The star of Darren Aronofsky’s latest pseudo-religious epic wins the Oscar, but his character is no saint.
At this moment when endless hatred governs media and politics (when “hold accountable” means selective vengeance), Darren Aronofsky pretends to make The Whale about forgiveness. Its 600-pound gay male hero, Charlie (Brendan Fraser) eats himself to death yet refuses to blame anyone, not even the world that has wronged him.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie repeatedly says, to the annoyance of his female caregiver Liz (Hong Chau), whose late brother was Charlie’s lover. He’s also understanding toward his ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), his resentful teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), and Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young evangelist harboring a secret. Charlie would be a saint if Aronofsky believed in holiness. Instead, the film’s personal and social obstacles expose Aronofsky’s schematic method.
Set in a dark, cluttered space — the tract house where hermetic Charlie’s soul unfolds — The Whale feels as contrived as a stage play. It’s based on a 2013 theater text by Samuel D. Hunter, one among the recent spate of prizewinning dramatists who map out the biographical predicaments of a gay writer. These self-proclaimed “auto-dramas” are contemporary theater staples (Fun Home, A Strange Loop, Ain’t No Mo’, Fat Ham, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Take Me Out). They proclaim the grant-funded coming-out phase of the gender wars.
Aronofsky is not committed to gay spirituality (the lesbian vibes of his 2010 movie, Black Swan, were just a soft-core tease). But his appropriation of Hunter’s identity crisis conforms to the existential quandary of his other films (Mother, Noah, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream) that played with sin and redemption. Unlike the parochial Midwestern filmmakers Stephen Cone and Mark Thiedeman, who openly struggle with gay spiritual self-acceptance, Aronofsky uses The Whale for easy, unsightly, virtue-signaling.
If Aronofsky is a gay “ally” in the popular sense, it’s because he has found a convenient guise for his spiritual posturing. Charlie’s agon is never titillating like the sex-and-drugs extravaganza of Requiem, or Noah’s apocalyptic epic, or Mother’s horror-movie jamboree. This is Aronofsky’s most masochistic film since The Wrestler made Mickey Rourke pay penance for his beyond-hipster eccentricity. Now Aronofsky trades his usual eccentricity just to be in sync with the alphabet people (LGBTQ+) trend.
Problem is: The Whale is packed with so many self-righteous liberal clichés (queer victimization, anti-Christian skepticism, multiracial representation) that Aronofsky’s flights of redemption land with a thud, like a beached whale. Charlie doesn’t reach for God, he searches for pity. This conforms to Hunter’s own professed struggle with faith and also to Aronofsky’s failed search for his own beliefs, going back to his debut film Pi (1998), which exploited Orthodox Jewish custom through questionable indie-noir mannerisms.
At its most unambiguous (when Hunter and Aronofsky are not going for pride and pity), The Whale occasionally touches on the modern difficulty of faithlessness that now triggers — separates — friends, lovers, and family relations. Charlie and his cohorts are adrift. Without a spiritual anchor, their emotional relations dither between anger, shame, and regret. Even the writing students Charlie teaches in a remote-instruction program become part of the film’s shock-turns-into-forgiveness scheme. Charlie’s sexual predilection is first revealed through his video-porn habit. His physical condition is eventually revealed to his students via Zoom. This goes no deeper than Aronofsky’s superficial insight about modern-day estrangement.
There’s a bovine sweetness to the performance of former action-movie star Brendan Fraser. (We didn’t need this movie to feel sorry for his career troubles, and I prefer his characterization in The Whale to the phony humility of Colin Farrell’s retardation act in The Banshees of Inisherin.) Fraser’s most effective moments recall Al Pacino trying to do right by everyone in Dog Day Afternoon. The other actors are professional, but their effect is muted by Hunter’s deliberate remoteness — the unembarrassed self-pity that does not advance the deep empathy summoned by more-skillful gay playwrights of an earlier era such as Terence Rattigan, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams. Their expressive language sometimes touched the divine.
Charlie’s self-destructive binge is so contemporary, so maudlin, that the film’s “miraculous” climax is no more transcendent than the finale in Birdman. It comes across as a shameless gimmick. Neither Hunter nor Aronofsky seems capable of expressing the selfless sacrifice of saintliness. We’re simply meant to genuflect. Fashionable terms “auto-drama” and “auto-fiction” even let quarter-ton screw-ups be narcissists.
