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"The Whale" is an abhorrent film, but it also features excellent performances.

It gawks at the grotesquerie of its central figure beneath the guise of sentimentality, but it also offers sharp exchanges between its characters that ring with bracing honesty.

It's the kind of film you should probably see if only to have an informed, thoughtful discussion about it, but it's also one you probably won't want to watch.

This aligns it with Darren Aronofsky's movies in general, which can often be a challenging sit. The director is notorious for putting his actors (and his audiences) through the wringer, whether it's Jennifer Connolly's drug addict in " Requiem for a Dream ," Mickey Rourke's aging athlete in " The Wrestler ," Natalie Portman's obsessed ballerina in " Black Swan ," or Jennifer Lawrence's besieged wife in "mother!" (For the record, I'm a fan of Aronofsky's work in general.)

But the difference between those films and "The Whale" is their intent, whether it's the splendor of their artistry or the thrill of their provocation. There's a verve to those movies, an unpredictability, an undeniable daring, and a virtuoso style. They feature images you've likely never seen before or since, but they'll undoubtedly stay with you afterward.

"The Whale" may initially feel gentler, but its main point seems to be sticking the camera in front of Brendan Fraser , encased in a fat suit that makes him appear to weigh 600 pounds, and asking us to wallow in his deterioration. In theory, we are meant to pity him or at least find sympathy for his physical and psychological plight by the film's conclusion. But in reality, the overall vibe is one of morbid fascination for this mountain of a man. Here he is, knocking over an end table as he struggles to get up from the couch; there he is, cramming candy bars in his mouth as he Googles "congestive heart failure." We can tsk-tsk all we like between our mouthfuls of popcorn and Junior Mints while watching Fraser's Charlie gobble greasy fried chicken straight from the bucket or inhale a giant meatball sub with such alacrity that he nearly chokes to death. The message "The Whale" sends us home with seems to be: Thank God that's not us.

In working from Samuel D. Hunter's script, based on Hunter's stage play, Aronofsky doesn't appear to be as interested in understanding these impulses and indulgences as much as pointing and staring at them. His depiction of Charlie's isolation within his squalid Idaho apartment includes a scene of him masturbating to gay porn with such gusto that he almost has a heart attack, a moment made of equal parts shock value and shame. But then, in a jarring shift, the tone eventually turns maudlin with Charlie's increasing martyrdom.

Within the extremes of this approach, Fraser brings more warmth and humanity to the role than he's afforded on the page. We hear his voice first; Charlie is a college writing professor who teaches his students online from behind the safety of a black square. And it's such a welcoming and resonant sound, full of decency and humor. Fraser's been away for a while, but his contradictions have always made him an engaging screen presence—the contrast of his imposing physique and playful spirit. He does so much with his eyes here to give us a glimpse into Charlie's sweet but tortured soul, and the subtlety he's able to convey goes a long way toward making "The Whale" tolerable.

But he's also saddled with a screenplay that spells out every emotion in ways that are so clunky as to be groan-inducing. At Charlie's most desperate, panicky moments, he soothes himself by reading or reciting a student's beloved essay on Moby Dick , which—in part—gives the film its title and will take on increasing significance. He describes the elusive white whale of Herman Melville's novel as he stands up, shirtless, and lumbers across the living room, down the hall, and toward the bedroom with a walker. At this moment, you're meant to marvel at the elaborate makeup and prosthetic work on display; you're more likely to roll your eyes at the writing.

"He thinks his life will be better if he can just kill this whale, but in reality, it won't help him at all," he intones in a painfully obvious bit of symbolism. "This book made me think about my own life," he adds as if we couldn't figure that out for ourselves.

A few visitors interrupt the loneliness of his days, chiefly Hong Chau as his nurse and longtime friend, Liz. She's deeply caring but also no-nonsense, providing a crucial spark to these otherwise dour proceedings. Aronofsky's longtime cinematographer, the brilliant Matthew Libatique , has lit Charlie's apartment in such a relentlessly dark and dim fashion to signify his sorrow that it's oppressive. Once you realize the entirety of the film will take place within these cramped confines, it sends a shiver of dread. And the choice to tell this story in the boxy, 1.33 aspect ratio further heightens its sense of dour claustrophobia.

But then "Stranger Things" star Sadie Sink arrives as Charlie's rebellious, estranged daughter, Ellie; her mom was married to Charlie before he came out as a gay man. While their first meeting in many years is laden with exposition about the pain and awkwardness of their time apart, the two eventually settle into an interesting, prickly rapport. Sink brings immediacy and accessibility to the role of the sullen but bright teenager, and her presence, like Chau's, improves "The Whale" considerably. Her casting is also spot-on in her resemblance to Fraser, especially in her expressive eyes.

The arrival of yet another visitor—an earnest, insistent church missionary played by Ty Simpkins —feels like a total contrivance, however. Allowing him inside the apartment repeatedly makes zero sense, even within the context that Charlie believes he's dying and wants to make amends. He even says to this sweet young man: "I'm not interested in being saved." And yet, the exchanges between Sink and Simpkins provide some much-needed life and emotional truth. The subplot about their unlikely friendship feels like something from a totally different movie and a much more interesting one.

Instead, Aronofsky insists on veering between cruelty and melodrama, with Fraser stuck in the middle, a curiosity on display.

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Whale (2022)

Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content.

117 minutes

Brendan Fraser as Charlie

Sadie Sink as Ellie

Hong Chau as Liz

Ty Simpkins as Thomas

Samantha Morton as Mary

Sathya Sridharan as Dan

Darren Aronofsky

Writer (based on the play by)

Samuel D. Hunter

Cinematographer

Matthew Libatique
Andrew Weisblum
Rob Simonsen

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‘The Whale’ Review: Body Issues

Brendan Fraser plays an obese writing instructor reckoning with grief and regret in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film.

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In a scene from the film, Brendan Fraser is seen from the shoulders up, wearing prosthetic makeup to portray the obese character Charlie.

By A.O. Scott

Charlie is a college writing instructor who never leaves his apartment. He conducts his classes online, disabling his laptop camera so the students can’t see him. The movie camera, guided by Darren Aronofsky and his go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, also stays indoors most of the time. Occasionally you get an exterior view of the drab low-rise building where Charlie lives, or a breath of fresh air on the landing outside his front door. But these respites only emphasize a pervasive sense of confinement.

Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the script), “The Whale” is an exercise in claustrophobia. Rather than open up a stage-bound text, as a less confident film director might, 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 own body. He was always a big guy, he says, but after the suicide of his lover, his eating “just got out of control.” Now his blood pressure is spiking, his heart is failing, and the simple physical exertions of standing up and sitting down require enormous effort and mechanical assistance.

Charlie’s size is the movie’s governing symbol and principal special effect. Encased in prosthetic flesh, Brendan Fraser, who plays Charlie, gives a performance that is sometimes disarmingly graceful. He uses his voice and his big, sad eyes to convey a delicacy at odds with the character’s corporeal grossness. But nearly everything about Charlie — the sound of his breathing, the way he eats, moves and perspires — underlines his abjection, to an extent that starts to feel cruel and voyeuristic.

“The Whale” unfolds over the course of a week, during which Charlie receives a series of visits: from his friend and informal caretaker, Liz (Hong Chau); from Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young missionary who wants to save his soul; from his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and embittered ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). There is also a pizza delivery guy (Sathya Sridharan), and a bird that occasionally shows up outside Charlie’s window. I’m not an ornithologist, but my guidebook identifies it as a Common Western Metaphor.

Speaking of which, Charlie is not the only whale in “The Whale.” His most prized possession is a student paper on “Moby-Dick,” the authorship of which is revealed at the movie’s end. It’s a fine piece of naïve literary criticism — maybe the best writing in the movie — about how Ishmael’s troubles compelled the author to think about “my own life.”

Perhaps Charlie’s troubles are meant to have the same effect. He becomes the nodal point in a web of trauma and regret, variously the agent, victim and witness of someone else’s unhappiness. He left Mary when he fell in love with a male student, Alan, who was Liz’s brother and had been raised in the church that Thomas represents. Mary, a heavy drinker, has kept Charlie away from Ellie, who has grown into a seething adolescent.

All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic while demanding extra credit for emotional honesty. But the working out of the various issues involves a lot of blame-shifting and ethical evasion. Everyone and no one is responsible; actions do and don’t have consequences. Real-world topics like sexuality, addiction and religious intolerance float around untethered to any credible sense of social reality. The moral that bubbles up through the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s score) is that people are incapable of not caring about one another.

Maybe? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman provide some literary ballast for this idea, but as an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.

Aronofsky has a tendency to misjudge his own strengths as a filmmaker. He is a brilliant manipulator of moods and a formidable director of actors, specializing in characters fighting their way through anguish and delusion toward something like transcendence. Mickey Rourke did that in “The Wrestler,” Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” Russell Crowe in “Noah” and Jennifer Lawrence in “Mother!” Fraser makes a bid to join their company — Chau is also excellent — but “The Whale,” like some of Aronofsky’s other projects, is swamped by its grand and vague ambitions. It’s overwrought and also strangely insubstantial.

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

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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The Whale Reviews

Fraser keeps Charlie’s fully formed humanity at the forefront of The Whale, despite various filmmaking decisions that could flatten his character into a saccharine pity case.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2024

It’s Aronofsky’s most blunt and uninspired work yet— an indulgent and strident slice of misery porn that rides a wave of unearned emotion to its underwhelming conclusion.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

If I were to describe this film in one word, it would be melancholy; it is practically flawless, at least in my opinion, and conveys the notion that people are inherently kind...

