Aronofsky’s “The Whale” (2022)

To say it’s been a strong year for lead actors and actresses is a ridiculous understatement. However, if someone told me that Brendan Fraser takes it for Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale”, I wouldn’t blink. Hell, after walking out of the film, I wanted to find a truck full of Oscar statues, knock it over and hand deliver one to him. 

It’s not just a towering performance. There’s nothing actor-y about it. As Charlie, a morbidly obese online English professor, Fraser’s presence is lived in, prosthetics and all. As much as I often steel myself for Aronofsky’s film (for a couple of reasons), I know that I’m going to see genuinely great performances.

Additionally, Sadie Sink as Ellie, Charlie’s daughter, and Hong Chau as Elizabeth, his deceased partner’s sister, are revelations. Yes, yes, Sink has proven herself already on “Stranger Things” and I’ve been on the Chau wagon since “Inherent Vice” (and she was wonderful in “The Menu”); but here, they both have a chance to explore difficult, complex characters that embody the adage that much of acting is reacting. 

That adage often sounds reductive, but given the situation both Liz and Ellie are faced with, they are in default, reactive positions. That their reactions are sometimes harshly honest in the extreme is understatement and honesty is a main theme throughout the film.

I don’t want to discuss plot not just because it’s a simple one or because there isn’t much to be described; it’s mostly that this is one of the few Aronofsky films I’ve seen where the thematic structures and sometimes heavy handed symbolism took supportive places. It may help that Aronofsky didn’t write the film; it’s based on the play by Samuel D. Hunter who had Aronofsky in mind to direct the adaptation. What ensued was pretty much a full collaboration with the director insisting on Hunter’s presence on set, unusual in filmmaking these days (or really, any day).

Hunter himself has made no bones about not wanting to set up distance from his characters, and certainly not ironic distance. He has stated that he is very much in earnest about his work and the people who inhabit his plays and you feel throughout the film a deep, true empathy for all concerned. 

The issues and trauma of abandonment, religious abuse, the trauma of losing those you love most dearly, and a throughline of struggling to connect and do that one right thing in your life give shades and layers of emotional depth and meaning to each scene. There are moments where the film threatens to go into a slightly more precious direction, but this is avoided by a kind of pulling back, either through Charlie’s own self-aware humor or Liz’s haranguing. Ellie doesn’t let Charlie (or anyone) off the hook; every moment Sink is in frame, she’s a prism of emotion - erratic, mean, selfish, nasty, and conceited - all undercut by the vulnerability in her eyes and voice. 

The religious antagonism presents itself in the form of Thomas (Ty Simpkins from “Iron Man 3”, “Jurassic World” and the “Insidious” series), a missionary from the New Life Church in town. He encounters Charlie as Charlie is rubbing one out to some gay porn and later suffers a cardiac event. Charlie has Thomas read him an essay on “Moby Dick” and this seems to restore Charlie to some degree of stability. Liz shows up and pretty much throws Thomas out; she doesn’t like the Church and as will become clear, very much has her reasons.

Later in the film, Ellie draws Thomas out and gets him to reveal that he’s not completely who he says he is. The New Life Church no longer goes door-to-door, but we discover that Thomas has taken it upon himself to do so. We learn that he was a heavy pot smoker, that he was alienated from his father who was a minister, that he was frustrated by the lack of genuine outreach of his church in Iowa (the action here takes place in Idaho), and so he stole the church’s petty cash, hopped a bus, and found himself on the receiving end of Ellie’s casuistry, needling, and to a degree, seduction, insofar as she got him a little buzzed. I should add that Simpkins does a fine job, too, but that his character is - perhaps of necessity - more of a plot device than as fully “felt” as Liz and Ellie. 

In moments with Thomas, we’re on the borderline of character-as-symbol outweighing character-as-person but both are almost subsumed by the use of the character as a component in the larger narrative of Charlie’s backstory. These have to be the most difficult characters for writers and performers, let alone directors. With Aronofsky, the symbol can threaten to outweigh all the other narrative elements, but here it remains only barely.

For much of the film, our focus is around Charlie and his attempt to reconnect with Ellie, whom he’d not seen in eight years. When we first meet her, she’s abrasive and abusive and fueled by rage at her father. It could be either dire miserablism we’re descending into or perhaps, we feel this early on, the setting of a redemption arc. It’s neither: Aronofsky and Hunter have something grander and dare I say it, more graceful in mind.

