Does "The Whale" Deserve its Academy Award?
Brendan Fraser just won an Oscar for his terrific performance as an obese English professor eating himself to death. But does the movie itself deserve that same acclaim?
I’ve been putting off watching The Whale for some time now. It was the one Oscars-hopeful movie from this awards season that did not interest me in any way. I’ve been hearing about The Whale since September, where it premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, and even after reading a positive review or two, I remained uninterested. I’m not interested in 300 pounds of digitized flesh being added to Brendan Fraser’s body. I’m not interested in watching two hours of Darren Arronofsky’s punishing directorial vision being cast down upon obesity. There was almost nothing about The Whale that could possibly pull me off my lazy bum and into the theater to watch it.
But then Fraser went and won for Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards, and I had to concede that I should probably watch it. Not on the basis of it being good—there are plenty of bad Oscar winners—but instead on the basis of Oscars history. This is an important cultural moment not just for Fraser’s acting career, but for the film’s distribution company A24, which managed to snag wins for all four acting categories for the first time in Oscar history. (Really, though, I watched it because my friend Tegran has been insisting that I write about this movie for WEEKS, and I finally caved. So, Tegran, now that you’ve made me to sit through this pretty effing bad movie, I’ve got one question for you: Ya happy now?)
Last week, I wrote about how the Oscars are not awarded on the basis of quality, but instead on the basis of narratives—the cultural and industrial context surrounding the film itself. Never has this been truer than in the case of Brendan Fraser and The Whale. After several years of absence from the silver screen, Fraser announced his return in a big way with a six-minute standing ovation at the film’s premiere in Venice for his performance as Charlie, a morbidly obese English teacher struggling to reconnect with his teenaged daughter. Standing ovations of that length are basic expectations in Venice, but for Fraser, it was deserved. His performance—tender, transformative, and beautiful—raises the bar for a film that is otherwise horrendously oppressive and melodramatic.
The Whale is adapted from a stage play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter, a fact that one can observe plainly in the film’s (obnoxiously stagey) single-room setting. That room is a one-bedroom apartment in Moscow, Idaho, and is Charlie’s cluttered home, from which our 600-pound protagonist never leaves. He teaches English classes through Zoom at an online university, keeping his camera off to avoid shame. He orders two pizzas each night from the same delivery driver. He is visited only occasionally by his friend Liz (Hong Chau), also his nurse, who berates him for avoiding hospital treatment despite imminent congestive heart failure.
Oh right, because Charlie is eating himself to death. Director Darren Aronofsky, who has a penchant for Old Testament morality tales, depicts Charlie’s actions as compulsive, monstrous, and actively suicidal. See, for instance, the film’s grotesque opening sequence in which Charlie suffers from a heart attack as a result of masturbating to internet porn, or scenes in which Charlie’s binge-eating habits are accompanied by slow zooms and shrieking, horror-movie strings that convert him into a demonic creature. And therein lies the fundamental problem with the film: I just had to use the words “grotesque” and “demonic” to describe the film’s main character. Wasn’t this supposed to be a tale of redemption?
Well, maybe I haven’t made that clear. Charlie hasn’t spoken to his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) for the past eight years, having left her and his ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) for Alan, one of his old grad students. Living alone and on the verge of death, Charlie is obsessed with Ellie, asking after her whenever he gets the chance despite his mother’s insistence that he stay away. Not that anyone would want to be around her: Ellie has, in her teenage years, become the kind of sullen, hateful devil child that might have come out of Rosemary’s Baby, actively fat-shaming her father and ruining the lives of anyone with whom she comes into contact. Her mother is aghast, calling her “evil” and blaming Charlie for having left them years earlier. Charlie, for his part, is an unrepentant optimist: “I’m worried she’s forgotten what an amazing person she is.” It’s the kind of line you’d hear from any absentee parent of divorce, unwilling to accept the cruelty of their child’s actions.
There’s an embryo of an interesting film that you can see in moments like these, where Charlie’s occasionally insufferable kindness chafes against the abject immorality of everything around him, including his own self-destructive condition. Somewhere in there, there are interesting questions to be had about salvation and the denial of Otherness. Every beat, plot contrivance, and character arc in the drama works against them, however, as can be seen in the character of Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young Christian missionary who shows up at Charlie’s door to provoke facile questions about Charlie’s salvation before God. Thomas isn’t the only person to appear in the drama at dramatically convenient instances. Almost every character in the film appears within the drama with seemingly little other purpose than to announce their grander thematic purpose, each time landing with the grace of a plummeting anvil.
Breaking through the façade of this shallow redemption drama is Fraser himself, who treats Charlie with the kind of care one would afford the most gentle soul. With jolts of joyous laughter and bursts of sobbing tears, Fraser does, to some degree, transcend the leering vision of Aronofsky’s camera, allowing us to experience the life of a deeply kind and forgiving man.
So does Fraser deserve that Oscar win? His performance in the film is tender, transformative, and undeniably excellent—but then again, so were those of his fellow nominees Colin Farrell, Bill Nighy, Austin Butler, and Paul Mescal. Theirs was the most competitive category in this year’s awards season, and not just because of the quality of the performances themselves: the narratives surrounding them were just as compelling. Farrell (who would have been my pick for the award) has capped off an accomplished career with his best year yet, featuring great performances in The Batman, After Yang, and The Banshees of Inisherin. Nighy emblemized a life of gentlemanly charm with Living, as I wrote in my review of the film. Butler and Mescal were the two young boys on the block (meaning not likely for the Oscar win), but both offered up transformative performances in roles that solidified their star status.
Deciding which of these five performances is the best is, to my mind, an impossible task, as I’m sure it also was for Academy voters. In the end, they went with Fraser because his comeback narrative was, in the traditional Oscars mold, a more classically engaging story. His movie star presence in Hollywood in the early 90s was ubiquitous, beginning with films like Encino Man (1992) and continuing all the way through films like The Mummy (1999) and Crash (2004). Fraser was the victim of an alleged sexual assault in 2003, however, which caused a downturn in his career that lasted until only recently. His return to the big screen in The Whale as the kind of gentle giant that audiences came to know and love solidified his Oscar win over the others.
For as much as I appreciate the upturn in Fraser’s career, I can’t help but think that The Whale is a movie undeserving of Oscar attention. It is a film constantly at odds with itself, locked in a struggle of creative influences. While Aronofsky turns his camera upon his 600-pound protagonist as a figure of revulsion and disgust, Fraser tries to turn him into a creature of deeply felt pathos. The result is a broken and disjointed film, one in which Aronofsky’s punishing vision in the end overtakes Fraser’s sympathies. Nothing can save The Whale from its own leering eyes.