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

If you didn’t know that The Whale was based on a play, you’d work it out pretty quickly... The immediate distance that this initially creates soon evaporates, however, in no small part thanks to Fraser’s all-in performance.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2023

If it’s as sincere as it purports to be, this is one of the worst movies of recent years, and if it’s not — which is almost preferable — then it’s a landmark exercise in trolling.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2023

A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Earns its place in the "most tearful films of the year" list as it moves slowly yet efficiently towards its overwhelmingly emotional ending, especially elevated by the most subtly powerful & irrefutably moving performance of Brendan Fraser's career.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

A riveting character study of one broken man that transcends compassion, love, pain/regret. A masterpiece Sadie Sink/Hong Chau should be nominated & Brendan Fraser might have turned in one of the best performances of all time

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

I just wished that the film overall was as strong as Brendan Fraser’s acting comeback.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 22, 2023

Charlie [is] played brilliantly by Brendan Fraser...

Full Review | Jun 2, 2023

It has a more or less decent preamble that is propelled by an organic performance from Brendan Fraser on his return, but its psychological marrow is locked into a basic routine of trivial conversations and a lack of substance. [Full reveiw in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Apr 19, 2023

A strangely hopeful story that manages to stay on the surface even as it seems to sink into mediocrity. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 29, 2023

One of the most deplorable elements of The Whale is its near celebration of defeat and resignation. The decision by Charlie to eat himself to death is treated as a meaningful act of self-sacrifice. Why would this possibly be so?

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

All the weight of the story (metaphorically and literally) is carried by its tragic protagonist — the ailing Charlie, whom Brendan Fraser portrays with such depth, nuance, and wit. Nothing in the film's text matches this commitment, and that's a problem.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Two words - Brendan Fraser. He was born to play Charlie and his Oscar award is extremely well deserved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Chamber settings, by their nature, let the acting echo out and Fraser’s central performance speaks volumes about his character’s history.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Though The Whale has captured the interest of the public, I can’t say that it’s earned. I hated this movie, but not for the reasons you may think.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 17, 2023

Aronofsky’s film of this joyless play was a hit, so I guess it touched something in the moviegoing public. It had to use a bodega claw to do it because it couldn’t get off the couch, but it touched them.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Aronofsky uses The Whale for easy, unsightly, virtue-signaling.

Full Review | Mar 15, 2023

At times, it feels like they had a list of difficult themes they wanted to include, which makes for an uneven experience. But we also can't deny the power of Fraser's performance, which some would argue is superior to the film. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 15, 2023

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‘The Whale’ Review: Brendan Fraser Is Sly and Moving as a Morbidly Obese Man, but Darren Aronofsky’s Film Is Hampered by Its Contrivances

The director seamlessly adapts Samuel D. Hunter's play but can't transcend the play's problems.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“The Whale” is based on a stageplay by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the script, and the entire film takes place in Charlie’s apartment, most of it unfolding in that seedy bookish living room. Aronofsky doesn’t necessarily “open up” the play, but working with the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique he doesn’t need to. Shot without flourishes, the movie has a plainspoken visual flow to it. And given what a sympathetic and fascinating character Fraser makes Charlie, we’re eager to settle in with him in that depressive lair, and to get to the bottom of the film’s inevitable two dramatic questions: How did Charlie get this way? And can he be saved?

In case there is any doubt he needs saving, “The Whale” quickly establishes that he’s an addict living a life of isolated misery and self-disgust, scarfing away his despair (at various points we see him going at a bucket of fried chicken, a drawer full of candy, and voluminous take-out pizzas from Gambino’s, all of which is rather sad to behold). Charlie teaches an expository writing seminar at an online college, doing it on Zoom, which looks very today (though the film, for no good reason, is set during the presidential primary season of 2016), with video images of the students surrounding a small black square at the center of the screen. That’s where Charlie should be; he tells the students his laptop camera isn’t working, which is his way of hiding his body and the shame he feels about it. But he’s a canny teacher who knows what good writing is, even if his lessons about structure and topic sentences fall on apathetic ears.

Charlie has a friend of sorts, Liz (Hong Chau), who happens to be a nurse, and when she comes over and learns that his blood pressure is in the 240/130 range, she declares it an emergency situation. He has congestive heart failure; with that kind of blood pressure, he’ll be dead in a week. But Charlie refuses to go the hospital, and will continue to do so. He’s got a handy excuse. With no health insurance, if he seeks medical care he’ll run up tens of thousands of dollars in bills. As Liz points out, it’s better to be in debt than dead. But Charlie’s resistance to healing himself bespeaks a deeper crisis. He doesn’t want help. If he dies (and that’s the film’s basic suspense), it will essentially be a suicide.

It’s hard not to notice that Liz, given how much she’s taking care of Charlie, has a spiky and rather abrasive personality. We think: Okay, that’s who she is. But a couple of other characters enter the movie — and when Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie’s 17-year-old daughter, shows up, we notice that she has a really spiky and abrasive personality. Does Charlie just happen to be surrounded by hellcats and cranks? Or is there something in Hunter’s dialogue that is simply, reflexively over-the-top in its theatrical hostility?

And what a rage it is! Sadie Sink, from “Stranger Things,” acts with a fire and directness that recalls the young Lindsay Lohan, but the volatile spitfire she’s playing is bitter — at her father, and at the world — in an absolutist way that rings absolutely false. Lots of teenagers are angry and alienated, but they’re not just angry and alienated. There are shades of vulnerability that come with being that age. We keep waiting for Ellie to show another side, to reflect the fact that the father she resents is still, on some level … her father.

“The Whale,” while it has a captivating character at its center, turns out to be equal parts sincerity and hokum. The movie carries us along, tethering the audience to Fraser’s intensely lived-in and touching performance, yet the more it goes on the more its drama is interlaced with nagging contrivances, like the whole issue of why this father and daughter were ever so separated from each other. We learn that after Charlie and Ellie’s mother, Mary (Samantha Morton), were divorced, Mary got full custody and cut Charlie off from Ellie. But they never stopped living in the same small town, and even single parents who don’t have custody are legally entitled to see their children. Charlie, we’re told, was eager to have kids; he lived with Ellie and her mother until the girl was eight. So why would he have just … let her go?

There’s one other major character, a lost young missionary for the New Life Church named Thomas, and though Ty Simpkins plays him appealingly, the way this cult-like church plays into the movie feels like one hard-to-swallow conceit too many. This matters a lot, because if we can’t totally buy what’s happening, we won’t be as moved by Charlie’s road to redemption. Near the end, there’s a very moving moment. It’s when Charlie is discussing the essay on “Moby Dick” he’s been reading pieces of throughout the film, and we learn where the essay comes from and why it means so much to him. If only the rest of the movie were that convincing! But most of “The Whale” simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival, Sept. 4, 2022. Running time: 117 MIN.

Production: An A24 release of a Protozoa Pictures production. Producers: Darren Aronofsky, Jeremy Dawson, Art Handel. Executive producers: Scott Franklin, Tyson Bidner.
Crew: Director: Darren Aronofsky. Screenplay: Samuel D. Hunter. Camera: Matthew Libatique. Editor: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Rob Simonsen.
With: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan.

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‘the whale’ review: brendan fraser is heart-wrenching in darren aronofsky’s portrait of regret and deliverance.

Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins and Samantha Morton also appear in this chamber drama adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his play about grief and salvation.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Brendan Fraser Deserves an Oscar for ‘The Whale.’ He Also Deserves a Better Movie

By David Fear

Charlie is 600 lbs. This is the first thing you notice about him; this is the first thing you are meant to notice about him. He’s always been a big guy, he says, but he “let it get out of control.” On the Zooms in which Charlie teaches online English courses — he’s a professor — his voice is always emanating from a solid square of black, the video permanently disabled, the word “Instructor” the only visual his students associate with him.

But when we first see Charlie in The Whale , director Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s award-winning 2012 play, we get to observe all of him: a bulk of a man, his body bloated and swollen, sitting deep in the corner of his couch, masturbating furiously to online porn. Severe chest pains interrupt his endeavor. Only the arrival of a random stranger, who happens to find the apartment door unlocked, saves his life.

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Fraser is a dream collaborator in that respect, and yet The Whale seems hellbent on making you view Charlie as a grotesque. There’s something monstrous about the way it keeps framing him, how it seems to almost fetishize every roll of his flesh and put the sound of his greasy chomping on fried chicken so high in the sound mix. What this man is experiencing — a horrible sense of shame that’s metastasized into self-destruction — is not pretty. But the movie seems to revel a little too enthusiastically in its own ugliness. That doom-laden score by Rob Simonsen keeps rubbing the despair even deeper into your face. For every sunbeam of humanity Fraser lets shine through this soul, the film summons a half-dozen dark clouds to try and dampen it.

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A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.

Darren Aronofsky
Samuel D. Hunter
Brendan Fraser
Ty Simpkins
987 User reviews
324 Critic reviews
60 Metascore
50 wins & 120 nominations total

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Young Ellie

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Trivia For the role, Brendan Fraser had to don a heavy prosthetic suit that he wore for hours. According to a piece in "Variety", he told members of the media in attendance at the Venice International Film Festival, "I developed muscles I did not know I had. I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed. It was like stepping off the dock onto a boat in Venice, that undulating. It gave me appreciation for those whose bodies are similar. You need to be an incredibly strong person, mentally and physically, to inhabit that physical being."
Goofs Charlie nicks his skin when shaving but the cut disappears in the next shots.

