‘The Whale’ Pits a Nuanced Brendan Fraser Against a Complicated Role

This opening scene puts all the movie’s pieces in play, from the cramped production design of Charlie’s rundown apartment (which the camera almost never leaves), to the looming sense that he—like Moby-Dick narrator Ishmael—is a man lost in despair. Friends and strangers alike want to help Charlie, whether through medicine or the word of God, but he’s painfully content hurtling toward an early grave, a sorrow which Fraser puts on display with wonderfully touching brush strokes.

The stage play was based on Hunter’s own struggles with weight and depression. While there are valid ongoing conversations about depicting fatness in media—especially how the prevalence of fat suits robs fat actors of work—Fraser is, at least, a fitting choice from an emotional standpoint, even though the role has historically defaulted to impersonations of fatness, rather than actors who look the part. For one thing, the combination of prosthetics and CGI employed by Aronofsky is realistically proportioned. It’s a far cry from the comical, face-elongating fat suits of shows like Friends and Dr. Death. For another, retaining Fraser’s features and expressions allows him to create a vulnerable conception of Charlie, as a man so beset by grief that he would rather die than leave his home.

The problem, however, arises when any other character enters Charlie’s purview. When he senses death approaching, he reaches out to Ellie without her mother’s knowledge and tries to reignite their relationship. Ellie is none too pleased, and she makes it known, but when she or anyone else expresses disgust for Charlie’s predicament, the camera rarely remains focused on Charlie, with the edit favoring the speaker’s close-ups as they admonish or patronize him. When it finally cuts back for Charlie’s reaction, this usually takes the form of wide shots meant to capture his entire frame. It ends up having a distancing and borderline comedic effect, since Charlie is often seen (and loathed) from other people’s point of view.

While the set is meant to evoke the wide open space of a stage, the frame’s constriction makes it feel more like a multi-camera sitcom from the ’80s or ’90s, screen shape and all.

The narrative framing is exacerbated by practically every other design choice, from the 4:3 aspect ratio that makes Charlie fill up even more of the screen, to the decision to mostly move the camera laterally across the limited set, comprising a couch facing a TV (and facing us), with a bookshelf and some other details in the background. While the set is meant to evoke the wide open space of a stage, the frame’s constriction makes it feel more like a multi-camera sitcom from the ’80s or ’90s, screen shape and all. This is unfortunately fitting for a movie that has a decades-old sitcom’s idea of a fat person, as someone who prat-falls and stuffs their face with goodies. While such moments are meant to symbolize Charlie’s childlike helplessness and his desire to die, the aforementioned shot choices frequently keep us at arm’s length. At best, the camera pities him. At worst, well…just ask Mr. Chow from The Hangover.

Fraser, however, works to draw the viewer in, far beyond the camera’s condescending gawking, through breathless proclamations of Charlie’s wide-eyed (perhaps even naïve) belief in human goodness. As an actor with his own well-documented struggles with depression, Fraser crafts a riveting, three-dimensional character who knows how to mask his sorrows beneath humorous self-loathing. But the film rarely gets to the heart of this psychological dynamic. Its aesthetic concerns lie more in external flourishes, like injecting the soundscape (and the music by Rob Simonsen) with familiar echoes of breaths and the shoreside, as if Charlie’s memories of other people and places have fallen out of reach. It’s distinctly theatrical, and it creates a haunting atmosphere, but rarely is the same artistry afforded to unearthing Charlie’s interiority. There’s a constant sense of what he lacks, between his use of a walker and other devices to grab household objects, but rarely a sense of who he is beyond his limitations.

Adding to the film’s stage-like nature, perhaps unintentionally, is how stilted some of its interactions seem, as if the lines have become too familiar to the other performers through over-repetition. It feels, at times, like watching a filmed tech rehearsal, as the likes of Sink and Simpkins lurch through the motions, falling into quick and monotonous oral rhythms that prevent the text from feeling fully considered or pored over. It’s either an unlucky coincidence, or a poorly thought-out ode to the production Aronofsky watched 10 years ago, which sparked the idea for his version. Few movies feel so overtly like stage adaptations in ways that they, perhaps, should not. Sink also plays Ellie with the kind of one-note snark that makes Charlie’s affection for her difficult to connect with. There exists a looming possibility that his belief in her innate goodness is self-delusion (his ex-wife believes Ellie is outright evil), but whatever the case may be, it’s a perspective the film never articulates. Instead, it deems surface appearance the most worthy form of presentation—a decision that’s doubly strange in a film at least nominally about considering what lies beyond a person’s body.

The characters’ actions, therefore, are made to feel like mere symbols in the present, each revolving around fatness as a physical construct witnessed from afar, rather than something lived or experienced from within.

The interactions between Chau and Fraser are the exception to the film’s off-key rhythms. They’re warm and intimate, and they aren’t solely about revealing information, the way every conversation involving Thomas or Ellie seems to be. However, that’s also a problem in itself, since Liz’s dynamic with Charlie happens to be predicated on a common past that doesn’t come to light until late into the film. In theory, this revelation informs the deeply tragic understanding Liz has of Charlie, which drives her to not only assist with his daily routine, but to give in to his demands for enormous meatball subs and other heavy foods, knowing full well the consequence. By robbing the audience of these vital emotional details, the characters’ respective pasts aren’t fleshed out until well into the 117-minute runtime, with only a passing mention of Liz being an adoptee to a white Evangelical family whom she now rejects (the broader emotional implications of this are quickly glossed over). The characters’ actions, therefore, are made to feel like mere symbols in the present, each revolving around fatness as a physical construct witnessed from afar, rather than something lived or experienced from within—let alone as an extension of Charlie’s psychological state.

With every creative decision, Aronofsky divorces Charlie from his own physical form—the very form that Fraser (and the artisans behind the effects and prosthetics) work so hard to imbue with beating humanity. In the process, the director severs the fundamental dramatic connections between Charlie’s mind and body, those that might make a story like The Whale even remotely worth telling in the first place.