Editor’s Note: After a few years working remotely, Nick Johnston is back in Canada all week covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. We’re all very excited! Read through our continuing coverage of TIFF 2022, check out our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Darren Aronofsky makes a massive — and I mean massive — box office failure centrally constructed around his passion for his lead, and, after spending a few years lying low, returns with a small-scale drama about a golden-hearted outsider with memorable features who also happens to be a shitty father. It comes from an acclaimed author, and stars an actor who, following years of torment, deserves a comeback vehicle that proves, once and for all, that he is more than just some kind of sideshow attraction in the press and online. It attempts to be a sort of “realist” counterpoint to Aronofsky’s more stylized work, which means his editors pace themselves with the scissors, and ends ambiguously. It premieres at the Fall Festivals and becomes an Oscar contender almost overnight, with the lead receiving those laurels he should have earned long ago. The only difference, at this point, between The Wrestler and The Whale is that The Wrestler is a good movie – Aronofsky’s best by a country mile and a bonafide masterpiece – and The Whale is, well, The Whale.
To be clear, it’s not fair to expect a filmmaker to have the same perspective they did nearly fifteen years ago, and only the ones making the most boring possible art can maintain that kind of slight thematic continuity to their work. But Aronofsky’s spent the last ten or so years, following the success of Black Swan crafting a bizarrely anti-natalist trilogy of works, ones that perfectly dovetail with alterations to his personal life. Noah is both about God’s rejection of his creation — it lays out all of the reasons why mankind was both right to be exiled from Eden and the horrors they inflict upon the other beings and environments they come into contact with — but it’s also about a patriarch attempting to hold his family together through tumult, only to be disappointed, somewhat, with his own children. mother! took a similar tack in its environmentalism and depictions of people as brutish and stupid metaphors (which, despite Aronofsky’s pleading in interviews, I have never found as a wholly compelling explanation for how the text operates), yet it’s also about the collapse of a family because of the overwhelming demands of the artist-God who just wants a little silence so he can write. Bardem’s supposed to be “the villain,” but he’s also an authorial stand-in for whom Aronofsky has sympathy, with human suffering forming the kindling for his creative fire, with the regret of the loss of his wife and child being a necessary symptom of continuing to develop his craft.
The Whale continues this throughline by showing the fallout from a family’s collapse: Charlie (Brendan Fraser), the patriarch, has abandoned his wife and child for the possibility of love and a life lived honestly with another, and, years later, hefinds himself alone and isolated after that relationship comes to a tragic end. That torment alone is not enough for him to atone for his sins, and writer Samuel D. Hunter heaps miseries upon miseries upon him. The most immediately obvious of these is his weight: Charlie weighs over 600 pounds and is quite clearly dying from his overeating, with his blood pressure, taken each day by his sole friend, a nurse named Liz (Hong Chau), staying at levels so high that it’s a wonder he’s not dead already. Yet Charlie doesn’t want any help, frequently begging Liz not to call an ambulance because he says he can’t afford it, and he’s resigned himself to the grave. But this isn’t the gleeful indulgence of something like La Grand Bouffe, which featured Marcello Mastrioni and bros eating themselves to death in an orgiastic excess, it’s meant to be pathetic, as with your typical episode of My Six Hundred Pound Life, since shame is the primary emotion that the film intends Charlie to feel. He teaches his English classes remotely from his house in Idaho, and tells his students that the camera on his laptop is busted so that they don’t have to see his face and the squalor in which he lives.