Charlie : Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?

Connections Featured in Projector @ LFF: The Whale (2022)

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aniceguy1988
Sep 7, 2022
How long is The Whale? Powered by Alexa
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December 21, 2022 (United States)
United States
Official A24
Newburgh, New York, USA
Protozoa Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$10,000,000 (estimated)
$17,463,630
Dec 11, 2022
$57,615,635

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Runtime 1 hour 57 minutes
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Screen Rant

The whale review: aronofsky's drama showcases a stunning performance by fraser [tiff].

Powered by Fraser's performance, the film has moments of gentle vulnerability & contemplation in its exploration of guilt, redemption, grief & trauma.

The Whale is being recognized for Brendan Fraser’s tremendous performance. And the actor, whose career was paused for a long while, deserves the accolades he is receiving for his turn as Charlie. Director Darren Aronofsky ’s latest feature, from a screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, is powerful because of Fraser’s central performance. It’s the key to the movie’s success. While the film is determined to live in the pain felt and lobbed at its main character, there are moments of gentle vulnerability and contemplation in its exploration of guilt, redemption, grief, and trauma.

Charlie (Fraser) is a 600-pound English professor who is suffering from congestive heart failure. He lives alone and is primarily immobile, though he is visited often by his friend Liv (Hong Chau), who is also a nurse, and, frustratingly, by an annoyingly persistent missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who is trying to save Charlie. When Charlie is seized by pain, he reads from an essay about Moby-Dick to make him calm down and feel better. Knowing that he is reaching the end of his life, however, Charlie reaches out to his estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), in the hopes of mending their relationship before he dies.

Related: The Whale Movie News & Updates: Everything We Know

Fraser’s performance is magnetic and nuanced. He imbues Charlie with so much optimism, kindness, and empathy. Whereas most of the characters, save for Liz, are pretty terrible and cruel, Charlie is not. The film acknowledges that he has been through a lot in his life. He lost the love of his life, he wasn’t able to be there for his daughter in the way he wanted to, and so on. Despite all the hardships, Charlie’s regrets and sadness don’t overcome his need to find pockets of light in an otherwise tragic situation. The Whale portrays Charlie through an empathetic lens. The story explores his character enough to understand him and his journey, from where he was to where his life ultimately led him. Other characters offer their sympathy and want to help, but it’s an instance where they themselves are lost and lashing out at someone who seems like an easy enough target. Charlie, however he is feeling, doesn’t take the bait most of the time.

The Whale is a poignant tale of grief, regret, and redemption. It sees Charlie looking back on his life — the joys and the missteps along the way — as death nears, but it also contemplates religion, sexuality, and parenthood. The film is bolstered by a riveting performance by Brendan Fraser , who portrays Charlie’s every emotion with sincerity and sensitivity. His performance is grounded and honest, beautiful in the way the actor deepens and humanizes Charlie. Without Fraser, The Whale wouldn’t be what it is, especially as aspects of the script are surface-level at best and unnecessarily melodramatic at worst. Still, Charlie’s journey, his desire to love and be loved, evokes a tender, compassionate emotional reaction. After all that he’s been through, the traumas he’s experienced, and shortcomings as a father, Charlie wants only to look upon the world and his life with bright, hopeful eyes and see the beauty in it. What Fraser manages to pull off in his performance is lovely, and it’s one of the strongest, most heartening aspects of the film.

Aronofsky’s film is not without its pitfalls. There’s a lot of verbal abuse thrown at Charlie, and daughter Ellie is especially abhorrent in her treatment of him. The cruelty in some of the characters’ actions and words can get excessive, making for a painful watch at times. This is especially true when Aronofsky’s direction showcases Charlie in a horrific light, one that is meant to disgust viewers instead of reaching for the empathy that is offered in other scenes. It’s as though the filmmakers wanted to subject Charlie to the worst of the worst before the film’s ending, and it’s this seeming desire to cause unending pain for the lead that might turn viewers off.

While The Whale is never dull, its over-the-top theatrical staging turns certain elements of the script into an aggressive melodrama that doesn’t always work. Character dialogue — save for Hong Chau as Liz, who brings equal parts heart and frustration to her role — reaches for excess in parts when thoughtful consideration would have sufficed. The Whale is nonetheless memorable, if one is able to sit through Charlie’s pain, because of its handling of regret, guilt, and grief. Though it often offers surface-level readings about religion and father-daughter relationships, in particular, the film is worth the watch for Fraser’s performance alone.

The Whale had its premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11. The film releases in theaters on December 9. It is 117 minutes long and is not yet rated.

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The Whale review: Brendan Fraser shines in a overwrought, underbaked drama

The actor is better than director Darren Aronfosky's stagey adaptation.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

In every awards season, there are certain movies whose heat index seems to rise almost solely because of a central performance: actors so indelible in the part they transcend the flaws and missteps of the film formed around them. (Renée Zellweger in Judy was one a few years ago, or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody ; both won Oscars.) Brendan Fraser 's astonishing turn in The Whale often feels like that to the n th degree: a tender, modest, and momentously human piece of work plonked in the midst of a drama so masochistically stilted and stagey it often feels less like a movie than an endurance test, or even worse, a parody.

The staginess, to be fair, is at least partly because it was in fact a play, one that director Darren Aronofsky spent the last decade trying to bring to the screen (the playwright, Samuel D. Hunter, also penned the adaptation). Why the man who helmed Black Swan , The Wrestler , and Requiem for a Dream would find a bleak psychological drama about deeply broken people appealing is not a mystery; what he found irresistible here though, is less easy to see. Fraser's Charlie, in the opening scene, is just a voice inside a black Zoom screen. That's because he teaches remotely at an online college, but his excuse of a broken laptop camera is a lie: The truth is he's morbidly obese, so large that he can't leave his shabby apartment or even stand up without a walker. He can just about manage to bathe and feed himself, but other activities (masturbation, laughing) leave him too clammy and winded to breathe.

There's a gadget for nearly every physical thing he can't do on his own — handles and pulleys in the shower, a special seat in the bathroom, even a little clawed picker-upper for whatever he might drop on the floor. And a friend named Liz ( Watchmen 's Hong Chau ) comes faithfully every day to check his vitals and bring him groceries. Liz is also a nurse, and she keeps telling him plainly that he's dying. But she's often interrupted by a knock at the door: First an earnest young missionary (Ty Simpkins) named Thomas hoping to spread the good word, and later, Ellie ( Stranger Things ' Sadie Sink), his estranged teenage daughter whose only words for him, primarily, are sneered f-bombs. Ellie, hissing and venomous, hates him because he left her mother ( Samantha Morton ) years ago for another man, but mainly she hates everything.

Aside from a single brief flashback, the action, such as it is, is confined entirely to Charlie's drab apartment and the small roundelay of guests who steadily come through to drop chunks of story exposition or settle scores. Fraser — encased in elaborate prosthetics that Aronfosky revels in shooting like a Caravaggio, all shadows and moody, milky light — welcomes them, down to the missionary kid. Charlie knows that he's killing himself and he knows why, but there's hardly any complaint or self-pity; instead he's emotionally generous almost to a fault, a man still eager to spread his love of Walt Whitman and Moby Dick and only connect, even if his efforts are met with mockery or disgust.

He and Chau, who brings a bright acidity and affection to Liz, often seem to be drawing from a different well than their castmates. But all the actors are left to mine their own layers in characters who have only the scantest backstories and broad traits: Hellish Teenager, Troubled Soul, Man Too Big to Live. Those dynamics may have played out better on stage, where a certain kind of bold underlining serves a live audience. Here it often feels clumsy and maddeningly inconsistent, stranding Fraser in a melodrama undeserving of his lovely, unshowy performance. Whatever he wins for The Whale — and early prizes have already come — he deserves. The rest is just chum. Grade: C

‘The Whale’ review: Brendan Fraser delivers the best performance of his career

Movie review.

Charlie is dying.

Morbidly obese, the central character in “The Whale” is literally eating himself to death. Scarfing down candy bars from a desk drawer full of them. Devouring pizzas delivered to his door daily. Subsisting on bucket after bucket of fried chicken.

His heart is failing, but he refuses to seek medical attention to the despair of his only true friend, a woman named Liz (Hong Chau) who is his devoted caregiver.

He’s lonely. He’s guilt-ridden. He’s grief-stricken. He’s, frankly, suicidal. He knows exactly where he’s headed and is waiting for the not-too-distant day when his suffering will finally be at an end.

As played by Brendan Fraser in a startlingly authentic-looking full-body prosthetic fat suit, he’s a fascinating, complicated individual. For all his health issues and psychological problems, he is not without hope. That hope springs from his work as an online English teacher. He loves inspiring students. Via Zoom sessions, he encourages them to be analytical and self-revealing in their writing. He keeps his condition a secret from them, turning off his laptop’s camera so they can’t see him, while his intellect and caring nature come through loud and clear.

Fraser, distancing himself from his long-ago days of playing the light-comic likes of Dudley Do-Right and George of the Jungle, shifts emotional valences with lightning quickness as Charlie, now hopeful, now caring, now grieving, now desperate, in ways that are not jarring but rather seamless and revelatory of Charlie’s innermost dimensions. Under the direction of Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan,” “Requiem for a Dream”), working from a screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, Fraser reaches deep within himself to give what is arguably the best performance of his career.

