The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

[Noiretirc]

Maybe they can do a digital effects thing like The Irishman.

This thread indicates much interest in the subject thus far!

[domino harvey]

I didn't even know the human body could exceed 500, let alone 600, pounds. So, I got that out of this movie already.

You must not be old enough to remember all the great pics in the Guinness Book of World Records in the 1970s:



It was glorious time to be alive

Who, to take it back to hearthesilence's post, were also referenced on the Simpsons

[therewillbeblus]

Spoiler'd for size (sorry)Show

[Monterey Jack]

Brendan lookin' phat.

[Kracker]

I didn't even know the human body could exceed 500, let alone 600, pounds. So, I got that out of this movie already.

You must not be old enough to remember all the great pics in the Guinness Book of World Records in the 1970s:



It was glorious time to be alive

Ah the famous 'World's Fattest Twins', good thing my childhood was protected from the fact that one of them died in 1979, before i was born, of a motorcycle accident. Heart failure caught up with the other one in 2001.

[Finch]

Reading this review of The Whale basically killed any slight interest (mainly in Fraser's performance) I had in watching this film.

If an alien landed on Earth and wondered whether the human species found its largest members attractive or repellent, The Whale would clearly communicate the answer. Aronofsky turns up the foley audio whenever Charlie is eating, to emphasize the wet sound of lips smacking together. He plays ominous music under these sequences, so we know Charlie’s doing something very bad indeed. Fraser’s neck and upper lip are perpetually beaded with sweat, and his T-shirt is dirty and covered in crumbs. At one point, he takes off his shirt and slowly makes his way to his bed, sagging rolls of prosthetic fat dangling off his body as he slouches toward the camera like the rough beast he is. In case viewers still don’t get that they’re supposed to find him disgusting, he recites an essay about Moby-Dick and how a whale is “a poor big animal” with no feelings.

And that’s just what Aronofsky communicates about him through the film’s directing. The story in The Whale’s first half is a gauntlet of humiliation, beginning as an evangelical missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) walks in on Charlie as he’s having a heart attack, gay porn still playing on his laptop from a pathetic attempt at masturbation. Charlie’s nurse and only friend, Liz (Hong Chau), is mostly kind to him, although she enables him with meatball subs and buckets of fried chicken. So is Thomas, although he’s less interested in Charlie as a person than as a soul to save. But Charlie’s 17-year-old daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) openly despises him, and says the most vicious things she can think of to punish Charlie for leaving her and her mom, Mary (Samantha Morton), when Ellie was 8.

Aronofsky and writer Samuel D. Hunter (adapting his own stage play) don’t reveal the condescending point of all of this until the second half of the movie: Charlie is a saint, a Christ figure, the fat man who so loved the world that he let people in his life treat him like complete dogshit in order to absolve them of their hatred, and him of his sins. Meanwhile, a subplot involving Thomas’ past life in Iowa makes the bizarre assertion that people are actually trying to help when they treat others unkindly, which can only be true if the target of that hostility doesn’t know what’s good for them. So which is it? Should a person turn the other cheek, or be cruel to be kind? Depends on whether they’re fat, it seems. Charlie never comments on other characters’ smoking and drinking, but they sure do comment on his weight...

(...)

In The Whale, Aronofsky posits his sadism as an intellectual experiment, challenging viewers to find the humanity buried under Charlie’s thick layers of fat. That’s not as benevolent of a premise as he seems to think it is. It proceeds from the assumption that a 600-pound man is inherently unlovable. It’s like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying, “You’re an abomination, but I love you anyway,” in keeping with the strong strain of self-satisfied Christianity that the film purports to critique. Audience members get to walk away proud of themselves that they shed a few tears for this disgusting whale, while gaining no new insight into what it’s actually like to be that whale. That’s not empathy. That’s pity, buried under a thick, smothering layer of contempt.

