The Whale reviews

[Big Magilla]

The Whale is now available on VOD.

If anything, I liked it less than Tee and Sabin which doesn't surprise me as I've let to see an Aronofsky film I really liked. Aside from a performance here and there, Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Natalie Portman in Black Swan, his films are all disappointments.

Brendan Fraser does give an impressive performance, albeit in a vacuum. Think Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas where we watched him drink himself to death. Here we get to watch Fraser eat himself to death.

Hong Chau is good as Fraser's friend and nurse but, as Tee pointed out, she's gone for quite a bit of the film. Ty Simpkins' missionary with a secret never comes to life. Sathya Sridharan as the pizza guy, whose face we get to see just once, has more personality talking to Fraser through the door as he makes his nightly deliveries.

Sadie Sink as Fraser's bratty daughter is, as Samantha Morton as her mother puts it, evil. None of her actions prove otherwise, making Fraser's boundless concern for her unconvincing.

[Reza]

If Academy members also feel the same way about The Whale as Mister Tee then Colin Farrell will easily walk off with the Oscar.

[Mister Tee]

For the first hour, I mostly liked this movie. It had clear stage origins, but I thought Aronofsky's use of his camera was fluid enough that (in the early going) it didn't have that awful hit-your-marks/make-your-exit feel of some adaptations. The missionary guy felt like a device, but i was okay with him much the way I was with the interviewer in the opening scenes of Gods and Monsters: I could accept him as a way to get the story going. This was all tolerable to me because I so liked the early scenes between Fraser and Chau. I can't say if I responded because the dialogue worked, or simply because the rapport they found with one another (and with the other characters) had such honesty to it that it brought me in. I was definitely going with the film at the start, because of their performances. (Even when I wasn't crazy to see the missionary turn up a second time, I liked that it gave Chau a seriously good scene with him, out on the porch.)

My uh-oh antennae did go up during Sadie Sink's first scene (I've never watched Stranger Things, so she's new to me; is she always this bad?), but, even there, I thought Fraser held his own, and I could process it as an insight into Fraser's life that I hoped would be a one-off.

Unhappily, it was the start of something bad, a badness that infected way too much of the second hour. My objections to that part of the movie, in brief:

1) Way too much screen time given over to Sink and the missionary, the worst parts of the film.

2) Giving the missionary a back-story that, as Sabin implies, has nothing to do with the drama at hand, and is, in fact, a massive distraction from it. My rule of thumb (derived from watching and not liking Spielberg's The Terminal years back) is, we can accept one outlandish premise in a story, but a second, unrelated one ruins it.

(In The Terminal's case, I could accept the guy arriving at the airport in the midst of his home country's displacing revolution...but the twee reason for his journey, getting that photo autographed -- which might have worked as an individual plot-starter -- was a bridge too far for believability.)

In this film, the story is a guy consumed by grief, trying to consume himself to death, whose life reaches a crisis point. For him to, by pure happenstance, have a guy knock at his door who's running from his own crisis, and have it involve exactly the organization Fraser holds responsible for his grief, and have it resolved by the encounter with Fraser's daughter...do I need to spell out how unlikely all that is? As a playwrighting teacher once told me, the impossible probability is a better dramatic choice than the improbable possibility.

3) Hong Chau's character being shunted to the side for too much of this part of the film, with her final scene not nearly enough to bring her back to the center, where she belonged.

She was the prime life of the movie, for me, and I missed her every minute she wasn't there. And very much disliked the plot device that pushed her offstage.

4) A script that, rather than expanding/going in directions we crave, doubles down on the worst parts of the story, and contracts.

I don't think this is just a case where a playwright adapting his own work limits the project; I think the source play is at fault, here. Just as film has the Syd Field hackish model for screenplays, there's a type of play that's very limited, more interested in crossing rudimentary t's than in exploring interesting territory. This is the kind of script that people will tell you "plays" -- the scenes are all built to have their themes underlined and their exits (or almost-exits) rigged for applause; the characters are all schematically drawn to prove points rather than to explore human behavior.

In short, I think the play, after a promising start, becomes a bore.

5) The metaphors are out of control.