Aronofsky has surrounded him with actors who are similarly adroit at revealing unexpected facets of their characters. Chau’s caregiver Liz hectors Charlie to quit being so self-destructive, yet at the same time feeds him unhealthy sandwiches because that’s what he wants and she loves him so much she’s helpless to deny him what he craves.

A young missionary named Thomas played by Ty Simpkins shows up at the door, Bible in hand, eager to save Charlie’s soul. But there is something in his manner that suggests his grasp of his own faith is somehow less secure than it seems.

Charlie’s ex-wife Mary, played by Samantha Morton, arrives late in the picture, full of long-held bitterness over Charlie’s abandonment of her and their only child when he went off to live with another man. And yet in the course of her visit, she, almost in spite of herself, tenderly nestles close to him to listen to his laboring heartbeat.

The most searing performance is given by Sadie Sink in the role of Charlie’s teenage daughter Ellie. She blows into his apartment, a whirlwind of rage made so by Charlie’s having abandoned her and her mother for his male lover when she was 8. Now 17 and failing in school, she comes to his home to unload her white-hot resentments on him and at the same time to angrily and reluctantly accept his offer to help her write her school essays. The main essay is on the topic of “Moby-Dick,” the source of the title rather than a reference to Charlie’s girth, though that nonetheless is implied.

Her mother calls Ellie evil, and she is as shown by hurtful things she does to her father. But wounded as she is, Charlie, loving and compassionate, wants to help her in any way he can, scholastically and financially.

Hunter’s screenplay is adapted from his 2012 stage play, and Aronofsky’s decision to confine the picture to Charlie’s cluttered apartment reveals its stage-bound roots. The disordered living space reflects the chaotic state of Charlie’s mind. The place is an arena where all the characters’ warring emotions are concentrated to an almost unbearable degree.

The fat suit is in a sense a distraction in that you wonder how Fraser was able to act within it. But the fact that he does so and so effectively makes “The Whale” a searing, moving experience.

W ith Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton. Directed by Darren Aronofsky from a screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter. 117 minutes. Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content. Opens Dec. 21 at multiple theaters.

The Whale Review

A deeply emotional glimpse at a troubled man confronting his own white whale..

The Whale releases in theaters on Dec. 9, 2022.

I’m fat. There’s no getting around that. So, unsurprisingly, The Whale – a story about an overweight man – had potential to be a deeply personal film for me. Writing about it, even more so. What I wasn’t expecting was just how personal.

The Whale tells the story of Charlie (Brendan Fraser) – a 600lb man with increasingly complex health issues and a life full of regret. I may not be 600lb but I can sure relate to that last part. Like I said, I’m fat. Much like Charlie, “I was always big, I just let it get out of control.” Charlie’s life spirals following the death of his partner. For me, it was after getting divorced. But the results were similar – comfort food quickly became a few pounds, a stone or two. Then you look back and wonder how the hell you got there.

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We don’t see that with Charlie – just the end result, his bloated, 600lb-frame a testament to the devastation his life has wrought upon him. Director Darren Aronofsky paints a grim portrait of poor Charlie. He’s a reclusive English teacher who’s cut himself off from the world. He’s so embarrassed by himself that he keeps his webcam switched off while delivering his college courses. I did exactly the same when I began studying one.

That’s why Fraser’s performance hits so hard for me – the sheer authenticity of it. I’ve been there, I get it. I know exactly what it’s like to give up on yourself. I notice the look in his eyes, the guilt when he reaches for another chocolate bar, the anger, and rage, and self-destruction on his face when he gorges himself on another binge. For me, it’s one of the most authentic performances I’ve ever seen on film.

Which is Darren Aronofsky’s best film to date?

It's a heavy and emotionally draining performance, too. Charlie is dying – a victim of his own eating, while he clings fanatically to an essay about Moby Dick every time he’s close to his last breath. But Charlie is more than just a fat, dying man. He’s a father, a friend, a grieving lover.

The complexity of Charlie is a testament to the incredible script by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the play on which the film is based. It’s deftly handled by both Aronofsky and Fraser, with a subtlety and grace you won’t expect from beneath a 600lb body mass. And that’s exactly the point.

There’s been some controversy over the decision to put Fraser in a body suit, given the fact that Charlie is portrayed as grotesquely, morbidly obese. But by exaggerating Charlie’s proportions, it allows Aronofsky to hit us even harder with an important truth: Charlie is as human as the rest of us. Much like Walt Whitman in his poem, Song of Myself, Fraser explodes the self, giving us a humane and harrowing glimpse into Charlie’s complex life that most will avoid looking for in the first place.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a fat person portrayed so honestly, and that unflinching authenticity – the good, the bad, the warts and all – makes The Whale important and hugely necessary. In fact, Charlie isn’t made out to be a victim – he’s done some questionable things, too. He’s merely human. Aronofsky gets that point across with poetic beauty.

Charlie’s physical appearance is designed to shock, with some astonishing makeup and prosthetics used to bring Fraser up to that 600lb body mass. There’s an element of sensationalism when you’re faced with Charlie’s naked, showering body, for instance. By exaggerating Charlie to grotesque proportions, it hits even harder when we begin to uncover the anguish that pushed him there.

If Fraser’s performance is at the heart of The Whale then Sadie Sink, who plays his daughter, Ellie, is the soul. The anger bubbling up inside her is a counterpoint to Fraser’s sadness – two ways of coping with tragedy that oppose and clash. Sink brings a phenomenal performance, too, overshadowed only by the brilliance of Fraser in what might be the defining role of his career. Their dynamic brought a tear to my eye more than once.

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Of course, she is Charlie’s white whale – repairing his relationship with her is all-consuming. It’s another element of his personality that comes to light through a mix of incredible performances and subtle direction… not to mention orchestral hits mimicking whale song in an eerie, emotional nod to the story of Moby Dick.

The utter brilliance of The Whale is this: it’s not just about Charlie. It’s about you. How you interact with the film – what you get from it – is what’s important. Aronofsky forces us to face our own prejudices in a subtle way, reassessing how we see Charlie at every step.

The Whale is truly one of the most emotional voyages you’ll take in a theater. A gut-wrenching, tear-jerking story is topped only by Fraser’s performance – a career-defining role that’s surely a contender for Oscars glory. Sink brings a staggeringly off-kilter performance as Ellie, while the whole thing is expertly guided by Aronofsky at the rudder. Hunter charts a course through unfamiliar waters, forcing us to face some uncomfortable truths. Fat people are people, too. Good or bad or everything in between. The Whale shows its 600lb protagonist with a humanity that has long been missing from Hollywood.

The Whale forces us to face some uncomfortable truths, not just concerning its grotesquely proportioned protagonist, but about ourselves, too. Much of its power comes from breaking down the barrier between the audience and the film’s subject, forcing us to accept that there’s a human being beneath the fat. A powerhouse performance from Brendan Fraser explores every facet of the deeply complex man, while Sadie Sink digs deep for a quirky role that keeps you guessing. A sharp script is delivered with slow brutality by Darren Aronofsky who gets to the heart of what it means to be Charlie. The Whale isn’t just a great film – it’s an important one, too, delving into our own humanity with the dogged relentlessness of Ahab himself.

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Inside Darren Aronofsky’s messy movie The Whale is something wise about religious trauma

The Whale is more than the movie where Brendan Fraser wears a fat suit.

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It’s no wonder Darren Aronofsky wanted to adapt The Whale , Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play, for the big screen. It feels like it originated in the same brain that made Noah , The Wrestler, and Mother! : a story about regret and redemption, probing the spirit-body connection and drawing on biblical and literary myth.

So he got Hunter to write the screenplay and Brendan Fraser, who’s long been out of the public eye, to star. Fraser delivers a brilliant, gutting performance as Charlie, an online college professor who, out of great grief, has developed an eating disorder that has left him immobilized. He can’t leave his home; he can barely leave the couch, and he keeps the camera off when he teaches, afraid of his students’ gaze.

Charlie lost his partner Alan some years ago, and as The Whale progresses, we slowly realize his grief response of binge-eating is an inversion of the eating disorder that killed Alan. His late partner’s sister Liz (Hong Chau) is his closest friend, stopping by his apartment every day to check on him and bring him groceries. She works at a hospital, so she checks his slowly deteriorating health as well, and by the time the movie starts he’s showing clear signs of congestive heart failure. He’ll be dead by the end of the week if he doesn’t seek medical attention, and that’s the one thing he refuses to do.

At the start of the film, a young missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) knocks on Charlie’s door, wishing to evangelize Charlie, who kindly informs him that he knows the Bible inside and out. He’s not the only unexpected guest: Soon, Ellie (Sadie Sink) shows up, to Charlie’s great surprise; she’s his teenage daughter, sullen and rebellious and about to be kicked out of school, and he hasn’t really seen her since he and her mother split up years earlier. Her arrival seems like a moment of redemption. Charlie feels he’s messed up everything in his life, but maybe now, in his final days, he can do something right, and save himself.

The Whale is set in a very specific place: Moscow, Idaho, a city whose significance might not hit everyone the same way. Set along the state’s northern border with Washington, it’s a home both to a sizable population of Mormons and to a burgeoning movement of Christian Reconstructionists , an evangelical movement that embraces the idea, in essence, that biblical law ought to be the law of modern America. If you’ve been in conservative Christian circles, you’ve likely heard of the ringleader, Douglas Wilson, pastor of a church in Moscow, most recently famous for being blurbed on the back cover of a book about Christian nationalism published by the right-wing site Gab.