[therewillbeblus]

That sounds incredibly uncharitable, and I don't see why one would take it as the 'correct' interpretation without seeing it for themselves. Aronofsky has engaged in condescending exploitation that reads as fatalistic microassressions before with Requiem, but no review of that film should stop someone from forming their own opinion. He's also overstated his intentions before to great success in other films, and I think the bottom line is that it's very risky to bring us into a character's own self-destructive depressive existence because a viewer can interpret that as exploitative disengagement or as intimate engagement with the person's state of being; reading as ostracizing humiliation or reflexively forging a union between audience and principal, relating deeply to the self-pity and self-anger via film grammar and mise en scene. Ultimately when it comes to this kind of film, especially when we see a reviewer's reactivity this extreme, that has more to do with that viewer's own triggers than the film's actual intentions or merits. It's certainly impossible for me to be objective about Requiem..

[Finch]

Slant reviewer didn't like it either

It’s easy to see what drew the director of Noah to Hunter’s play, given how it dabbles into the realm of religious belief, albeit superficially. A young door-to-door missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), arrives at Charlie’s apartment during one of many moments when he’s indisposed and in need of help. Thomas takes this as a sign from God that he must stick around to also spiritually save the poor man, spurring on an ongoing series of blunt back-and-forths with Charlie, Ellie, and Liz, who are all to varying degrees cynical and atheistic.

All of this unsubtle narrative busywork betrays the fact that the material scarcely wrestles with its ideas about faith and empathy. Worse, neither Aronofsky nor his cast seem to really care about the reality of what it’s like to live with weight issues, at least not past what it can do to enhance an ostensibly artistic dramatic scenario. The effect is cold and calculated, right down to the performers, who spend the film trying to out-shout each other, their every word ultimately hanging dead in the air, flattening the emotional impact that they’re desperately straining for.

The Whale has been touted as a comeback for Fraser, whose talents have been underrated throughout this career, even when he was specializing in broadly comedic roles. But while it’s gratifying at times to see him put that signature puppy dog face to impassioned effect here, even his boundless expressiveness is bogged down by the film’s solemnity. “I just want to know I did one good thing in my life!” Charlie shouts near the end of The Whale, emerging out of his self-defeating funk to vocalize his growing urgency to be the supportive father he once was. But the film doesn’t give Fraser the space to intuitively build to this climactic moment, instead relying on the fussy dialogue to spell out the emotions for him. Aronofsky may think he’s presenting some kind of radically cathartic journey throughout The Whale, but all he’s doing is bringing a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.

Look, I think Aronofsky is a talented filmmaker and I've liked some of his films to varying degrees (Pi especially but also Black Swan, The Fountain and Mother!) and disliked others (Requiem for a Dream) but I'd much rather go see, say, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story than this film if it's disingenuous enough to fat-shame while pretending to be compassionate.

[therewillbeblus]

That blurb from the Slant review doesn't indicate "fat-shaming" at all to me, rather that it's another unapologetically overstated effort from Aronofsky that feels hollow. Look, I'm going to go into this with skepticism as well, as it's raising the same red flags for me too (and I dislike half his work for similar reasons), but I think there's something fundamentally misguided about linking a review and assuming it's the right way to approach a film one has never seen, especially when the mere existence of this film in our climate is going to provoke the internet to revolt against it. And, unfortunately, it seems like it's working to sway people away with neon-flashing exit signs. I'm not on Film Twitter, but sometimes when people post one-off reviews with responses that read like 'Oh so apparently this is what this film is now, let's run from it', my impressions of that space's groupthink pull appear to be seeping in here

[swo17]

So the play was described in the first post as "fiercely funny." Is any of that tone present in the film? Are reviewers missing it?

[Finch]

I think there's something fundamentally misguided about linking a review and assuming it's the right way to approach a film one has never seen, especially when the mere existence of this film in our climate is going to provoke the internet to revolt against it. And, unfortunately, it seems like it's working to sway people away with neon-flashing exit signs. I'm not on Film Twitter, but sometimes when people post one-off reviews with responses that read like 'Oh so apparently this is what this film is now, let's run from it', my impressions of that space's groupthink pull appear to be seeping in here

I get where you are coming from, TWBB, and it's a fair point; I should have explicitly stated that the review made me personally even less interested in seeing it and that I wasn't meaning to dissuade others from going to see it. I've only read Rife's review and the Slant one (neither of which I found through Film Twitter but straight from the source). I don't follow film twitter and only click on links to Radiance and Eureka tweets. Again, I'd like to stress I am not trying to tell others not to watch the film and I appreciate that other people will have a more open-minded response to those negative reviews than me, but, you know, at the same time, life is too short: this year has been rough and I'd rather watch Brandon Fraser who I have a lot of time for in Gods and Monsters or the 1999 Mummy instead of a film where at least a section of the audience is getting the impression that the movie is sneering at his character. And I guess, with that I really ought to refrain from further comments about the film until I decide to see it.

