The Whale

Read Deadline's review of Darren Aronofsky's 'The Whale' starring Brendan Fraser and premiering at the Venice Film Festival.

Given the industry affection for Florian Zeller’s The Father, a similarly inventive filmed-stage experience, it’s not hard to see The Whale attracting similar awards buzz and not just for Fraser’s lead — there’s the terrific Hong Chau, who can command attention with the mere stubbing of a cigarette, and Samantha Morton, who brings heartbreak to a glorified cameo. But it’s also a mark of Aronofsky’s acuity as director that Charlie never becomes at all freakish or monstrous — that job falls to Ellie, a friendless Facebook bully who is obviously talented but prefers to stew in her own hostility. His new competition film [The Whale](https://deadline.com/tag/the-whale/) opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man. It’s a testament to Fraser’s incredibly soulful portrayal of Charlie that the make-up elements — notably his thinning hair, doughy face and bloated body — become almost invisible once the initial shock of seeing Dudley Do-Right in such terrible shape has passed. After his spell in the self-indulgent wilderness with Noah and Mother!, however, The Whale suggests the director is very much back as that Oscar bellwether, cutting the line to put a never-better This, Charlie’s first real chance to bond with his daughter, is kicked to the curb with the arrival of Mary (Samantha Morton), Charlie’s troubled and still wounded ex-wife.

VENICE, Italy (AP) — Brendan Fraser is having a moment at the Venice International Film Festival. The once ubiquitous movie star of “The Mummy” franchise ...

And, in “The Whale,” it’s not just a single apartment, it’s also a character who doesn’t move much. “For someone like Charlie to see that there’s good in someone like Ellie, it’s throwing her for a loop.” “The Whale” was Aronofsky's favorite kind of challenge — in that it had so many limitations. “The last few years, so many of us have lost so much. “I was afraid to write it,” he said. And A24 plans to release it in theaters on Dec. "His superpower is to see the good in others and bring that out of them.” Aronofsky and his actors could be poised to leave with trophies in hand this year, too. I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed, as you would feel stepping off of a boat in Venice,” Fraser said. “To a lot of Sam Hunter’s pain, it took me 10 years to make this movie and that’s because it took me 10 years to cast,” Aronofsky said. “She’s got a lot of things to say so she comes in hot. While the film already has pundits predicting Oscar nominations, Fraser is trying not to think about whether awards are in his future.

Darren Aronofsky's new film stars Brendan Fraser as a morbidly obese professor. It's hard to imagine anyone being as captivating in the role, ...

The Whale is a kind of companion piece to the director's 2008 hit, The Wrestler (although, unusually for Aronofsky, he didn't write either of them), in that it involves a man with an estranged daughter, a heart condition, and a body he has pushed to painfully unhealthy extremes. Fraser richly deserves to be nominated for a best actor Oscar, and if that doesn't happen, I won't just eat my hat, I'll eat as many pizzas and cheese-and-meatball sandwiches as Charlie gets through in the film. For a film that opens with a 40-stone man suffering chest spasms after masturbating to online pornography, The Whale turns out to be disappointingly stodgy and sentimental. (One of Charlie's favourite books is Moby Dick, so the title isn't just a reference to his size.) It's rare to see prosthetic make-up on this scale outside of a body-horror movie, but it's so well done that the viewer comes to accept it within minutes. But all Charlie cares about is talking to Ellie (Sadie Sink), the 17-year-old daughter he hasn't seen since he left her and her mother (Samantha Morton) eight years earlier. The reason for this shyness is that he has been depressed since the suicide of his lover, several years ago, and he has kept eating to the point where he is morbidly obese.

Darren Aronofsky's latest walks a fine line between compassion and exploitation, but its star gives a refined, mournful performance.