So many of them: Moby Dick. Eating yourself to death vs. (the dead lover) starving yourself to death. Writing "truthful" essays. (The Moby Dick essay does sound credibly written at 8th grade level. The question: who would be assigning Moby Dick to an 8th grader?) On and on. The more the drama fizzles out, the more the metaphors just pose for the audience's admiration.

6) The only thing I actually liked in that entire stretch was Samantha Morton's one scene -- her second fly-in-to-rescue-the-movie scene this year.

It's all a shame, because I liked Fraser's work and loved Chau's, and, as I say, thought the movie had something going at the start. But, in the end, it's more dud than firecracker. Had I seen it prior to nominations, the screenwriting omission wouldn't have surprised me in the least. (Though Maverick as replacement would still appall me.)

[Sabin]

Had The Whale been adapted by a better screenwriter, it might have merely been a more competent movie that we could disagree about. Like our conversations about The Wrestler, and what purpose it serves in showing Mickey Rourke rise only to fall. But The Whale wasn't adapted by a better screenwriter. It was adapted by the playwright himself, a process that couldn't have taken more than ten minutes, and it doesn't really work as a movie for a lot of reasons. It doesn't work as a movie because none of the subplots are really working together to form a proper whole. None of the payoffs are thematically connect to each other. Maybe on-stage you could overlook it if the missionary character could tell Charley what he thinks of him and then run off-stage, but not in this film. It's really of a piece with mother!; is this part of some "Uninvited Guest Trilogy?" Anyway... It doesn't work as a movie because it isn't about anything. The Moby Dick metaphor, the creativity metaphor, the Republican primary, the bird outside the window eating apples off a plate metaphor... none of those mean anything, not really. I might make the joke that what it's really about is how watching a Republican primary could make anyone want to eat themselves to death. But even deeper, it doesn't work as a movie because I couldn't buy into it for more than a minute or two on end. The farmework for the film is perfectly fine. Charlie is a good character and I could -- and did -- buy that he had a daughter, that he lost his lover, etc, etc. But I didn't buy that every time he thought he had a heart attack he read that essay as he was going and read it out loud to himself as he walked down the hallway to lay himself down to bed. I could buy that he had an eating enabler in Hong Chau's nurse, even to the degree that she would bring him food that was unhealthy (two meatball subs, extra cheese is a stretch), but I didn't buy that suddenly near the end of the film she would exclaim "What am I doing?" Enablers like her know what they're doing because they feed off of something that people like Charlie is giving them. I have no difficulty believing that Charlie is giving her something. He's quite intelligent and charming, although, he's never allowed to be in this movie. We're never shown it beyond a moment of silence between them on the couch, watching television, before he says her name and she knows instinctively that he wants an entire bucket of fried chicken.

But I can't lay all the blame on this novice screenwriter's feet. Darren Aronofsky and his team deserve credit for getting the tone of the room just right. It's not overblown squalor. It's always believable. And the choice to film in Academy ratio is ultimately an acceptable one if you want to embody the spirit of this -- or any -- play. I have issues with the tonal balance of a film which tries to match what is on the surface an exploration of the human condition with the tone of an angry freak show. But it's a choice. But Aronofsky's work with the actors is more of a mess than I've seen in ages. Every scene feels very stagy, full of clockwork bristling and eruptions. Every character is exactly who they appear, even those who aren't. Sadie Sink is the worst offender. Her character is a monster and she can't handle the nuance. Even worse, she does something horrible in this film and the film somehow tries to make the case that this is proof that she isn't.

And yet, I don't hate the film. I even come close to giving it a recommending it with reservations, if you squint you can see the better, more affecting film about a person that you wouldn't ordinarily meet. And Brendan Fraser is very good. But you shouldn't have to squint so hard. In fact, I think the film itself might end up costing Fraser the Oscar.

[Big Magilla]

Current MetaCritic scores:

TAR - 90
Women Talking - 90
Bones and All - 74
The Whale - 74
White Noise - 68
Empire of Light - 61
Bardo - 51

[Sabin]

Brendan Fraser is great. The film isn't.
This is probably enough to mark Brendan Fraser as the front-runner for Best Actor in pencil at least. If he succeeds, then he will be yet another heavily makeup-assisted Best Actor or Actress winners


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