[Toland's Mitchell]

Daniel Franzese's thoughts on Brendan Fraser's casting

[mfunk9786]

All I can add to the chorus of praise for Fraser's performance is that it's indeed one of the best I've seen, and has me extending a lot more goodwill toward this moving film than it likely deserves on (especially screenwriting) merit alone. It is not a perfect film by any definition, and holding it to that standard seems to be leading to some accurately middling critical appraisals of material that is below Aronofsky's capabilities on his worst day.

But it is merely an excuse for a director/performer mind-meld to take place, and from that standpoint it's almost as though the rest of the intangibles fade to the background and we are just thinking about what Aronofsky and Fraser are doing, in my case often in open-mouthed awe. Turns out the reason Fraser was cast instead of someone else is that Fraser is a better actor than just about anybody, and The Whale is proof.

[therewillbeblus]

Teaser

[therewillbeblus]

So this isn't very good, but rereading the two pieces Finch shared, I'm inclined to agree with the Slant one more than Katie Rife's ridiculous critique. mfunk mentioned that this has script issues and he's really underplayed how problematic they are- This is one of the most overstated, obnoxiously blunt examples of poor writing I've seen in a movie in a long while (which is itself funny given Fraser's character's profession and the message of communicating honest writing equaling absolute existential merit). Aronofsky can't save the flaws with the visual flourishes he often implements to complement the themes of transparent overwriting (see the terrific mother!, where amplifying the obvious only helps the picture). He simply isn't playing to his strengths in his chamber setting, but he's also unfortunately harnessing that energy into over-directing his actors, making this doubly irritating. All the players (especially Hong Chau and Sadie Sink) are doing their best here, but none of the performers can overcome the material they're working with, or find their own voice in friction with a director clearly urging them to pitch their reactivity higher - a really tough spot for an actor to be in. That is, except for Fraser, who does manage to feel like a real human being several times throughout this thing- but sadly not the whole way through.

I really don't get Rife and co.'s committed condemnations of this being a fat-shaming exercise, because a) it's so blatantly not that, and b) there are so many other issues to take with it. Fraser's character is engaging in self-destructive behavior via overeating; but then other reveals make clear that it's not about a life choice to get fat or complicated circumstances leading to this state over time, but broader 'self-flagellation' (including harming himself economically, actively avoiding opportunities for health benefits, etc.) so the charges don't hold in their specificity. Sure, there are frustrating moments of misery porn with the heightened score that recall Aronofsky's past experience problematically sensationalizing and simplifying addiction in the also-frank Requiem for a Dream. But the film is aiming its focus at self-harm, with its Biblical references and all, and it's weird that critics who are paid to watch and analyze movies could miss something so obviously comprehensive in a small movie that's biggest problem is how obvious it is. Such myopic opinion pieces make me wonder if critics are uncomfortable breaking from the movement of toxic positivity in body image to see the film for what it is about: a depressed man who has burned his life to the ground through a health-eroding vice.

If it was about an addict on the verge of death, compulsively using drugs instead of eating subs, would they write about something else instead? And why is it uncomfortable for people to admit they find obesity revolting when they would find ceaseless substance use just as repelling? Isn't that in part why Fraser's Charlie did it - like Shirley MacLaine once said in response to looking through a broken mirror, "Good, it makes me look the way I feel" - to embrace the self-fulfilling prophecy of making himself ugly? The most honest moment in the movie comes when he goads the film's peppiest character into admitting he finds him disgusting. I imagine the critics saw this and ignored the film's themes, the power of that scene, and took it at face value of the movie's messaging. Wild, especially given the motif of Honest Words, and the various characters serving as missionaries each taking unique approaches to evoke honest words from one another. This comes up at the beginning, throughout the movie, and again at the very end. The movie beats us over the head with it. How do you miss that?

