brendan Fraser was absolutely perfect and totally heartbreaking, and if his main competition for the Oscar right now is Colin Farrell in Banshees of Inisherin (which I also didn't like very much despite my love for Martin McDonagh), then there is no contest IMO. Fraser absolutely deserves an Oscar for this. If he doesn't get it, it's merely because some voters don't think he shouldn't have taken the role in the first place, which is ridiculous. Whoever they had play Charlie would have had to have worn a fat suit and prosthetics anyway, and if we are talking about representation...Brendan Fraser is, um, not thin. His George of the Jungle days are long gone. He's just as qualified to play the role as was Shuler Hensely, who originated the part.

Anyway, give the man the Oscar he deserves.

Is the movie that popular? It played for a mere werk in our local cinema and people who saw it there commented the theater was pretty empty.

Plays -- even the best ones -- seldom make memorable films. They're inherently the one thing film can never be: constructed on palpable artifice, on an audience and players pact to fully suspend disbelief. Masking in theaters we were reminded: hey, we breathe the same air as actors pretending to be other people! But The Whale is a curiosity. It was treated as a cutting edge work on stage, given ravishing notices in many regional productions after a successful launch in NY and elsewhere. On film, it's everything non-theater people loathe about plays: reeking of contrivance, larded with unities-fueling convenience and stagey entrances and exits, with announced revelations, and from start to finish talky, full of self-explicating dialog that underscores every metaphor, beginning with a title tethered baldly to Melville.

Yet I come not to sink The Whale, though I thoroughly disliked the movie, but to point out the fascinating chasm between the story's reception in one medium and another. Re-reading the NY Times review this morning (I'll post a little below), I was struck by the distance between the same paper's response to the staged drama. It doesn't help the cause, having the bloated material filtered through the lurid lens of Darren Aronofsky, a man who never met a repulsive image he didn't want to share with a dark auditorium of spectators held hostage to his world view. (To be fair to the playwright, Aronofsky adds binge and bulimia sequences that are the rank stuff of drive-in era horror.) But there's a conversation to be had about how the same tale playing on small and large stages looks so empty and, well, phony on the biggish screen. Even if you love its central, controversial performance (which left me oddly unmoved; only Hong Chau escapes the piled on excesses), you feel the gears of dramaturgy grind. Those same wheels were at work at Playwrights Horizon, yet no one was bothered; in fact, they cheered.

The Times on the film:

"All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic while demanding extra credit for emotional honesty. But the working out of the various issues involves a lot of blame-shifting and ethical evasion. Everyone and no one is responsible; actions do and don’t have consequences. Real-world topics like sexuality, addiction and religious intolerance float around untethered to any credible sense of social reality. The moral that bubbles up through the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s score) is that people are incapable of not caring about one another.

Maybe? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman provide some literary ballast for this idea, but as an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness."

Updated On: 2/2/23 at 08:21 AM

This seems like a Renee Zellweger, "Judy" situation. The movie is flawed, however the performance is wonderful!