When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in "The Whale," what does it see? It sees a man named Charlie who weighs 600 pounds and is slowly expiring from congestive heart failure in a dimly lit Idaho apartment. It also sees a familiar Hollywood face attached to a most unfamiliar body, enacting the kind of dramatic, prosthetically enabled transformation the movie industry likes to slobber over.
You might find these two images to be of a piece — an intuitive fusion of performer and role that reaches for, and sometimes achieves, a state of transcendent emotion. Or you may find them grotesquely at odds: the character whose every groan, wheeze and choking fit means to inspire both empathy and revulsion, and the actor whose sweaty dramatic exertions are calculated to elicit praise and applause.
Let's render that praise where it's due. There is more to Fraser's performance than his exertions, just as there is more to Charlie than the corporeal shock value that the movie front-loads him with: The opening scenes find him frenziedly masturbating to gay pornography on his couch, then doubling over with searing chest pains. It's a lot for an actor to come down from, but in a grueling chamber piece that tends to wield a dramaturgical cudgel, Fraser attempts, and mostly achieves, a symphony of surprising grace notes. He shows us Charlie's suffering, but also his sweetness; his grief, but also his good humor.