None of this is to say that there aren’t some very tough moments in this movie. The centerpiece where we see Charlie binge eating is tantamount to watching (almost) a torture sequence in “Hostel”. Of course, it’s much more than that, but it’s also when so much of the “Moby Dick” as subtext presents itself more overtly and the lines from the essay that Charlie repeats throughout gain more meaning: “I was very saddened by this book, and I felt many emotions for the characters.  And I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while.  This book made me think about my own life … “

Throughout the film, Charlie is presented as a man of whale like proportions and when he rises up to use his walker, the image calls to mind a cetacean breaching; it isn’t abhorrent or repulsive. If anything, there is a kind of magnificence to Charlie’s effort. Merely standing is an effort, a struggle, but he does it. 

In another scene when Ellie tells Charlie to walk toward her, he fails, and falls over on his couch crushing an end table. Ellie is disgusted with her father - no doubt for his appearance but also for his inability to pull himself together. Of course, she is riven with hatred at his leaving her and her mother behind and seemingly all but forgetting them.

Liz is more forgiving but is wrung out from caring for Charlie. As a nurse, she knows how close to death he is and her repeated admonitions to go to a hospital and seek medical care fall on deaf ears, particularly in the face of the not unfamiliar refrain of not wanting to fall into medical debt that can’t be repaid.

Hunter and Aronofsky play their cards close to their chests. As with Thomas, no one is quite what they seem early on. Not Thomas, not Liz, not even Ellie in a couple of ways, and in a significant degree, not even Charlie. Except that, despite his deception, it was in the service of what has kept him going; ensuring a future for his daughter. 

This isn’t to say that “The Whale” is some kind of puzzle; it’s the unfolding of a father’s truth, of failed relationships that might be saved, of the possibility of a redemption for people others have given up hope on ever being what they want those others to be, and the price paid for it all. 

If I’m speaking elliptically, it’s because nothing I can say would make this movie live the way it does on its own terms. I don’t know that “The Whale” is Aronofsky’s masterwork. I think that remains “Black Swan” for me, but it’s a close call. This is a more intimate film, more so than “The Wrestler” and far less abstract than “Mother!” Its hope is also more genuine than in nine-tenths of other films that proffer it. 

I do need to recognize Samantha Morton’s appearance as Mary, Charlie’s ex-wife. Morton remains reliably great (she has never disappointed, and even her brief appearance in “She Said” is a standout) and in her extensive two handed with Fraser, as they go back over their shared history of failure as parents and people, she is simply devastating. She is Charlie’s polar opposite; she mocks his optimism and he tells her it’s to balance each other out. She decries their daughter as evil but Charlie sees only how remarkable and good Ellie really is. 

Thankfully, all of this plays out better than I’ve just described it. While there are moments that come close to unbearable, and manipulated, tear-jerking, Aronofsky and Hunter have deeper veins to explore and pull back from technique that would cheapen the enterprise. If there is still some clunkiness (and there isn’t much, really) in the film, it’s overshadowed by the thoroughgoing honesty of the performances. 

That brings us back to Charlie’s theme; he keeps himself hidden, blacked out, from his students online so they can’t see him. After an email in which he tells him that nothing matters and admonishes them to just be honest (and gets fired as a result), he reveals himself to them. One girl laughs, the others seem somewhere on the spectrum of shock and repulsion, but their reactions don’t matter to Charlie. What does are the expressions of feelings some of his class have shared with him and that he reads back to them. He tells them that the class doesn’t matter, college doesn’t matter, but that this does; being honest with yourself and by extension, in your writing.

A point for discussion would be - if this piece were a class - if Charlie himself was honest the whole time. I think we would have to look at the larger issue of why he was doing what he was doing and why he made the decisions he had made in the wake of his partner’s death. His descent might seem tragic and assuredly so, but there is a kind of salvation/redemption that Charlie is going for that falls in line with everything else we learn about him. And it’s down to Fraser to show us that and he does, beautifully and frankly.

Frankly, with grace.

Additional thoughts:

This is may be Rob Simonsen’s finest score. The swells of the orchestra evoke the ocean and rather than bring atonality upfront during times of crisis, the music is more recessed. It literally underscores the action (as opposed to foregrounding it).

Matthew Libatique kills it again as Aronofsky’s cinematography of choice. They’ve been working together since the early days of “Protozoa” (thirty years ago, I think). His work for other directors is also exceptional (“Don’t Worry, Darling” being the latest); but with Aronofsky, there’s a consistent sense of filmed spaces as psychological spaces as well as representing/filling out narrative dimensions. This isn’t as flashy as, say, “Black Swan” or “Mother!”, but it is note perfect for filling out the needs of the script and the director’s vision.

And last - kind of a major spoiler, the essay was written by Ellie in eighth grade. Charlie clings to it like a sacred text on the one hand but extols it as the most honest essay he’s ever read. Consequently, it is proof to him of Ellie’s innately remarkable and good nature, the lens through which and by which he sees her. 

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