And yet to look into his eyes is to see a person who’s willing himself to die, even as he wishes he had the will to live. Charlie is a bit of a pushover, too eager to see the good in others even as he’s unable to acknowledge his own sterling qualities. (The movie’s title is a reference to Moby Dick, the subject of an essay Charlie loves and returns to again and again for comfort.) There are so many ways in which this guy is just a drag to be around; his self-destruction is at least partly entwined with his self-centeredness. [Mother!](https://time.com/4951193/darren-aronofsky-mother-director/) was to some a tortured, pointless spectacle, to others a cautionary tale about the potential cruelty of the creative impulse. His compulsion is a kind of suicide pact he’s made with himself, and he’s locked in a tricky cycle: his increasing weight seems to have made him more depressed and less able to cope, a condition he self-medicates by eating. Charlie’s grief, and what he sees as the mistakes he’s made in his life, have filled him with anxiety and guilt, and the only way he can cope with those feelings is to eat his way through them, even past the point where he knows his excessive weight is killing him. Shot by his frequent collaborator Matthew Libatique, the movie has a dank, used-dishwater look—to represent Charlie’s despair, the total lack of light in his life, of course. He has no insurance, so he relies on his closest—and only—friend, Liz ( [Hong Chau](https://time.com/5027082/hong-chau-gets-big-break-in-miniature/), in a bright, bracing performance), who is, luckily, a nurse, and who also has a knack for stopping by at just the right moment. [Darren Aronofsky’s](https://content.time.com/time/photoessays/10questions/0,30255,2040711,00.html) The Whale—playing in competition at the 79th [Venice Film Festival](https://time.com/6210765/bones-and-all-review/)— [Brendan Fraser](https://time.com/5171977/brendan-fraser-philip-berk-hfpa-sexual-assault/) plays Charlie, a man who has given up on life, which in turn affects how and what he eats. His 2010 nutso-ballerina saga Black Swan was either a work of spangled dorkiness that was impossible to take seriously, or a cautionary tale about the potential cruelty of the creative impulse. The Whale, at least, is a different kind of film for Aronofsky, who has managed to pry the camera’s gaze away from his own navel.

Darren Aronofsky's The Whale fails Brendan Fraser, saddling him with a reductive role, that never moves beyond the closed-circuit claptrap.

The Whale does not engage outside of the known narrative of the actor in the film — it’s his comeback! (Reminder: the character is physically introduced through masturbation which signals the desire to shock with his body, right from the get, something opposite of the tear-drenched ending and partially why the ending doesn’t feel earned to me). He has a set routine, which includes regular visits from his caretaker, who has ties to his past (Hong Chau), and Dan, the pizza delivery guy who follows the regular instructions of delivery — leave on the ledge, money is in the mailbox. Morton, too, was more of a mainstay in the early 2000s and has faded into lesser roles. The Whale is Fraser’s first leading role in a theatrical movie in a decade. Therein lies part of the problem of The Whale, the main character is not a vessel for his own journey but for a secondary character, and, by extension, the audience.

Darren Aronofsky seamlessly adapts Samuel L. Hunter's play but can't transcend the play's problems.

Charlie has a friend of sorts, Liz (Hong Chau), who happens to be a nurse, and when she comes over and learns that his blood pressure is in the 240/130 range, she declares it an emergency situation. The movie carries us along, tethering the audience to Fraser’s intensely lived-in and touching performance, yet the more it goes on the more its drama is interlaced with nagging contrivances, like the whole issue of why this father and daughter were ever so separated from each other. If only the rest of the movie were that convincing! In case there is any doubt he needs saving, “The Whale” quickly establishes that he’s an addict living a life of isolated misery and self-disgust, scarfing away his despair (at various points we see him going at a bucket of fried chicken, a drawer full of candy, and voluminous take-out pizzas from Gambino’s, all of which is rather sad to behold). But a couple of other characters enter the movie — and when Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie’s 17-year-old daughter, shows up, we notice that she has a really spiky and abrasive personality. And in “ [The Whale](https://variety.com/t/the-whale/),” directed by [Darren Aronofsky](https://variety.com/t/darren-aronofsky/) (who shepherded Rourke’s return in “The Wrestler”), Fraser is a better actor — slyer, subtler, more haunting — than he has ever been. Andy became the love of Charlie’s life, so he left the life he had behind. He’s gentle and spry, with a quick temperament — you might even say there’s something light about him — and this allows us, from the start, to see the man buried in the fat. [Brendan Fraser](https://variety.com/t/brendan-fraser/) — not that he ever really went away — has been a reminder of how much affection so many of us had for him back in the ’90s, when he had his moment in movies like “School Ties” and “Encino Man” and “Gods and Monsters” and “The Mummy.” Yet let’s be honest: This is not the comeback of John Travolta or Mickey Rourke. It’s hard not to notice that Liz, given how much she’s taking care of Charlie, has a spiky and rather abrasive personality. The actor sinks himself into that body, so that even as we’re gawking at a fellow the size of Jabba the Hutt we register the familiar soulful look in the eye, the distended remnants of the Fraser handsomeness. Fraser has been outfitted with a digital fat suit (the effects that bulk him up are a blend of prosthetics and CGI), and the result is that we see someone who looks at home in his flesh.

Brendan Fraser's return to Hollywood at the 79th Venice Film Festival was met with many tears. During Sunday night's world premiere of "The Whale", ...