All that’s worth noting because Hunter (with, presumably, Aronofsky’s input) has updated his Obama-era play to be set during the 2016 GOP presidential primaries in Idaho. (In the background, on Charlie’s TV, we can hear Ted Cruz winning over Donald Trump by a sizable margin.) The characters don’t engage in explicit political commentary, but Hunter made another key update — changing the young missionary Thomas from Mormon to evangelical, a member of what sounds like a fairly typical congregation in town called New Life. That church and its teachings, we’re meant to understand, are part of (or perhaps the cause of) a bigger apocalyptic moment in American history.

That’s the backdrop of The Whale , but the real apocalypse is happening at Charlie’s house, at least if we take “apocalypse” to mean a moment of revelation. We know — everyone knows — that these are the last days of Charlie’s life. It’s raining continually outside, like a flood is coming. Charlie is obsessed with an essay he keeps reading about Moby-Dick , an apocalyptic book if there ever was one, about a man with an obsession and a death wish. There’s an atmosphere of dread, both of what’s about to happen in Charlie’s house and what’s going on beyond its walls.

As a story, The Whale is compelling. As a film, The Whale is a tad shakier. First there’s the obvious problem of putting Charlie, whose body size is viewed with repulsion by many of the film’s characters, on screen to be looked at in a culture beholden to rampant fatphobia that tends to denigrate human dignity. The distinction between a person whose body is large and a person whose body is large and failing because they’re trying to end their own life is lost on many people, and undoubtedly those people will be in the audience. The peculiar vitriol reserved for the latter, out of proportion to all kinds of other ways to harm oneself, is a pestilence, and that’s not even counting the belief that it’s okay to judge and comment upon another person’s body shape.

Worse, there are times when it’s not clear the filmmakers know the difference, particularly a sequence in which Charlie’s binging behavior is rendered with the distinctive air of a monster movie. You can’t control an audience’s reaction to a character, but you can steer it, and The Whale doesn’t always do the work. And there are some other issues, too: The score feels manipulative at times, and Sink’s performance feels curiously one-note, overwrought and hysterical, particularly next to Fraser.

Yet there is more to The Whale , which is also genuinely moving. Following the movie’s Toronto Film Festival premiere, Hunter spoke about how, growing up as a gay kid in Moscow, Idaho, he turned to food to self-medicate the loathing he learned to feel for himself, and experienced some of what Charlie experiences. This is what The Whale gets exactly right: the ways that fundamentalist religion and other legalistic cultures teach adherents to hate those whose bodies don’t fit a prescribed mold — especially themselves. That can manifest in many ways, but a common one is eating disorders, which look different on different people and garner a range of reactions, but come from the same place. I grew up in a very conservative evangelical community. I experienced this judgment too. It is visceral and real and deadly.

The other matter The Whale understands keenly is that our response to this pressure is simply to try to save one another, or ourselves. Charlie laments that he couldn’t save Alan. Liz wants to save Charlie. Ellie wants saving both desperately and not at all. And Thomas has salvation mixed up in his head: by trying to force salvation on Charlie, he’s trying to save himself. It’s Liz who finally recognizes that nobody can save anyone — that trying to do so may mean you stop seeing them as human.

Which suggests that the whale of the title may also have something to do with the story of Jonah in the Bible who, in a famous Sunday school story, ended up in the belly of one. After God asked him to preach to a city of wicked people, Nineveh, he ran away rather than minister to them, only to find himself inside the giant creature. When he escaped, yielded, and finally made it to Nineveh, he discovered that the people listened and repented. Infuriated, he yelled at God for showing mercy; God more or less told him to shut up and let God decide who gets saved. It’s none of his business. His job is to live.

And in its enigmatic ending, I think, The Whale suggests the same. We try to save one another, and we fail, because we cannot help but fail. Every one of us fails. But something in the world is still powered on the energy of the love we try to have. At the end, that might be what matters most.

The Whale premiered at the Venice Film Festival and played at the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens in theaters on December 9, 2022.

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Charlie is a smart, positive-thinking man who does

Movie approaches Charlie's experiences with obesit

Dialogue describing a horrible death (a bloated bo

A character masturbates, with his hand underneath

Language includes "f--k," "bulls--t," "s--t," "a--

Various snack foods and sodas on display: Pepsi, 3

Teen vaping and smoking pot. A main character smok

Positive Messages

Thoughtful dialogue and discussions around love, literature, truth, and faith. Movie is also about dangers of pre-judging people. Promotes compassion.

Positive Role Models

Charlie is a smart, positive-thinking man who does everything he can to support his daughter, but he also has some major weaknesses. He lies to his students and keeps a big secret from his best friend, one that ends up hurting her. And he's forever apologizing for things, revealing a lack of confidence. In one sequence, after hearing bad news, he binge-eats and vomits. Liz, a nurse and Charlie's best friend, is selfless in her devotion to him, though she's often frustrated by him and sometimes even teases him. Some characters say cruel things about someone being overweight.

Diverse Representations

Movie approaches Charlie's experiences with obesity from a sympathetic place. He's also gay and mourning the loss of his true love. But the movie frames fatness -- and queerness -- as something shocking that needs to be "humanized" in the first place. Another major character is a strong, complex Asian woman (Vietnamese actor Hong Chau). Charlie's daughter, Ellie, is very smart, although she's also quite difficult and likes to make trouble; her mother is also a smart, three-dimensional woman. A South Asian supporting character shows kindness to Charlie. The only other character is Thomas, a White male missionary. Cruel language about a person being fat is heard.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Dialogue describing a horrible death (a bloated body washes up on shore, etc.). Main character frequently in pain. Main character chokes on food. Binge-eating and vomiting. Violent dialogue about death, stabbing, rape, etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A character masturbates, with his hand underneath sweatpants. A pornographic video plays on a laptop, with one person kissing and thrusting behind another. (No graphic nudity shown.) Charlie is shown shirtless in the shower. Strong sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes "f--k," "bulls--t," "s--t," "a--hole," "f--got," "retarded," "goddamn," "bitch," "hell," "idiot," "shut up," "stupid," "penis," "oh my God." "Jesus" and "oh Christ" as exclamations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Various snack foods and sodas on display: Pepsi, 3 Musketeers chocolate bar, Dr. Pepper, etc. Mentions of Walmart.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Teen vaping and smoking pot. A main character smokes cigarettes regularly. Dialogue about teen smoking too much pot. Character drugged with Ambien. Dialogue about someone who drinks frequently. Dialogue about college students drinking alcohol.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Whale is a drama about a man ( Brendan Fraser ) who's living with severe obesity and trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter ( Sadie Sink ). Directed by Darren Aronofsky , it's a compassionate movie with mature, complex themes. Violence is described in dialogue, and there's some unsettling imagery of things like binge-eating, vomiting, choking, etc. A man is shown masturbating (his hand is down his pants) and watching a pornographic video (one person kisses and thrusts behind another). The main character is also seen shirtless in the shower, and there's some strong sex-related dialogue. Language includes several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," and more. Teens smoke pot and vape, a character is drugged with Ambien, and there's dialogue about smoking too much pot and drinking too much alcohol. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (6)
Kids say (7)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Not worth it. Don’t understand why it’s getting awards

“the truth will set you free “, what's the story.

In THE WHALE, Charlie ( Brendan Fraser ) teaches English classes online while living with severe obesity. He pretends that his laptop camera is broken so that his students can't see him. He never leaves his apartment, ordering all of his food delivered and getting occasional visits and care from his friend Liz ( Hong Chau ), a nurse. When Charlie learns that his blood pressure is potentially lethally high, he refuses to go to the hospital, instead devoting his energy to reconnecting with his brilliant, estranged, and deeply troubled teen daughter, Ellie ( Sadie Sink ). Meanwhile, a young missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), happens upon Charlie and decides that he wants to help save his soul.

Is It Any Good?

Like Darren Aronofsky 's other movies, this dark drama doesn't shy away from the realities of its main character's situation, but what lingers are its deep wells of compassion. The Whale launches with Charlie's masturbation being interrupted by crippling chest pains. This initially casts him in a pathetic light, but as the story progresses over the course of a week, viewers begin to see who Charlie really is: loving, intelligent, sensitive, and an undying optimist.

Fraser's work is unfailingly powerful, Charlie's bright eyes consistently gleaming with hope. Playing opposite him, Chau is equally brilliant. The screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, adapted from his own play, is filled with discussions about love, literature, truth, and faith (Aronofsky has grappled with themes of faith in much of his work, especially Noah and Mother! ). Aronofsky's direction is skilled but not showy, closer to The Wrestler than his other movies and focused mainly on character and performance. The movie flows beautifully, even if it sometimes feels a little stage-bound and cutesy. (For a recluse, Charlie is never without someone to talk to.) Overall, it's a movie that twists preconceptions.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Whale 's depiction of body image . How do you think the filmmakers intend you to see Charlie? What message is the movie saying about judging others?

Why is it so important to Charlie for people to "write the truth"?

Did you notice positive diverse representations in the film? Are stereotypes used, or avoided?

How are drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol depicted? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why is that important?