Which really leads into the curiosity of Rife's piece, making all kinds of odd suppositions sourced in her own rigidity. No... Charlie isn't the whale in the Moby Dick references... were you even paying attention? And then there's this bit:

Meanwhile, a subplot involving Thomas’ past life in Iowa makes the bizarre assertion that people are actually trying to help when they treat others unkindly, which can only be true if the target of that hostility doesn’t know what’s good for them. So which is it? Should a person turn the other cheek, or be cruel to be kind? Depends on whether they’re fat, it seems. Charlie never comments on other characters’ smoking and drinking, but they sure do comment on his weight...

Who said this can only be true if the target doesn't know what's good for them? Don't we all partly know what's good for us but rely on objective parties to help us see more peripherally, or support us in feeding the wolf of hope vs surrender? That's what happens between these characters (as mentioned just above- they are all 'missionaries', vaguely speaking), in what is definitely too emphasized and yet not taken nearly far enough, but still the most interesting side plot of the film. Why does it have to be one or the other ("Which is it?") and what is this arbitrary rule or logic you're imposing on how social psychology works? And Charlie not commenting on other people's behaviors while they comment on his shows multiple things. 1) He's not as reactive with anger as they are, which prompts all kinds of musings on why and what is actually the optimal strategy of engagement we can take with others; 2) Maybe they have a right to be angry at him, vs. the other way around, since his complacency, and neglect towards himself and others has created a lot of harm; 3) Perhaps his own behavior (ironically, given the feedback ignorant to this observation) mirrors the toxic positivity of the film's detractors, and while being a positive force is certainly important and impactful, it can (and has, once we realize more details about Fraser's role in the fate of his lover) indirectly contribute to others' pain, and be sourced in selfishness, fear, avoidance, etc.; 4.) These people are trying to help Charlie. They hate watching him kill himself, and for some of them, after trying probably every intervention in the book, they don't know what else to do sometimes (but that's fat-shaming, so they should probably just issue strengths-based language and ignore the consequences of a concerning blood pressure reading of 238/134). They're actually fallible, reactive human beings! Not that you'd recognize this from the awful dialogue. It doesn't have to be either/or though, and it's strange for a critic to be so stiff and unwilling to engage with nuance, especially towards a film that's giving us breadcrumbs to work with in that department but, again because of the dramatized script, is so clearly there for the taking.

So yeah, this movie is off-putting in a variety of ways, and not just in the bold ones that make for a barely-compelling, provocative look at self-destruction. It postures at depth and then pivots to something new, avoiding the topic like Fraser does his health and his trauma and his role in abandoning those he loves. The film is not self-conscious about this reflexive emulation, remaining shallow when as an audience we're primed to sink our teeth into the meat being suppressed. For all its candid artless conduction, The Whale has nothing perspicuous to actually say, and boy, it definitely thinks that it does. Fraser is good, and he'll probably win for this, but only because there's no real competition this year.

[Finch]

I thought this was a moving piece from Sean Donovan.

[soundchaser]

Two questions about this:

1) Has Aronofsky said anything about his decision to shoot in Academy ratio? It was, in some ways, the most interesting choice he made here.

2) What was Samantha Morton trying to do?

[therewillbeblus]

Two questions about this:

1) Has Aronofsky said anything about his decision to shoot in Academy ratio? It was, in some ways, the most interesting choice he made here.

2) What was Samantha Morton trying to do?

1) No idea, but agreed

2) I think she was trying to do her best with a poorly written part, like everyone else. There's a lot of artificial pendulum-swinging of affect going on, which maybe makes more sense coming from the neglected daughter or caring nurse friend, but not really. Morton's odd performance might stand out stronger because she has less screen time to flesh out a character to justify that range, but it's the same process going on, which seems diagnosed in a combination of a) poor writing that doesn't understand human behavior, and tries to force both interpersonal engagement and individual engagement with a character's own emotions wayyyyy too quickly, and b) Aronofsky's direction to just go bigger and louder and more melodramatic when something understated would've carried so much more weight (sorry) in earning pathos.

