Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, which had its North American premiere at TIFF after resounding success at its world-premiere at the Venice Film Festival, is based on a 2012 Drama Desk winning play of the same name. The playwright, Samuel D. Hunter, adapts his own play for the film version, and the film despite some divisive responses about its approach to weight and the fat-suit its main performer wears throughout, has had a generally positive response. Even in responses that are a little more tepid, the general argument seems to be that Aronofsky, one of the 21st century’s virtuosic American directors, has harnessed a stage-bound work into something wonderfully cinematic. Any issues with the film, its approach to characterisations, and the ways its resolutions unfold are all merely incidentals that Aronofsky’s own talents overcome. I am less convinced of this need to give Aronofsky the benefit of the doubt. Very much about “The Whale” does not work for me, and there’s enough culpability to go around.
I did not enjoy “The Whale”. In fact, for most of its 117-minute-long runtime, I found it to be an incredibly unpleasant experience. In some ways the unpleasantness makes sense. The film is centred on Charlie, a writing instructor who refuses to turn his camera on for his students to see him. It is not stage fright, or not quite that. Charlie is overweight, morbidly so. Basic tasks are beyond him. His 600-pound frame is a direct threat to his mortality, but he refuses to go to the doctor, citing expensive bills. This excuse becomes a plot-point late in the film to startlingly ham-fisted results. So, yes, Aronofsky isn’t trying to make this “easy” on his audience. The film presents Charlie’s crisis like a horror movie. With every leering shot, Matthew Libatique’s camera – capturing “The Whale” with the same note of dread that he evoked in Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” – presents the body here as a thing of revulsion. Rob Simonsen’s music plays up the terror, groaning from scene to scene to conjure up feelings of dread. Here, Aronofsky says, look on this sad and depressed man. Let the emotions wash over you. But what emotions, right? That’s the thing…
At every turn, Aronofsky courts discomfort, not for catharsis, not for truth or even for clarity of emotion, but for its own sake. There is nothing to illuminate us about these characters. Information is shared but actual tender genuine feelings of truth and honesty and real understanding feel out of reach. The film confines us to Charlie’s house. We watch Brendan Fraser, in prosthetics and makeup, lurk through the halls like a figure beyond hope. It is a dark and dank space, in want of light. Charlie gets multiple visitors – an ex-wife (Samantha Morton briefly, but sharply), a daughter (Sadie Sink, less impressive), a missionary with a secret (Ty Simpkins, sometimes good sometimes not) and a friend who tries to nurse him to health (Hong Chau, the film’s beacon of light). Like the house we spend time in, this is a dark and dank film. There are moments of intrigue, and Hong Chau is note perfect. But even without performing an ethics review of ”The Whale”, how dismal is it that in a film where this fat, gay and depressed man is the ostensible protagonist, there no single minute in it that feels like it emerges from him. He is almost always the object, never the subject. Each close-up of his body presents him like an object of uncertainty, or revulsion or rancour. His body is the central object of terror in a horror movie. Whenever we close-up on this sliver of skin, or that exposed bloated limb, you can see that its perspective is one which wants to shock us. But when does it ever seem as if anything in “The Whale” wants to truly understand this man. To feel what he may feel. To grieve with him. There’s all this technical precision in service of what exactly?
Remove the added crisis of this 600-pound man, very little in “The Whale” really distinguishes itself beyond the premise of ‘previously bad father reunites with his sulky teen daughter.’ It might be easy to say that Aronofsky just isn’t a good fit for the material, but that critique elides his responsibility as a director. To sum up the issues with “The Whale” as Aronofsky just not being a good fit, turns this into a crime without a criminal. But he did do this film, and even though the script’s own emptiness is liable, everything Aronofsky brings to this story seems tinged in the cruel, the inorganic or the dull. Certainly, Hunter’s adaptation of his script errs on the side of the precious without enough interiority – beyond deus-ex-machina moments of revelations. But this is where the camera has room for that that kind of excavation. But Aronofsky’s harnessing of this story feels emotionally vacuous, in touch with the script’s own emptiness. In a late scene, Charlie admonishes his class to be true for one time in an expletive laden email. Some of them are shocked by his urging, but some are inspired. They tell him some “truths” – each truth more depressing than the last, and then I realised it. For Aronofsky, his vision of truth is one ensconced in the sad and disgusting and shameful. He can only see Charlie’s moribund state as one to be objectified. He cannot see inside. And it’s there where “The Whale” feels most inert.
For many, Aronofsky’s savvy direction is key to delivering the potential melodrama of the film but to make that argument one must first interrogate the film’s central thesis when it presents Charlie’s weight as a something horrific. Whose perspective is this meant to be courting? There is no elegance in its approach. There’s never any doubt that the heavy-handed metaphorising is intention and specific, but it feels like a misuse of cinematic craft. He may be our protagonist, but the camera moves over Charlie’s body as if it is a foreign land and we are on a safari. “Moby Dick” recurs throughout the film as an important (exhausting) literary allusion, but I kept thinking about “Heart of Darkness”, another quest-novel. Aronofsky’s vision of Charlie, and his world, is like Kurtz exploring the wild of the unknown. There is uncertainty, contempt, and revulsion all embodied in the way that the camera moves slowly across him. To what end? What is the seed of an idea, creative or ideological, that the film is hanging on to? Because, if its own aesthetics are underpinned by that kind of stolid resentment, then how is the film’s central screenplay thesis of absolution as a means of emotional deliverance meant to make sense? Does Aronofsky really care to know Charlie beyond the faint allusions of his own disgust for himself, manifested in an essay he recites about the whale in “Moby Dick” as a poor big animal meant to parallel his own self-hatred? I’m doubtful.
And on a scene-to-scene level, I’m less enthused by the performers. Fraser is good. I stop short of the revelatory plaudits he’s received. If this is career-defining work, then Fraser deserves better. My ambivalence is less dismissiveness of him and more because the film’s own claustrophobic parameters make it impossible for anything natural to come out of this idea of Charlie. Rather than Charlie, who the film revolves around, it is Hong Chau’s character who feels most adept at tying each divergent arc together. Lucky for Fraser he is her main scene partner, and such is the skill of Chau – who feels like the one thing true and honest in this film – each performer feels more profound in her presence. This is especially so for Sink, who is let down both by the script and Aronofksy’s own ability to rein her in. Each line reading and glance is suffused with only the thinnest idea of contemporary American teenage girl as monster. This is a Regina George-esque manifestation of childhood trauma that feels facile, but also incredibly ingratiating. Sink is not a poor performer on her own, but she can’t thread the about-turns of the script and consistently comes off as the weakest part of it. That the film ends on a two-hander with Fraser and her leaves “The Whale” ending at its worst. Samantha Morton is dependable, when she pops up briefly, but she’s doing a lot of work to thread a character that is incredibly thin. That she manages to avoid reproach feels more like a site of Morton’s own savvy approach to performance than anything the film offers to us, or her But “The Whale” feels trapped in its own parameters. It cannot see beyond itself, which leaves a shroud of limitedness over everything. This is a woefully superficial rendering of what is meant to be a tragic figure without the care and thought to stop and consider why, and how.
Presented with this context of this man as a figure of grotesque tragedy I remain unconvinced by any of this. Worse yet, I remain unmoved. Scene after scene, “The Whale” kept preaching about the need for truth, but it’s hard to believe in something that’s so emotionally false.
The Whale will premiere in cinemas later this year.
This piece was filed as part of coverage of the 2022 Toronto Film Festival.