How does the movie promote compassion ? Why is that an important character strength?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 9, 2022
Cast : Brendan Fraser , Hong Chau , Sadie Sink
Director : Darren Aronofsky
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Asian actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Drama
Character Strengths : Compassion
Run time : 117 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language, some drug use and sexual content
Award : Academy Award
Last updated : September 9, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Brendan Fraser’s Soft Quizzicality in “The Whale”

By Anthony Lane

A girl in front of a silhouette of an obese man.

Few actors have done more to promote the power of innocence than Brendan Fraser. Go back to the first wave of his fame, and to the gag that ran through his drollest roles. In “Encino Man” (1992), he was an early human, frozen solid during an ice age, defrosted by high-school kids, and invited to party down. In “George of the Jungle” (1997), he was a Tarzanesque vine-swinger let loose in San Francisco. And, in the charming “Blast from the Past” (1999), he was born in a nuclear bunker, raised on pure Americana, and eager, when he emerged after thirty-five years, to marry somebody from Pasadena. In each case, California was held up as the acme of civilization, and Fraser as a figure who knew almost nothing, bore no ill will, and was ready to be happily surprised. Get a load of those peepers, primed to pop! And that cartoon grin! When the meek are built like Johnny Weissmuller, it seems a little easier to believe that they might yet inherit the Earth.

Fraser then swung out of orbit, and partially faded from public view. If you missed him in the confusingly titled “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” (2008), or in “The Poison Rose” (2019), where he was billed below John Travolta and Morgan Freeman, don’t feel too bad. Now, though, Fraser is back, looming large in “The Whale.” He plays Charlie, who lives on his own and teaches literature classes online, explaining to his students, who can’t see him, that the camera on his computer is broken. This is untrue. Charlie doesn’t want to be seen, because his mind, however nimble, is housed in a body so gravely obese—the actor is robed in prosthetic fat—that a simple trip to the bathroom becomes an odyssey. Only when he eats does Charlie move fast, rootling through a drawer in search of chocolate bars, as busy as a jewel thief, or ripping slices from a pizza and hurrying them into his pie hole.

“The Whale” is directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter, who has adapted his play of the same name. Most of the action is set in two or three rooms, and Aronofsky strives to dispel any air of the theatrical; near the start, we are taken on a guided tour of Charlie, circling around him like travellers marvelling at a mountain, and there are times when his bulging features, in closeup, all but congest the screen. No playgoer would be granted such intimate privilege. What stymies the film, though, is not so much the confined space in which it unfolds—Hitchcock made do with less in “Rope” (1948) and “Rear Window” (1955)—as the stagy clunk with which other characters enter and exit that space. I half expected Charlie to exclaim, “Goodness gracious! Who could that be, at this hour?” as we hear a knock on the door.

One visitor is Charlie’s good friend Liz (Hong Chau), who is also a nurse, and makes no bones about the fate of his flesh. Who else would take his blood pressure, announce that he will soon die of heart failure, and bring him a sub to gorge on? Then, we have a young missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who drops in at random, asks Charlie, “Are you aware of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?,” and winds up smoking weed. More challenging is the arrival of Charlie’s daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and later of his ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). Both were estranged from him for years, after he fell in love with a man, but they now show up and embroil Charlie in highly wrought conversation. “You’re disgusting,” Ellie tells him, but he offers to help her with an essay for school, and her anger slowly melts. Could it be that Charlie, alone in his vastness, is valued after all?

“The Whale” is laughably earnest, larded with melodrama, and designed to shut down the long-standing association of human bulk with high spirits. Forget the tumid wit of Falstaff—“that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts,” as Prince Hal calls him—or the sinister bonhomie of Sydney Greenstreet. The film presents us with obesity as tragedy, and as a preventable scourge inflicted on the hero by a hostile and traumatizing world. (The villain, needless to say, is evangelical Christianity.) Here, in short, is a self-regarding drama of self-loathing: hardly the most appetizing prospect. If it proves nonetheless to be stirringly watchable, we have Brendan Fraser to thank. Returning to the spotlight, he continues to radiate an essential sweetness of nature. His line readings have lost none of their soft quizzicality, and he even ventures a giggle; as Charlie, so often does he apologize that I began to suspect him of being secretly British. Inside the whale is a still small voice of calm.

How does the story of Pinocchio begin? For Carlo Collodi, whose tales of the wooden child were published as a book in 1883, everything kicked off with violence—with a log moaning in fear at being struck by carpenter’s tools, and with two old men fighting over it. Walt Disney, in 1940, plumped for coziness: the carolling cricket, and the mock-alpine fantasy of Geppetto’s shop, its peace broken only by ticking clocks. In the latest retelling, officially titled “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” the tone of choice is pathos. We first meet Geppetto as he mourns a real boy: his son, Carlo, whom he cherished and lost. Pinocchio, in other words, fashioned in a drunken fit, is a replacement .

It’s a hell of a suggestion, and it accounts for the emotional thrust of what ensues. This Pinocchio will behave, throughout his exploits, as if he had plenty to prove and nothing much to lose, like someone who knows he was merely half wanted to start with. His basic locomotion is a kick-and-hop, and that reckless onward rush is an ideal match for the animation that drives the film along. The technique is that of stop-motion, and the effect is far smoother than it was in the old Ray Harryhausen epics—though the jerkiness of the stop-motion skeletons, in “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), made them more spooky, not less—but there remains a welcome smack of the homemade, gnarly and sticklike. This is the kind of movie that Geppetto would create in his dreams.

Parts of the narrative will seem familiar, especially to anyone weaned on Disney. Once again, Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) is lured away from Geppetto (David Bradley) and recruited into the circus by a vulpine rogue (Christoph Waltz). There is still a cricket in the offing, but his name is Sebastian (Ewan McGregor), not Jiminy, and there’s a cruel farce in the way he keeps getting knocked about and smashed. This remorselessness, and the characters’ ability to rise again after meeting the blows of fate, reach a very strange apogee in Pinocchio’s regular deaths. Time after time, he finds himself in a darkling underworld, where rabbits act as pallbearers, and where a glowing blue sphinx (Tilda Swinton), tricked out with buffalo horns and a lashing tail, lectures him on eternity and grief. Whereupon the boy bounces back to life: a rubber soul within a frame of wood.

How to respond to this? Well, readers of Collodi will warm to the blend of fatalism and hope—“When the dead cry, it means they’re on the way to recovering,” as a crow says in the book. And parents will ask themselves if it was quite such a good idea to drag their youngest offspring to the new movie, and what the chances will be, come evening, of getting them to sleep. (It’s certainly more of a nightmare than “Nightmare Alley,” del Toro’s previous work, released last year.) Oh, and be warned: the film takes place during the upsurge of Fascism, and provides a withering cameo for Mussolini, who is taunted by Pinocchio with poop jokes. So, if you are taking the kids, you’ll obviously need to fill them in on twentieth-century Italian political history while you’re lining up for Cherry Vanilla Cokes. No pressure.

To be honest, del Toro has thrown too much into the mix. For no compelling reason, for instance, and to unresounding effect, the movie also happens to be a musical. Imaginative overflow, however, is always more appealing than a dearth, and though the rounded beauty of Disney’s draftsmanship—remember the cathedral-like cavern of the whale’s interior—can never be erased, the angularity of this latest attempt has a piercing punch of its own. Nowhere more so than when Pinocchio, standing in the nave of a church, stares up at a Crucifixion. Like him, it has been carved by Geppetto, and, in honor of that affinity, Pinocchio suddenly cricks and skews himself to mimic the posture of Jesus in his agony. It’s an astonishing moment, undoubtedly blasphemous, yet touched with more wonder than derision. Suffer little children, even the ones made of pine.

Precisely how much Netflix paid, last year, to acquire the Roald Dahl estate is unconfirmed. Low estimates murmur of six hundred million dollars. In the wake of that transaction comes “Matilda the Musical”—a new movie, directed by Matthew Warchus, jammed with larky songs by Tim Minchin, and based on the show that was based on a novel by Dahl. And how deliciously uncomfortable it is, may I say, to observe Mrs. Wormwood (Andrea Riseborough), the heroine’s mother, testifying to her tackiness by waving wads of cash and crying, “Money! Money!” Ugh. Horrible stuff.

If Geppetto was alarmed by the advent of Pinocchio, Mrs. Wormwood and her husband (Stephen Graham) are appalled by their daughter’s birth. Nobody wished for her upon a star. As a young girl (Alisha Weir), she is loathed by her parents, not least for her literacy; following Dahl’s cue, the film is an ode to the bliss of reading (“like a holiday in your head,” Matilda says), which unchains you and renders you dangerous to tyrants. Hitherto self-educated, Matilda goes to school at Crunchem Hall, where she stands out as a freethinker, to the delight of her teacher, Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch), and the thunderous annoyance of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull (Emma Thompson). A former hammer thrower, Miss Trunchbull now contents herself with tossing her pupils into an adjacent field.

