The Whale

Director: Darren Aronofsky (USA). Year of Release; 2022

A zoom meeting where all participants are visible, apart from one black rectangle, containing the name “Instructor.” The camera pans back to reveal the Instructor Charlie, an obese balding man, slumped on a sofa in his dingey Idaho flat. Charlie reminds the class that last week he’d been telling them about structure. This is typical of his lessons, on screen at least, which refer back to things which sound interesting but largely consists of glib fortune cookie inanities.

The Whale is based on a play, but that is obvious if you just watch 5 minutes. It is so – there’s no better word for it – stagey. All the action takes place in one dimly lit room, inhabited by Charlie, while a series of characters pay visits which usually end with an overly dramatic stage exit. Occasionally, we get to venture onto the outside porch, usually to interact with Dan, the regular pizza delivery guy, but these scenes offer little actual content and rarely last for long.

Charlie’s first visitor is Thomas, a member of New Life, a more secty equivalent of the Mormons. Thomas knocks on the door just as Charlie is having a heart attack induced while he was watching gay porn. Charlie is suspicious of the sect, for reasons which will become clearer later, but for the time being needs Thomas’s help. Thomas believes that his arrival at the house at this very moment is a sign from God, and promises to return whether Charlie wants him there or not.

The next visitor is Liz, Charlie’s nurse and the sister of his ex-partner. It seems that Liz is the only person left who shows any friendship to Charlie, but even she admonishes him and tells him that he should go to the hospital. Charlie refuses, saying that he has no insurance and can’t afford the health charges. Liz measures his blood pressure to be 238/134. When he googles the result, Charlie arrives at a page which tells him that he should immediately seek medical help.

Next up is Ellie, Charlie’s daughter, who is still seething with anger that he abandoned her with her mother when she was just 8 years old. Although she makes the odd homophobic comment, Ellie seems less disgusted by the fact that her father left her mother for a man, it’s more that she is seizing on every opportunity to make him feel bad. Charlie is particularly needy with his daughter, eager to anything to win her respect, but she is too pissed off with him to reciprocate.

Here is where Charlie plays his trump card. You know he told Liz that he had no money to go to hospital? Well, he was lying, and he’s actually stored up $120,000 in savings – his work pays well, and it’s not as if he goes out much. And he’s prepared to give it all to Ellie if she just comes and visit him once in a while. More than that, she’s in danger of being thrown out of high school. He’ll write her homework for her to ensure she stays in school.

This transaction betrays the disdain that The Whale seems to have for humanity. Charlie is being set up as a good guy, because he’s prepared to spend on using his money to give his daughter an unfair advantage over her contemporaries. Not only that, his financial offer provides a sleight of hand which tries to make us forget that he abandoned his wife and daughter and has not obviously spent much time or effort to help them come to terms with this abandonment.

Moreover, while Charlie is portrayed as a decent guy, Ellie is presented as a bit of a cow. When she and Thomas visit the house at the same time, she takes his photo, records his confessions and does her best to undermine him on social media. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to think of her. I presumed that the (bad) writing was aimed as making us see her as the undeserving victim of the piece, but for most of the film I was on Team Ellie (great acting by Sadie Sink by the way).

Sadie’s treatment of Thomas leads to a bizarre scene which seems to argue that her mistreatment for him is to be valued as it leads him to make an unwanted decision that turns out to be in his best interests. The film is full of so much Biblical portent about God silently guiding our decisions that you feel that Darren Aronofsky might be celebrating Ellie’s behaviour here because she is following Divine will, rather than saying that Thomas is a pious twat who deserves all he gets.

For a film which argues that writing and structure should take a back seat to authenticity and originality, the ending is one of the most makwish tear-stained group hugs that I can remember. For most of the time. I found this to be a film with potential – ok it was a little clunky with the overwrought religious imagery and the undeserved ambition to be judged alongside Herman Melville, but it was a pleasant enough piece until the sickeningly sentimental finale.

Added to this, given some of the content, you might think that the film’s underlying message is to judge a person by their personality and not what they look like. You might think this until you actually look at how it treats Charlie’s obesity. I didn’t register a moment of empathy or any sense of compassion. Whenever Charlie eats, the sound is turned up to 11, playing ominous music and the sound of smacking lips. This is more a freak show than serious drama.

Before we go, could we just say something like Fatface? You know, like Blackface, but for fat people. Apparently Brendan Foster was filmed in a 21 stone fat suit, and who knows how much CGI, because no fat actors were available to take the role. Or something. Apparently, playing “abnormal” shows the breadth of your acting talents and wins you Oscars. The only downside is that means you are playing someone who is, in effect, inhuman, someone who is to be pitied.

By the way, Brendan Foster did win that Oscar. It’s not that he’s terrible, but Colin Farrell, you wus robbed.