A review on The Whale
I’ve decided to watch a movie that I have been putting off for a while to watch, which is the 2x Oscar winner, 2022’s The Whale directed by Darren Aronofsky.
It’s a film that’s well received due to Brendan Fraser’s performance and after watching it, it had to be one of the best performances of modern cinema that I have ever seen.
Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese online college professor, isolated in his small home with the only company of his enabling nurse friend Liz. Charlie tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie who has grown to resent him.
Charlie is a man who is disgusted with himself but for someone who holds so much self-resentment, he sees the good in others, especially his hateful daughter. I find Charlie to be a saddening character, a husk of the happy man he was and lives in his guilt and constantly reminded of those he hurt. I really wish that they would’ve fleshed Charlie out more as character as I felt like the writing relied on him being pitiful for him to win audiences over.
Ellie is a complex character, but the writing has exaggerated her to be a typical teen who has a repetitive vocabulary of playground insults, but Sadie Sink intelligently acted this character with such ferocity and emotion.
Liz is played by Hong Chau; she is an amazing character who is constantly frustrated with Charlie but still cares for him and it shows with her amazing performance.
The film is extremely gloomy visually and emotionally, it deals with heavy subjects such as grief, guilt, obesity, sexuality, religion and being oneself. The film was also criticized for being shallow for just being an extremely sad movie, which I can definitely see why but still doesn’t let it completely sour the experience for me. The film was also criticized for being fatphobic, saying that it reinforces harmful stereotypes of overweight people, and that prosthetics were used. Although, I felt that the people behind this film never had any bad intentions going into it.
Overall, I really liked this movie but felt that it was still flawed. It is a movie that is inherently mean-spirited and uses pity as a source of emotional investment from the audience. I think that the protagonist, Charlie should’ve been more fleshed out as a character and not just shat on for being obese and sad. This movie is hard to watch but still is riveting for its amazing performances, I rate it a 7.5/10