Like “Pinocchio,” the saga of Matilda goes where “The Whale” fears to tread, into the murky and Dickensian comedy of abuse. Miss Trunchbull is descended from other principals whose names smell of torture, like Thomas Gradgrind, in “Hard Times,” or Wackford Squeers, in “Nicholas Nickleby”—the first book that Matilda mentions, in the film, when asked what she’s been reading of late. Of all the beneficiaries of Dickens, none have been more influential than Disney and Dahl. Both deal in the heartfelt popular grotesque; turpitude spawns moral and physical gargoyles, whom the virtuous (preferably not simpering but impish, like Matilda) must learn to trounce. It seems fitting, then, that the best thing about Warchus’s film should be the energy of the children. Confidently led by Weir, they swarm the screen. Picking up where the urchins of “Oliver!” (1968) left off, they hymn their climactic liberation with an anthem that binds the messy to the insurgent, glorying in the most Dahlian of all words: “We’re Revolting!” ♦

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The ‘cathartic release’ of ‘The Whale’ explained by the play’s actors and directors

Four actors playing the obese main character in "The Whale" onstage

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The following contains spoilers from the movie “The Whale,” now playing in theaters.

The movie version of “The Whale” ends with a breath, a bright light and a beach. The last visual shows the sun shining, the tide rising and falling, and a younger, slimmer version of the lead character, Charlie, staring out into the ocean as his daughter plays in the sand behind him.

If the serene seaside scene confused you, you’re not alone: That final flashback was a surprise to playwright and screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, as director Darren Aronofsky tacked it on without discussing it with him. But the ending’s overall effect echoes the final moment of its source material, which actors and directors who’ve staged the popular play consider to be a release that, when performed, feels communal and generally satisfying for the audience in the room.

“The way it’s structured, this play is designed to slowly and repeatedly turn up the pressure until it almost can’t be tolerated,” said Davis McCallum, who directed a 2012 off-Broadway staging at Playwrights Horizons. “And then it has this really cathartic release at the end of the piece — a blackout, a sound effect, and a moment where the audience just lived in that silent darkness together.”

Both the play and the movie “The Whale” center on Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a reclusive, morbidly obese instructor of online writing classes who has been eating himself to death since the passing of his lover, a casualty of religious homophobia.

An obese man wearing a button-up shirt sits in a dark room

Review: Does Brendan Fraser give a great performance in ‘The Whale’? It’s complicated.

Darren Aronofsky’s intimate chamber drama, adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his own play, navigates a tricky line between empathy and exploitation.

Dec. 8, 2022

The character is an amalgamation of Hunter’s past lives: as a closeted gay kid attending a fundamentalist Christian school in rural Idaho, a depressed adult who silently self-medicated with food, and an expository writing instructor for college freshmen (the piece’s heartbreakingly honest line “I think I need to accept that my life isn’t going to be very exciting” is an actual submission from one of Hunter’s students).

Throughout “The Whale,” Charlie is visited by his estranged and troubled daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink) , and his frustrated ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton), both of whom Charlie abandoned when he ended his marriage and came out as gay; Liz (Hong Chau) , a conflicted caregiver who is also the sibling of Charlie’s late lover; and Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a fundamentalist missionary who is far from home. Hunter doesn’t shy away from any of the issues the characters are dealing with “but doesn’t bury you in [them] either,” said Martin Benson, who directed a 2013 staging at South Coast Repertory. “He’s not advocating anything, he’s just writing what he believes is true.”

These characters and their concerns are similar to those in Hunter’s other plays, which tackle subjects “fundamental to Greek tragedy: the limitation of humanity’s vision, the place of religion in society and the desperate longing for relief from the lonely uncertainty of life,” wrote Times critic Charles McNulty when Hunter received the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2014. “He proceeds not with a moral point but through observation of the way his characters either defend their bunkered existences or attempt to reach beyond them — or more commonly, some combination of the two.”

An actor in shirt and tie talks to an obese man seated on a couch in a play.

Throughout the intimate live piece — which is staged without the escape of an intermission — all five characters reveal truths to each other and the audience that raise the stakes of their potential bonds.

“These deeply flawed characters actually care about each other so much, but there are so many obstacles for them to express that love or connect with one another in real ways, however desperately or destructively,” said Joanie Schultz, who directed a 2013 production at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. “So when some of them finally do, it’s gorgeous and almost magical.”

Numerous stagings of “The Whale” accentuate the pressure-cooker effect by designing Charlie’s living room, where the entirety of the play unfolds, with an extra sense of claustrophobia or isolation. For example, the 2014 Bay Area run raised the Marin Theatre Company stage by four feet and angled Charlie’s ceiling so that, from the audience’s perspective, the character appeared to “dominate the space in a way that intimidated the people who visited him,” said director Jasson Minadakis.

Likewise, the off-Broadway version strategically lit the space “so that it felt as if his room were hovering in this dark void,” said director McCallum; the Chicago staging positioned the proscenium “like an island in the sea, which was really effective because they’re all alone on their own islands in some ways, with all these barriers to connection,” said director Schultz.

A woman kneels next to an obese man who has on his face tubing providing oxygen in a play.

Darren Aronofsky on ‘The Whale,’ fatphobia and empathy

Director Darren Aronofsky dives deep on “The Whale,” fatphobia, human connection and how he feels about Brendan Fraser and Sadie Sink.

Dec. 13, 2022

Within these confined spaces, the actors who played Charlie — each wearing body suits weighing anywhere from 30 to 100 pounds — charted his arc physically and emotionally. As he attempts to nudge daughter Ellie toward a place of authentic self-expression, he too reveals himself to his students. The intention is that, by the time Charlie shares that he’s giving his life savings to Ellie, and endures great pain to stand up and walk toward her as she reads her “Moby-Dick” essay aloud to him, the audience would feel the overwhelming fulfillment Charlie gets during his final breath in the play.

“Every night, it was a journey, and it wasn’t easy to watch or to perform,” recalled Tom Alan Robbins, who starred in the 2012 world premiere in Denver. “His goal is self-destructive, but you want the audience to understand what has driven him to do this, and that his redemption is in the relationship he tries to forge with his daughter. You want that last second to be a combination of incredible pain and incredible triumph because, however briefly it is that they connect, it’s still an achievement for him.”

“Ellie says terrible, devastating things to Charlie throughout the whole thing, but he loves her so much that it doesn’t even hurt him,” said Matthew Arkin, who played Charlie at South Coast Repertory. “So in that final moment, whatever flaws he had, whatever mistakes he made and in whatever ways he couldn’t love himself enough, he lived a life redeemed, because he gave everything to save his daughter.”

Whether Charlie dies at the end of “The Whale” is up for debate. As written in Hunter’s script, the stage directions of that breath simply read, “A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black.” Many theater makers say that breath could very well be his last inhale, after which he is finally freed from the pains of his body, his loneliness, his grief. “The love and connection that Charlie gives Ellie is a gift, and hopefully she will remain true to her voice and herself in a way that he gave up on,” said Hal Brooks, who directed the Denver premiere.

It also could be considered in a metaphorical way, mimicking “how whales immerse themselves for so long underwater and then they finally come up to the surface,” said Schultz, or “a deep intake of breath before diving in somewhere they’ve never gone before,” said Shuler Hensley, who played Charlie in the New York run as well as a London staging in 2018. “It’s a brilliant ending, because audience members have constantly told me they couldn’t breathe afterwards. They didn’t know what to do, whether to applaud or get up or move because they’ve become so connected to Charlie.”

A young woman sitting on a couch near an obese man sitting on a desk in a play.

When asked about the ending, Hunter didn’t clarify Charlie’s status because, he said, it’s not necessarily relevant. “The final moments of this play and this movie abandon realism a little bit, and it’s no longer about this guy in this apartment,” he explained. “What matters is that he’s connected with Ellie, he’s done the thing that he’s been trying to do throughout this entire play, and that connection feels real and genuine. There’s this apotheosis that happens, and in the film, Charlie literally ascends off the ground.”

Though Hunter didn’t write the beach scene that follows Charlie’s onscreen ascension, he called it “marvelous” and shared an interpretation of what it might mean: “If it’s a flashback to the last time Charlie went swimming in the ocean, close to when the family fell apart, what I see in that shot is a man staring down the abyss of self-actualization, contemplating the decision he has to make about the different avenues he can take.

“Maybe he was thinking about what would happen if he stayed in that marriage: Ellie would have grown up with a closeted father, [his lover] Alan would have been miserable and, as Liz points out, would have probably died way before he did when he was with Charlie,” Hunter continued. “Choosing to stay or leave, both paths are complicated and tragic in their own ways, but ultimately, I think Charlie took the more hopeful route, and chose to look for the salvation one can find through human connection.”

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Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and Poynter’s Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others. She is currently working remotely alongside her dog, Oliver.

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The Whale review – Darren Aronofsky’s latest is a contrived disappointment

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Brendan Fraser’s morbidly obese English teacher in this much anticipated but underwhelming return to movies

D arren Aronofsky’s vapid, hammy and stagey movie, adapted by Samuel D Hunter from his own 2012 play, is the festival’s biggest and most surprising disappointment: the writing clunks; the narrative is contrived and unconvincing and the whole film has a strange pass-agg body language, as if it is handling its own painful subject matter with kid gloves and asking us to do the same. Brendan Fraser is Charlie, an English teacher in charge of an online study course, run via Zoom. He claims to the group that his laptop camera isn’t working, which is why the square on the screen where his face should be is blank. But actually he doesn’t want them to see what he looks like: Charlie is morbidly obese, a giant pool of flesh, hardly able to leave the couch with a walking frame to get to the lavatory, gorging delivery pizzas and fried chicken, with a stash of chocolate bars in the desk drawer. Our first view of Charlie is of him masturbating to gay porn, culminating in a heart attack that almost kills him.

But this isn’t supposed to be ironic black comedy and Charlie isn’t supposed to be greedy or lazy or selfish (although these uncaring talking points are not really aired). He is depressed after the death of his partner, a former student from an adult night-school class for whom he left his wife and young daughter; it was a desertion for which he is still guilt-stricken.