When you try to condense so much into a single five-minute interaction between exes with a rich, traumatizing history, there's not much for Morton to do. In being expected to cover all that ground without the right resources, she risks becoming a two-dimensional cartoon. Now that you mention it, this is, to a much more intensive degree, the same kind of problem some of us voiced about Blanchett's ineffective part as Lydia Tar. At least in the same domain of why it didn't quite work; though that part isn't palpably offensive to the eyes and ears

[davoarid]

I *read* the play last night (I live in the sticks and can never *see* any plays). There's one extremely curious change from source to film: in the play, Thomas (the boy) is a *Mormon*, and the church Charlie's boyfriend attended was a *Mormon* church--when Thomas is trying to proselytize, he's quoting from the Book of Mormon (which, when Charlie interrupts Thomas's pitch to say "I actually know everything you're telling me. I've read the complete Book of Mormon several times" Thomas's shock at this makes more sense than Film Thomas's shock at learning Charlie has read the *Bible*, as though it's some obscure text.)

Not sure what to make of this. Aronofsky--based on his work--is obviously more interested in Christianity than he is in Mormonism, and the author of the play is a Christian too. (I found an interview where Hunter states he made the play be about Mormonism because "It's America's only native religion. Plus, it's very helpful that they go door to door.") I'll say that Mormonism makes more *sense*--it makes Thomas's encounters more obviously unnerving (since the one thing *everyone* knows about Mormon missionaries is that they travel in twos--Thomas knocking on Charlie's door *alone* makes everyone rightly suspicious of him from the outset, in a way that's absent from the film version.)

The easy guess as to why they made the change is because it's easy to make art that portrays Christians as intolerant homophobes--full stop. I am extremely *not* in Aronofsky's camp--I think he's a hack--so that's why *I* think they made the change. But I'd be interested in hearing from people who *like* the guy give their thoughts on the switch.

[therewillbeblus]

Interesting, I think Christianity is more suitable to the text for a variety of reasons. It pits unconditional forgiveness vs. self-flagellating judgment, and draws upon the indirect and often concealed forms missionary work can take in everyday life that Christianity seems to mine for. I'd think that making the characters Mormons would be immediately alienating to most audiences, generally 'othering' to the group, and create a disconnect between the religion and the broader themes of the play that identify and challenge humanistic ideas in practice. Hearing about this change actually makes me respect the film more - it's one of the few elements that threatens to work about the writing.

[knives]

Wouldn’t that stuff work for Mormonism as well as mainstream Christianity?

[therewillbeblus]

I'm not as well-versed in Mormonism, so for all I know it has the exact same ideas, but the point is that those Christian principles and themes are well-established. I feel like davoarid's post gets at how highlighting problematic aspects of a religion threatens to undermine its value, which would only be easier to do if pertaining to a religion that less people were familiar with and thus was less dimensional for exploration. To be clear, Christianity is not necessarily a richer religion than Mormonism, but on a level of accessibility, a widespread audience is more aware of its many facets and so these themes can land better, already packaged as complex and contradictory under familiar umbrella. Even if there's been more publicized and extensive evidence of harm that can usurp the merits for some, there's undoubtedly been a more significant exposure, and so I'd wager that even most viewers with sensitivities to certain features of those institutions will be able to engage with the conflict in a way that might require more context if the umbrellaed religion was novel. The film is also dealing with self-destructive addictive behavior, and the longest-standing active programs treating addiction in all its forms stem from Christianity - so it feels fitting to wager that self-flagellation with forgiveness and address the concept of a Higher Power using a backdrop of the religion that informed these treatments, which in turn helped inform psychological understandings of the moral model vs. disease model of addiction, etc.

[swo17]

Mormons consider themselves Christians. The subtitle to the Book of Mormon is "Another Testament of Jesus Christ"

[beamish14]

Mormons consider themselves Christians. The subtitle to the Book of Mormon is "Another Testament of Jesus Christ"

They have a habit of calling non-LDS Christians “gentiles”, which is hilarious

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I know, okay I'll say it another way: keep it broad to old-hat Christianity in general, so the audience can access the material better and apply the broad principles to the film's themes. I think making the Christian missionary a Mormon would only complicate what the film is trying to achieve with religion as a canvas for wide brushstrokes.