This is all intended for your gawks and gasps, wondering what trauma might cause a person to do something like this to themselves, and Hunter attempts to provide a reason why. It’s pretty simple, honestly, given that it’s because of internalized guilt for acting on his desires and neglecting his responsibilities, with Charlie’s heart seeming to have a moral character: Any time he’s not actively moping, by expressing himself in some fashion, he has a minor heart attack. Such is how the film begins, with Charlie nearly keeling over after masturbating to gay porn on his laptop, only to have his life saved by a passing missionary (Ty Simpkins) that’s connected to a cultish church whose teachings Charlie’s intimately acquainted with. There are many scenes like this, where Charlie has some small moment of joy or pleasure or even a release of semi-righteous anger, but the heart is there to stop him in their tracks so whomever is yelling at him can continue with their brusing barbs. Most of these insults come from his estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), who, for the most part, is portrayed, for the most part, as a garden-variety sociopath only hours away from telling what few pals she has not to come to school tomorrow. That’s not intended to be flippant, either: once you watch the film, you’ll have a good sense as to just how fucking mean this child is, to the point where it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she’d be capable of genuine horrors, and it’s one that her mother (Samantha Morton) actively dreads. She’s in the process of washing her hands of her hopes for Ellie’s future well-being, but Charlie refuses to give up the idea that there might be good within her still. So, he offers to pay her for her company, helping her rewrite essays for English class while she goes off about how fat and disgusting he is or while she crouches over her phone, posting unflattering candid shots of her mother and father to her Facebook, accompanied by brutal captions.
The anti-natalism — the “Good Lord, what a nightmare is it having children who will ultimately destroy you in the process of their self-actualization and internalize every single thing you do to improve your own happiness” — is relatively new in the whole scale of Aronofsky’s career, but it fits comfortably in the whole of his filmography in other ways. The sort of whimpering suicide that Charlie is attempting is a hallmark of Aronofsky’s films, albeit it’s usually off-set by the main character(s)’s potent “obsessions,” which can be anything from ballet fame (Black Swan), heroin (Requiem for a Dream), discovering the secrets of the Talmud (Pi), or yearning to preserve naturally-ephemeral love eternally (The Fountain). Of course, the wages for these sins of the passionate is suffering and/or death, but Aronofsky has rarely been this cruel, perhaps because this is an impulse that he can relate to on a more deeper level than in, say, The Wrestler, when the idea of raising children following a divorce was slightly more abstract to him than it is now. But there’s so little there to mitigate the overwhelming pain that it’s impossible to ignore.
This isn’t your typical tonal discord, given that it’s intended to be the opposite: To do any of those neat editing tricks or have a kind of style would distract you from the fact that you are supposed to be feeling devastated from the first frame onward until we White Out and the credits begin to roll. Befitting its origins as a play, Aronofsky shoots The Whale like it’s a multi-camera sitcom, with his lens following each character from a stationary point as they move about the room, because finding some way to make this particularly cinematic would distract the audience from their feelings. It is aggressively overscored, which is saying something given that the dude made Requiem for a Dream, but the droning sounds of sad strings become treacly when they’re deployed every single time that Charlie tries to stand with his walker or has a particularly sad expression or feels a pain in his chest. The Whale is pathetic, yet it’s not because of our protagonist’s circumstances or the tumult he is put through: It’s because Aronofsky is trying so goddamned hard to wring every last salty drop out of your tear ducts that he loses sight of the wonderful gift he’s been given by his lead.
To say that Brendan Fraser is nearly as good as Mickey Rourke was a decade ago as Randy “The Ram” isn’t an understatement. Fraser spent much of his career, like Rourke, as a joke, especially in an era where few folks cared to appreciate his talents as a comic and a leading man. He had oodles of charisma, possessed great comedic timing, and was shockingly soulful in organic ways that contrasted with both his matinee-idol good looks and the type of films he worked in. But trouble derailed his career following Journey to the Center of the Earth, which you can read about elsewhere, and though he’s been wanting to work, he hasn’t been able to. This is what it looks like when a decade’s worth of emotional turmoil breaks through to the audience, and Aronofsky’s been lucky enough to have two performers with real pain that they’ve been willing to plumb. Rourke’s charm acted, along with his battered face, as a mask for a man who’s mourning glory days long passed by, and Fraser’s deep and yearning eyes ground an inorganic character who is almost wholly invented to be a sin-eater for those around him and a font of eternally springing hope and despair in some manner of truth. His body — which Fraser uses to give a towering physical performance — may be the cross he has been nailed to, the scattered Romans and denying disciples at his feat may be to blame for some of his circumstances (despite the mission ultimately being his own), and the passion play itself might be made in a dishonest, cloying, miserable and self-pitying way, but when Fraser cries out “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” it is impossible not to be deeply moved. If only his faith in Aronofsky had been rewarded.