The Whale review: Darren Aronofsky has some odd ideas about fat people

Polygon had a team at the Toronto International Film Festival 2022, covering the dramas, horror and action films that will dominate our cinematic conversations as we enter awards season. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s TIFF premiere.

A24’s Whale drops all of Darren Aronofsky’s worst tendencies into a fat suit. It’s an exercise in abjection in the mode of Aronofsky’s torturous Requiem for a Dream, but it’s focused on an even more vulnerable target than Requiem’s addicts. It’s also full of the pet biblical wankery of Mother, NoahPlease see the following: FountainBut it is centered around a Christ-like figure, whose superpower of masochism is to take in the cruelty of all those around him and keep it safe inside his huge frame.

Some people do enjoy miserabilism, to be sure. But these viewers are also warned that not only is this film difficult to endure and likely to be actively harmful to some audiences, it’s also a self-serving reinforcement of the status quo — which is one of the most boring things a movie can be.

For a movie that, in the most generous reading possible, encourages viewers to consider that maybe there’s a painful backstory behind bodies they consider “disgusting” (the movie’s word),The WhaleCharlie, the main character of the story (Brendan Fraser), seems to be interested only in her point of views. Charlie is a middle-aged divorcé living in a small apartment somewhere in Idaho, where he teaches English composition classes online. Charlie never turns his camera on during lectures, because he’s fat — very fat, around 600 pounds. Charlie uses a wheelchair to get around, but he also has graber sticks and other adaptive equipment around the house.

Imagine an alien landing on Earth, and wondering if its biggest members are attractive to it or repellant. WhaleThe answer would be clearly communicated. Aronofsky raises the audio foley whenever Charlie is eating to emphasise the wet sounds of the lips mashing together. He plays ominous music under these sequences so we know he’s doing something Very bad indeed. Fraser’s neck and upper lip are perpetually beaded with sweat, and his T-shirt is dirty and covered in crumbs. He takes off his shirt, and slowly walks to his bed. His body is covered in prosthetic fat, which he flaunts as he looks like a rough animal. In case viewers still don’t get that they’re supposed to find him disgusting, he recites an essay about Moby-Dick and how a whale is “a poor big animal” with no feelings.

And that’s just what Aronofsky communicates about him through the film’s directing. It’s a great story. Whale’s first half is a gauntlet of humiliation, beginning as an evangelical missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) walks in on Charlie as he’s having a heart attack, gay porn still playing on his laptop from a pathetic attempt at masturbation. Charlie’s nurse and only friend, Liz (Hong Chau), is mostly kind to him, although she enables him with buckets of fried chicken and meatball subs. So is Thomas, although he’s less interested in Charlie as a person than as a soul to save. But Charlie’s 17-year-old daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) openly despises him, and says the most vicious things she can think of to punish Charlie for leaving her and her mom, Mary (Samantha Morton), when Ellie was 8.

Aronofsky and writer Samuel D. Hunter (adapting his own stage play) don’t reveal the condescending point of all of this until the second half of the movie: Charlie is a saint, a Christ figure, the fat man who so loved the world, he let people in his life treat him like complete dogshit in order to absolve them of their hatred, and him of his sins. Meanwhile, a subplot involving Thomas’ past life in Iowa makes the bizarre assertion that people are actually trying to help when they treat others unkindly, which can only be true if the target of that hostility doesn’t know what’s good for them. Which is it, then? Do you think a person should be compassionate or turn the other way? Depends on whether they’re fat or not, it seems. Charlie never comments on other characters’ smoking and drinking, but they sure do comment on his weight.

One of the worst things about Whale It is amazing how close they are to any kind of insight. Aronofsky and Hunter just needed to show some empathy and curiosity about people Charlie’s size, rather than paternally guessing at their motivations. The main culprit here is a plot point where Charlie refuses to go to the hospital, even though his blood pressure is dangerously high and he’s showing symptoms of congestive heart failure. At first, he lies to Liz and says he doesn’t have the money to pay the massive medical bills he’d rack up as an uninsured patient. Charlie then reveals that he has over $100,000 in savings.

Photo: A24

Whale understands this as a combination of selflessness — he’s hoping to give that money to Ellie after he dies — and suicidality. What gives away Aronofsky and Hunter’s projection about Charlie’s motivations: extensive studies have shown why obese patients avoid medical treatment, and it has nothing to do with self-sacrificing messiah-complex bullshit. Doctors are just cruel to fat people — and disproportionately likely to dismiss, demean, and misdiagnose them.

It is also disappointing to note that Brendan Fraser, the lead role in this film is actually an asset. Charlie plays a thoughtful, intelligent, funny and humorous man. He refuses let his tragic life make him a cynic. Ellie’s insults are countered by affirmations and support. He believes there is something good in everybody. (She’s hurting, you see.) Fraser’s eyes are kind, and his eyebrows are furrowed with sadness and worry.

But if there’s any rage behind those eyes, we don’t see it. If Charlie is just telling people what they want to hear in hopes of minimizing their abuse, that doesn’t translate. The film seems satisfied with his surface-level protestations that he’s fine and happy and just a naturally positive guy, which again betrays its lack of interest in Charlie’s inner emotional life — Fraser’s sensitive attempt to find a man inside the symbol notwithstanding.

Aronofsky’s team is more concerned with their individual cleverness than they are in the success of others. Some of the barbs thrown around in Charlie’s apartment are actually pretty funny. (The movie openly shows its theatrical roots: The entire story takes place within the confines of Charlie’s apartment and front porch.) Chau is particularly good as Liz. Her role is one of a kind and caring friend who uses playful insults as her love language, but is actually there to defend the friendship. Of course, Liz’s hurting is not the only one. Everyone is. Charlie, however, is suffering the most from it.

Take a look at Whale as a fable, its moral is that it’s the responsibility of the abused to love and forgive their abusers. The movie thinks it’s saying, “You don’t understand, he’s fat because he’s suffering.” But it ends up saying, “You don’t understand, We have to be cruel to fat people, because we are suffering.” But Aronofsky and Hunter’s biblical metaphor aside, fat people didn’t volunteer to serve as repositories for society’s rage and contempt. No one agrees to be bullied so the bully can feel better about themselves — that’s a self-serving lie bullies tell themselves. It is an externally enforced martyrdom that negates all the points of the exercise.

Whale, Aronofsky posits his sadism as an intellectual experiment, challenging viewers to find the humanity buried under Charlie’s thick layers of fat. That’s not as benevolent of a premise as he seems to think it is. The assumption is that 600-pound men are inherently unlovable. It’s like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying, “You’re an abomination, but I love you anyway,” in keeping with the strong strain of self-satisfied Christianity that the film purports to critique. Audience members get to walk away proud of themselves that they shed a few tears for this disgusting whale, while gaining no new insight into what it’s actually like to be that whale. That’s not empathy. That’s pity, buried under a thick, smothering layer of contempt.

WhaleDecember 9th, in cinemas