Toronto International Film Festival 2022: THE WHALE

Few movies at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed to elicit as much division among viewers as The Whale. That being said, festival season is often a time of extreme hyperbole. Terms like “masterpiece” or “the worst thing I’ve ever seen” are thrown out with such ease, and so much boast, that it can make you often suspicious. Still, by the time I actually sat down for the filmed adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play of the same name  —  itself a point of much controversy and debate — there was a certain kind of excitement in the air.

Having never seen the play, I can’t really speak to similarities or differences between the stage production and the one now put to screen – Hunter wrote the screenplay as well – but intuition says nothing much was changed. The story remains confined largely to the apartment of Charlie, a middle-aged English professor who’s become a shut-in with a severe eating disorder. His current weight is over 600 pounds with a blood pressure that should send him to the emergency room.

But Charlie seemingly has a death wish. We learn his eating habit was born out of the death of his partner  —  a former student he fell in love with and left his family for years earlier. Now, his only human contact outside the occasional pizza man are his students, who only see him as a blank screen during virtual lessons, and Liz; a nurse and perhaps his only friend who hints Charlie could likely drop dead any day due to congestive heart failure.

Sensing death is imminent, Charlie decides instead of seeking medical attention to make amends with his estranged daughter  —  now a teenager and not on the best behavior.

The script hones in on Charlie’s pain and guilt, as well as his desire to assist his daughter, Ellie, as a form of repentance. Along the way are conversations on spiritual forgiveness and religion spurred by a teenage missionary claiming to be from some new-age house of warship  —  more on that later.

Cinema of the grotesque

The movie’s problem, or rather the frustration I had while watching it, is the way the performances and overall aesthetics often feel in opposition to each other. Darren Aronofsky directed the picture and excels at portraying a certain kind of grime-filled grotesqueness on screen – see films such as Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, or Mother!. He’s perhaps also underrated when it comes to working actors. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single performance in any of his movies that doesn’t work. But those two aspects of his directorial arsenal have rarely felt more out of sync as they have here.

The movie’s goal is for us to empathize with Charlie, looking past the overlarge mass of a man barely able to move from his couch and seeing a kind soul gripped by grief and self-loathing. But the movie also indulges in the sight of Charlie as an unnatural spectacle. Some of this is partially baked into the script but Aronofsky himself seems unable to resist his knack for capturing the grotesque.

When he goes on an eating bender, it’s shot as though he were Jaba the Hut, grease smothered over his face, rolling slices of ham up in pizza and dunking them in jelly. When anyone outside of his immediate family or Liz takes a look at him, their reaction – matched by the score – is of such horror, you almost wait for Charlie to cry out “I’m a monster!”

A twinkle in the eye

That’s reason enough to praise Brendan Fraser. While the aesthetics of the movie are working against him, he manages still to imbue a sense of nuance and emotional fragility into his performance of Charlie, adding what humanity exists in the film. On paper, his presence appears like a sly bit of stunt casting, the kind of self-conscious “comeback” performance that calls to mind another one of Aronofsky’s works; 2008’s The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke.

In the 90s and early 2000s, Fraser was the type of leading man Hollywood loved to gravitate to, with matinee idol good looks, a twinkle in his eye and a playful sense of screwball energy. He could play broadly comic (George of the Jungle), swashbuckling action hero (The Mummy), and occasionally restrained drama (School Ties). However, his presence in movies since about 2008 has been minimal, to say the least. The actor touched on some of the reasons for this in a 2018 interview for GQ. Since then, he’s popped up in smaller parts in films such as Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move or the television series Doom Patrol.

There’s a surprise in seeing him take such a tortured role but by the end, you can’t imagine it being anyone else. That twinkle mentioned earlier, the innate goodness that Fraser exudes is the key to what makes him work in the film. While the mounds of makeup used to transform him into Charlie make the performance seem outwardly physical, it actually only works with an actor who can convey a full amount of expression just using the face.

Fraser is confined most of the picture to a couch or wheelchair. The mere act of moving is virtually impossible for Charlie without some form of assistance. All the pain, regret, self-loathing, and ultimately sweetness of the character needs to be conveyed using the face. The eyes by extension even more so. It helps for as gentle as Fraser is, he’s always been an actor who could go big. You need that under so much makeup.

The cast of players

A movie like this has you constantly thinking of the actors. They’re grasping for the themes of the material with ferocity and intensity. Some get there better than others, but it’s never for a lack of trying. As Charlie’s daughter, actress Sadie Sink from Stranger Things gets saddled with helping ring true the movie’s central arc, but it never quite crystallizes. She’s good, very good even but her character can feel like a collection of “bad-teen” stereotypes at points. As written, she has to play an idea, not a person; a possible embodiment of evil that Charlie’s intent to prove holds worth and goodness.

The same struggle holds true for Ty Simpkins, who stars as the teen missionary and has to embody a lot of the script’s religious ideas that always feel like an extra add-on instead of illuminating the story further. Samantha Morton as well enters in for one fiery scene as Charlie’s ex-wife but where the movie most comes alive are the scenes between Fraser and actress Hong Chau, stepping in as the nurse character Liz.

Their scenes together have a real weight to them. There’s an unspoken history between these two people that would come through the actor’s performances, even if the script chose not to clarify it. Watching Chau and Fraser together, I bought into the movie’s tragedy, the way pain builds inside people to the point of self-destruction.

She in particular has never been better and for all the awards buzz that seems to be going Fraser‘s way, it seems a crime to leave her out of the conversation. Their scenes also have frustration and anguish that feels honest (a word Charlie himself repeats constantly to his writing students as a badge of integrity). But it’s a shame then that by the movie’s end that honesty is lost. The overblown finale pushes the anguish to such operatic levels that it begins to ring hollow.

In Conclusion

In its final moments, The Whale reaches for the heavens. Forgiveness, redemption, and a release of pain all collide at once. No doubt both Aronofsky and Hunter want our souls to feel transported as well. Personally, I did not feel myself levitating. I wanted to roll my eyes a bit.

Watch The Whale