‘The Whale’ Evaluate: Physique Points

Charlie is a school writing teacher who by no means leaves his condo. He conducts his lessons on-line, disabling his laptop computer digital camera so the scholars can’t see him. The film digital camera, guided by Darren Aronofsky and his go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, additionally stays indoors more often than not. Sometimes you get an exterior view of the drab low-rise constructing the place Charlie lives, or a breath of recent air on the touchdown outdoors his entrance door. However these respites solely emphasize a pervasive sense of confinement.

Based mostly on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the script), “The Whale” is an train in claustrophobia. Fairly than open up a stage-bound textual content, as a much less assured movie director would possibly, Aronofsky intensifies the stasis, the calamitous sense of stuckness that defines Charlie’s existence. Charlie is trapped — in his rooms, in a life that has run off the rails, and above all in his personal physique. He was all the time an enormous man, he says, however after the suicide of his lover, his consuming “simply received uncontrolled.” Now his blood strain is spiking, his coronary heart is failing, and the easy bodily exertions of standing up and sitting down require huge effort and mechanical help.

Charlie’s measurement is the film’s governing image and principal particular impact. Encased in prosthetic flesh, Brendan Fraser, who performs Charlie, offers a efficiency that’s generally disarmingly swish. He makes use of his voice and his massive, unhappy eyes to convey a delicacy at odds with the character’s corporeal grossness. However almost all the pieces about Charlie — the sound of his respiratory, the best way he eats, strikes and perspires — underlines his abjection, to an extent that begins to really feel merciless and voyeuristic.

“The Whale” unfolds over the course of every week, throughout which Charlie receives a collection of visits: from his pal and casual caretaker, Liz (Hong Chau); from Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a younger missionary who desires to avoid wasting his soul; from his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and embittered ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). There may be additionally a pizza supply man (Sathya Sridharan), and a hen that often exhibits up outdoors Charlie’s window. I’m not an ornithologist, however my guidebook identifies it as a Frequent Western Metaphor.

Talking of which, Charlie isn’t the one whale in “The Whale.” His most prized possession is a scholar paper on “Moby-Dick,” the authorship of which is revealed on the film’s finish. It’s a superb piece of naïve literary criticism — perhaps the very best writing within the film — about how Ishmael’s troubles compelled the writer to consider “my very own life.”

Maybe Charlie’s troubles are supposed to have the identical impact. He turns into the nodal level in an internet of trauma and remorse, variously the agent, sufferer and witness of another person’s unhappiness. He left Mary when he fell in love with a male scholar, Alan, who was Liz’s brother and had been raised within the church that Thomas represents. Mary, a heavy drinker, has saved Charlie away from Ellie, who has grown right into a seething adolescent.

All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic whereas demanding additional credit score for emotional honesty. However the figuring out of the assorted points entails a variety of blame-shifting and moral evasion. Everybody and nobody is accountable; actions do and don’t have penalties. Actual-world matters like sexuality, habit and spiritual intolerance float round untethered to any credible sense of social actuality. The ethical that bubbles up by the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s rating) is that individuals are incapable of not caring about each other.

Possibly? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman present some literary ballast for this concept, however as an exploration of — and argument for — the facility of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and mental fuzziness.

Aronofsky tends to misjudge his personal strengths as a filmmaker. He is a superb manipulator of moods and a formidable director of actors, specializing in characters combating their means by anguish and delusion towards one thing like transcendence. Mickey Rourke did that in “The Wrestler,” Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” Russell Crowe in “Noah” and Jennifer Lawrence in “Mom!” Fraser makes a bid to hitch their firm — Chau can be glorious — however “The Whale,” like a few of Aronofsky’s different tasks, is swamped by its grand and imprecise ambitions. It’s overwrought and in addition surprisingly insubstantial.

The Whale
Rated R for abjection. Operating time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.