Brendan Fraser Offers the Performance of His Career in Devastating ‘THE WHALE’

Darren Aronofsky makes movies about people killing themselves. Sometimes unwittingly (Requiem for a Dream). Sometimes intentionally (The Wrestler). Sometimes in a fit of obsession (Black Swan). Sometimes as an act of salvation (π). In his heartbreaking weepy, The Whale, a show-stopping Brendan Fraser plays a morbidly obese man actively killing himself with calories. Aronofsky is no stranger to the slo-mo suicide drama and The Whale counts amongst his most heart-wrenching tragedies yet. Be prepared to ugly cry.

In his eighth feature film, Aronofsky does what he does best: staging the comeback performance of a lifetime. In Requiem for a Dream, the challenger-brand auteur stepped out of Ellen Burstyn’s way to allow for one of the great haunting performances of the 2000’s. Eight years later in The Wrestler, Aronofsky revitalized Mickey Rourke’s career – if only for a brief moment before Iron Man 2 put it back to bed. His next film landed Natalie Portman a Best Actress Academy Award for her hypnotic work in Black Swan.

Even the less critically acclaimed turns in Aronofsky’s features reveal actors at the top of their game. The man makes Marlon Wayans pop as a dramatic force for God sakes. For Brendan Fraser to earn a place amongst the wall of great Aronofsky performances is no small feat. And yet, there’s an argument to be made that he bests them all.

Fraser is Charlie, a 600-pound English professor. Charlie teaches online classes with his camera off so that his students cannot see him. He’s so shy about his appearance that he won’t even greet the pizza guy dropping off his near-nightly order. Shame has a regular spot at Charlie’s dinner table, which also happens to be the couch he pretty much lives on. The Whale opens as Charlie’s life begins to end: congestive heart failure has set in. His no-nonsense caregiver Liz (Hong Chau) doubts he’ll make it to the weekend if he doesn’t go to the emergency room. For reasons that are not immediately clear, Charlie refuses. He busies himself with dying. Eating himself to death as if on a mission.

Before he’s six feet under, Charlie resolves to set things right with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink). Their relationship stopped dead a decade ago when Charlie left Ellie’s mom for a former male student. Her resentment is absolute. The only way Charlie can get his daughter to talk to him is by offering her every penny he has: roughly 120,000 dollars.

Adapted from his own stage production, screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter leans into the aching humanity of Charlie. Sometimes at the expense of everything else. There’s a dichotomy that wrestles within the character; he’s given up on himself but not humanity. His almost fatalistic optimism extends to the rest of the world and yet he figures himself too far gone to be saved. This tension makes for an absolute devastating reckoning with the very notion of salvation, especially as a peculiar missionary (Ty Simpkins) enters the equation to further complicate things.

Hunter’s work either can’t or doesn’t want to escape the material’s stagey roots. A claustrophobic chamber piece filmed in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, The Whale is designed for discomfort. The camera never drifts far from Charlie’s chambers, exiting his stuffy apartment only for a moment or two to the porch where other characters converse Charlie-free. We can only guess how long Charlie has been a shut in but for the two hours we spend with him, we too are shut in.

Much like Charlie pleads his students and daughter to forget convention and just write something honest, Aronofsky’s filmmaking leans into the sentimental melodrama of the material. Can it be heavy-handed in its themes and imagery? Yes, but that’s a definitive feature of Aronofsky’s works. Not a design flaw. The raw, unabashed commitment to these motifs and visual bombast is part of the appeal. Aronofsky doesn’t pull punches. He’s not often subtle. His intentions are branded right into the celluloid. This viewer found his exploration of a tragic figure like Charlie profoundly affecting. There were tears.

The amount of skill that goes into perfecting the performance that fuels this movie cannot be understated. Fraser is simply titanic here. There’s such kindness in his eyes, clouded sometimes with self-loathing but never vengeful. Never clear. His is a sensitive performance of an almost unmatched degree. Scenes that find Fraser, under untold pounds of prosthetics, shoveling pizza, subs, and candy into his mouth as some form of self-destruction or suicide are as visceral and gut-churning as anything in a horror movie this year. In that sense, The Whale is an anti-popcorn movie. As in it makes you want to pour your bowl of popcorn right on the floor and stomp all over it. In doing so, we would do what Charlie cannot.

Beneath the pain, the anguish, the prosthetics, Fraser does something miraculous. Anchoring Charlie’s trauma in his own, the once A-list star taps his publicly-recorded anguish and ostracism and turns it into something truly transcendent. Heartbreaking and so deeply felt, there’s something both so specific and yet universal about Fraser’s turn here. His is the best performance of the year. Get this whale an Oscar.

CONCLUSION: You’ve surely already heard that Brendan Fraser is a knock-out in ‘The Whale.’ The rumors are true. He’s simply astounding. Darren Aronofsky’s work is less subtle (per usual) but serves to spotlight every ounce of brilliance pouring out of Fraser. One of the year’s bests.