Hollywood loves a comeback story, especially when it allows them to embrace someone they've cruelly cast aside, and this awards season it's all about Brendan Fraser – beloved 90s star of The Mummy and George of the Jungle, pre-eminent himbo, and all-round nice guy who's gone from discarded has-been to frontrunner for the best actor Oscar.
Dwarfed by elaborate prosthetics that transform the one-time hunk into a morbidly obese 600-pound man, Fraser is Charlie, the reclusive English professor at the centre of The Whale, the latest film – some might suspect provocation – from Darren Aronofsky, the American director behind Black Swan, Mother! and Requiem for a Dream.
Aronofsky is rarely boring – or at the very least, he's never afraid to court ridicule – and The Whale's opening sequence does not disappoint.
We first meet Charlie as an empty black tile at the centre of the online Zoom class he's teaching, a void that Aronofsky's camera pushes into like he's inching toward the lair of a monster.
Seconds later, we find Charlie alone in his dank, dimly lit Idaho apartment, furiously masturbating to porn on his laptop. Wheezing and convulsing, he looks to be on the verge of a heart attack when a young Christian missionary (Ty Simpkins, Insidious) arrives in the nick of time to soothe him… by reading out loud from an essay analysing the themes of, in all seriousness, Moby-Dick.
"The author is trying to save us from his own sad story," Charlie repeats to himself, gasping and sweating, though not nearly as much as the screenplay.
It's the sort of moment from which a movie rarely recovers. But The Whale is just getting warmed up.
Charlie spends his days confined to his modest dwelling, binge-eating and hobbling around on a walking frame, Aronofsky's camera circling him as though sizing up a captive beast. Shooting in claustrophobic Academy ratio, the filmmaker's longtime cinematographer Matthew Libatique traps the character in a sickly amber palette, while composer Rob Simonsen's turgid, droning score tilts his every step toward some unseen, encroaching doom.
His only regular visitor is Liz (Hong Chau, The Menu; Inherent Vice), a nurse with whom he shares a long and sometimes combative friendship. Fraser and Chau have a tender, tough rapport that suggests the relationship between Charlie and Liz: She has watched, helpless, as he descended into self-abuse after the suicide of his lover, a young man who was once his student.
He's a man imprisoned by his flesh and his past.
Staring down what might be his last week alive, Charlie decides it's time for his one shot at redemption: reaching out to his estranged 16-year-old daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink, Stranger Things), the child from a marriage he walked out on nearly a decade ago.
Lured via an offer of money and help with her homework, the troubled Ellie arrives at the apartment armed with contempt.
"You would be disgusting even if you weren't this fat," she snarls at her father.
Aronofsky has done this daddy-daughter dance before, in The Wrestler, another tale of an "old, broken-down piece of meat" whose arc from rage to redemption felt hard-won – and far less contrived.
Still, Sink delivers a knockout performance, the best in the film, cutting against the screenplay's lugubrious sentiment with a disdain that, however callous, feels honest.
She brings out a levity in Fraser's performance, too; their antagonistic, sometimes witty banter reveals a spark of humanity – a tug of war between her wounded cynicism and his unbounded optimism – that nearly disperses the movie's fog of prestige gloom.
To be sure, there's a fascinating film buried somewhere here, one that's determined to explore the relationship between human bodies and societal shame.
Screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, adapting his 2012 stage play, brings much of his personal experience – his sexuality, religious background, and former eating disorder – to bear on Charlie's story, and there's a sincere attempt in the writing to tease out the connections between these elements.
Hunter is interested in the contradictions and complexities of his characters, in interrogating the dissonance between living for the flesh and the spirit – ideas that should align with Aronofsky's recurring fascination with religion and spiritual transcendence.
But what may have worked on the stage doesn't always translate to the screen.
All of theatre's worst tendencies are on display in The Whale, which is overflowing with playwright clunkers: schematic plotting, characters who exist as mouthpieces for ideas, and dialogue – Charlie exhorting his class to "think about the truth of your argument" – that etches the story's themes in font that would shame a skywriter.
And that's before we even get to the liberal quoting from Walt Whitman and – why not? – the Bible.
Meanwhile, the film's constant invocations of Moby-Dick – the source, if you hadn't already guessed, of the film's oh-so-metaphorical title – mostly bring to mind the great running gag about the book's meaningfully underlined passages in Heathers, a movie that harpooned the kind of pretentious self-pity in which The Whale wallows.
It's hard to buy into the film's gestures toward empathy when it flails to wring pathos from every moment – when its protagonist is mumbling lines like "this book made me think about my life" while sculling from a two-litre soda, an exposed, serial-killer light bulb swinging menacingly above his head; or, where every time an actor seems to be reaching a moment of emotional honesty, the moaning, mawkish score rises up like a leviathan to menace them.
(The gulf between the movie's empathic intent and its execution lends a certain credence to the argument that it's fat-phobic. But that's a whole other debate.)
Fraser, it has to be said, is for the most part very good. There's a sadness to his performance that is occasionally, genuinely affecting; a sensitivity and soul that's sprinkled with the knowledge that the actor has had a bit of a crummy time over the last few years – a once-ubiquitous multiplex presence who was forced to disappear, he says, from the toll his performances took on his body, and the shame he felt from an alleged assault at the hands of a prominent Hollywood figure.
The Whale is leavened in those moments when Fraser's boyish giggle and bright-eyed wonder peek through, heartbreaking reminders of a persona that once lit up movie screens with goofy charm.
But at the movie's worst, which is often, even Fraser suffers.
"JUST WRITE ME SOMETHING HONEST," Charlie pleads in all caps with his students toward the movie's denouement, before projectile vomiting into a kitchen trash can.
Moments later, he's blubbering, "I need to know that I've done one thing right with my life," a delivery so marinated in Oscar-reel tears that you can practically see Aronofsky reflected in Fraser's enormous, glassy eyes, waving a gold statuette off camera.
No actor could hope to weather such humiliating, fraudulent empathy, nor endure the movie's litany of glib, misty-eyed affirmations that "people are amazing".
In a film that consistently tests the limits of unintentional comedy, The Whale's risible climax – an abject lunge for transcendence that patronises both its characters and audience, blanching any traces of complexity in a rush of white light – is so over the top that it's difficult to believe it wasn't designed as parody.
There will be some in the audience who find it all very moving, and honestly, more power to them; it would be nice to feel the same.
But in the words of Ellie, characteristically raging at one point against having to write an essay on another iconic work of literature, "It's overwritten… and actually just a bunch of bullshit."
The Whale is in cinemas now.