“The Whale”‘s screenplay was written by Samuel D. A number of other audience members also shed tears during “The Whale”‘s heartbreaking final scenes. In the psychological drama, directed by “Black Swan”‘s Darren Aronofsky, Fraser portrays a 600-pound gay man confined to a wheelchair.

Brendan Fraser attends "The Whale" & "Filming Italy Best Movie Achievement Award" red carpet at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 4 in ...

[According to Variety, ](https://variety.com/2022/film/news/brendan-fraser-the-whale-weight-prosthetics-venice-1235359484/) "The Mummy" star is being touted as a serious Oscars contender with his portrayal in the drama. [his performance in "The Whale," ](https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/27/entertainment/brendan-fraser-the-whale/index.html)

Body horror takes a new form in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale, which chronicles the long, slow suicide of a morbidly obese man with pitiless candour but an ...

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Here at The A.V. Club, we know that there's nothing that our readers care about more than how many minutes people clap for after a movie premieres at a ...

[groped by former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk](https://www.avclub.com/brendan-fraser-says-he-was-groped-by-ex-hfpa-president-1823237740), and believes that the fallout from that interaction left him all but blacklisted for over a decade. I wanted to know what I was capable of.” That’s the start of an Oscar campaign if we’ve ever heard one. On Sunday night, Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale premiered in Venice, where it received a six-minute standing ovation. Now, there is new clapping to talk about and it may even move you (not clickbait!). The actor told Club, we know that there’s nothing that our readers care about more than how many minutes people clap for after a movie premieres at a European film festival.

The 2022 Venice Film Festival is halfway through its run and, as expected, the movie event has brought together a slate of titles that have become this ...

The trailer for the movie is yet to be released. Clearly moved and trying to fight back tears, Fraser does an exaggerated bow and prepares to exit the theater, but is prompted to stay due to the continuous roar of applause. The 2022 Venice Film Festival is halfway through its run and, as expected, the movie event has brought together a slate of titles that have become this year’s standouts, and we’ll certainly hear from them in the months to come.

The Whale premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, so what are critics saying about Brendan Fraser's big comeback?

[Brendan Fraser and his reintroduction to Hollywood](https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/brendan-fraser-explains-why-darren-aronofskys-the-whale-was-perfect-for-his-reintroduction-into-hollywood) via this movie, so it will definitely be interesting to see what recognition comes from it. The critic says: So let’s get to the reviews, starting with [Games Radar+](https://www.gamesradar.com/the-whale-review/)’s Jane Crowther. From the review: The movie reportedly received a [The Whale was already generating Oscar buzz](https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/way-too-early-2023-best-picture-predictions).

Actor Brendan Fraser received a six-minute standing ovation Sunday night at the Venice Film Festival, after making a comeback to the profession following ...

Dude had a super unfair shake in Hollywood, but now it's (hopefully) coming around and he's going to get his due," Fraser had breakout roles in George of the Jungle (1997) and The Mummy (1999). Rooting for all your success brother and congrats to my bud Darren Aronofsky.— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) He underwent a laminectomy (a procedure to remove vertebrae from the spine), a partial knee replacement and vocal cord repair, "Welcome back Brendan Fraser. He supported me coming into his Mummy Returns franchise for my first ever role, which kicked off my Hollywood career.

On three premieres from Venice, including The Whale and Don't Worry Darling.

On the other hand, every now and then it latches onto a groove of narrative momentum and goes with it to some purpose. [Gladiator](/reviews/gladiator-2000)” costar [Russell Crowe](/cast-and-crew/russell-crowe), “ [Camelot](/reviews/camelot-1967)” co-star [Vanessa Redgrave](/cast-and-crew/vanessa-redgrave) and “McArthur Park” songwriter [Jimmy Webb](/cast-and-crew/jimmy-webb), whose recollection is especially poignant. His performance is a physical wonder, a weird inverse bookend to his object/subject of desire in “ I was emotionally devastated by “The Whale” which is not just about Charlie but very specifically about how he reached the state the movie finds him in as it chronicles a Monday-through-Friday period in his life. Because Brendan Fraser is not himself 600 pounds, he wears a good deal of prosthetic makeup in his heartbreaking portrayal of Charlie, whose story is not the only one “The Whale” tells. Hunter (adapting his stage play), Liz ( [Hong Chau](/cast-and-crew/hong-chau)), a nurse who voluntarily looks after her friend Charlie ( [Brendan Fraser](/cast-and-crew/brendan-fraser)) notes that Charlie, who’s having an episode that convulses the entirety of his 600-pound body, is showing a blood pressure reading of 238 over 134.