Charlie’s only friend now is his late partner’s sister Liz (Hong Chau), a tough-minded nurse exasperated at his refusal to go to hospital. His fragile, lonely life becomes more complicated still with the arrival at his door of a strange young man, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a Christian evangelist from the church of which Charlie’s partner was a member. His angry, conflicted daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), also appears to want to reconnect.

Alongside it all, there is Charlie’s love of literature, especially Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Charlie is glumly aware that he is the whale, the huge bloated entity that no one wants to hunt down or obsess over or even think about at all. Or perhaps it is that Charlie is hunting the elusive meaning of his own wrecked life, deep in the ocean of loneliness.

Fraser brings a definite gentleness and openness to the role of Charlie, and his performance is good, although of course it is upstaged by the showy latex and the special effects, which are there to elicit a mix of horror and sympathy and awards-season love, like a very serious male version of the “ Fat Monica ” prom video scene in Friends.

There is a too-good-to-be-true sheen to Charlie’s sweet saintliness; his emotional yearning and wounded niceness are underlined by the coercive orchestral score, and this movie’s concept of death is sentimental and even sneakily religiose. But even this isn’t exactly the problem – it is the convoluted plot that surrounds Charlie: the weird and implausible shenanigans around Thomas’s background and Ellie’s unhappiness and bad attitude, all indirectly and clumsily revealed. Charlie believes in Ellie’s essential goodness to the very end, but any supposed ambiguity about her intentions and behaviour is unsatisfying and uninteresting. Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

Darren Aronofsky
Drama films
Venice film festival 2022
Venice film festival

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The Whale review: Brendan Fraser comeback is grossly manipulative to an effective degree

The star of ‘the mummy’, covered in layers of prosthetics, is sad-eyed and awards-friendly, article bookmarked.

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First seen masturbating as he watches online porn, Charlie ( Brendan Fraser ), the main character in The Whale , isn’t just morbidly obese; he is a lumbering leviathan of a man, so immensely fat that he can barely manoeuvre himself off his couch, let alone leave his apartment. He sweats profusely, vomits into dustbins and almost chokes on the junk food he gorges himself on. “Who would want me to be part of their life?” he asks plaintively toward the end of the film. Even his daughter calls him disgusting. Darren Aronofsky’s film is stagy and mawkish. Watching it you feel grossly manipulated, but the approach is undeniably effective.

Fraser was the star of films like The Mummy and George of the Jungle in the days when he was a more conventionally shaped leading man. Now, covered in layers of prosthetics, he gives one of those sad-eyed performances, like a dog with an injured paw begging for a bone, that many audiences will find very hard to resist. He’s already received an Oscar nod for Best Actor.

Charlie makes a living by giving online English literature tutorials. He lies to his students that the camera on his laptop is broken so he doesn’t have to reveal himself in his full grotesquerie. As the film progresses, we gradually discover why he has allowed himself to grow so monstrously out of shape. Just under a decade before, he walked out on his marriage, abandoning his then eight-year-old daughter to take up with a student called Alan with whom he had fallen in love. Alan is now dead. Charlie is eaten up with guilt. He is also suffering congestive heart failure which could kill him at any time.

The film is based on a play by Samuel D Hunter. Aronofsky does little to open up his source material for the screen; the entire story takes place in Charlie’s apartment. In its lighter moments, The Whale is disconcertingly reminiscent of American family sitcoms full of eccentric relatives and friends who bicker incessantly but love each other really . Various characters turn up at Charlie’s door. One regular visitor Liz, (Hong Chau), a sharp-tongued but affectionate woman who has a demanding job yet still tends to his medical needs and keeps him in food.

Also continually re-appearing is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a hapless young missionary from a cult-like religious group, who wants to save the fat man’s soul. Then, most important to Charlie, there is his estranged daughter, Ellie ( Stranger Things ’ Sadie Sink), now 17 and in danger of flunking out of high school. She wants him to help her with her school essays but doesn’t hide her contempt for him. Her mother (Samantha Morton) doesn’t know she is there.

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Physical drama comes whenever Charlie tries to move a few steps across his apartment, or to go to the bathroom. The slightest exertion exhausts him. In spite of his decrepitude, he is a sweet natured and optimistic character with an engaging sense of humour. The title of the film refers not just to his shape, but to an essay written by a disgruntled kid, dissing Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick . He knows the essay by heart and regards it as his favourite piece of writing.

Aronofsky goes so far out of his way to portray Charlie in the early scenes as a repulsive bum that it’s inevitable the character’s better qualities will soon emerge. Fraser retains the genial qualities which made him so popular with audiences in mainstream 1990s movies. He demands honesty from his students but there’s nothing cynical about him.

The pathos is laid on very thick. At times, you wonder why a filmmaker as sophisticated as Aronofsky is resorting to such manipulative tactics. Beneath all its blubber, though, this turns out to be a film with a very big heart.

Dir: Darren Aronofsky. Starring: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton. 15, 117 mins.

‘The Whale’ is in cinemas from 3 February

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God, Please Send A Whale (2024) ‘CPH: DOX’ Movie Review: Quietly Affecting Portrait of Grief

Julie Bezerra Madsen’s film “God, Please Send A Whale” is a portrait of mourning. It captures when mourning has been deferred, and the emotional churn that comes with a lack of closure takes over. Through this film, she is grappling with the loss of her mother, who passed away six years earlier while visiting her sister, Ursula, in Brazil. The sisters have had severely different relationships with their mother. Ursula frequently clashed with her mother, whereas Julie had a more temperate one. However, Julie insists later to her father she could barely talk to her mother about anything important, which she just brushed away. It was mostly about bingo and boyfriends, she muses.

The three’s manner of grieving is individual and different. Julie’s father reminds her that his grief doesn’t have the similar depth that she has of a child who has lost her mother. After all, he had already been long separated from their mother. However, Julie is desperate and firm to bring both her sister and father along the same lines. She asserts the restorative importance of collective grieving. With them, she desires to try and do things she wishes she had done with her mother. Maybe it would offer a form of solace. She suggests a ceremony they could have. Her appeal of sharing grief is insistent as she struggles to reconnect with her sister.

They don’t reject her outright but register their discomfort and hesitation. The three have had deeply varied memories and experiences of being around her, whose absence has had a profound effect on their lives. Julie takes us on a tour through her family history, albeit not in great detail, a decision that works to arguably differing ends. Her sister, who was six years older than her, never got to know her own father, but the new guy, whom her mother started going out with when they moved from Brazil to Denmark, took to her as if she were his own child. He quickly earned the right by which she regarded him as her own father, her often being more comfortable and easier around him than her mother.

God, Please Send A Whale (2024) ‘CPH: DOX’ Movie Review

Although the relationship between the two girls’ mother and their father eventually broke up, his concern and affection for his daughters remained as unshakable as ever. Ursula, who later concedes with amusement that she wasn’t an easy child, yearned for Brazil so much so that she chose to build her life in it instead of Denmark, where she’d otherwise have a lot of security in the reassuring presence of her family.

High On Films in collaboration with Avanté

Her decision to opt for such a life, where she sold jewelry on the streets with her boyfriend and somehow scraped by a living, never sat right with her mother. Ursula fiercely values her independence and ensures no one can quite push her into doing things against her will. She is resistant to any sort of control, defying the expectations of her parents, who wish her stability while confronting a realization that she isn’t having it if it goes against the oft-reckless way she chooses to lead her life.

After her mother’s death, the sisters drifted apart. Julie says her return to Brazil with her father and re-establishing a deep bond with Ursula is an “attempt to take action.” It is a means of fighting grief. With Ursula, she cannot quite bring herself to discuss matters relating to their mother as honestly and openly as she wants to. While Ursula seems more collected, Julie’s bereavement brims with raw vulnerability. The former has had a largely turbulent relationship with her mother, rarely seeing eye to eye on various issues. Whenever her mother came to visit her in Brazil, the two would spend most of the time fighting. Fortunately, on her last visit before her death, things were more cordial. At least they got to share a few happy moments together.

Julie didn’t get to bid farewell to her mother properly. It is only on this visit to her sister that, after many years, she is trying to have unresolved, long-due conversations. There is a lovely moment where the two just laugh their hearts out in a cathartic fit after having many intense conversations. “God, Please Send A Whale” shines with tender honesty in such moments where the three people bare their souls to each other. Though the obtrusively abrupt cuts quickly and inelegantly pace through a conversation to reveal the bruising points, Julie fills the film with so much candor and emotional truth any such niggling technical issues can be forgiven.

God, Please Send A Whale premiered at CPH: DOX Festival 2024.

God, please send a whale (2024) movie link: mubi, trending right now.

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Another endangered right whale dies after a collision with a ship off the East Coast

This April 3, 2024, photo released by the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center, taken under NOAA permit #24359, shows a dead North Atlantic right whale on a Virginia beach. Federal authorities say the whale died after suffering blunt force trauma from a vessel strike. Collisions with ships are among the biggest threats to the vanishing whales, which number less than 400. (Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center via AP)

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An increasingly deadly year for the endangered North Atlantic right whale got worse this week when another member of the species was killed in a collision with a ship, federal authorities said Thursday.

The giant species of whale numbers less than 360 and is vulnerable to ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. The whales have suffered high mortality in recent years, and several have died already this year off Georgia and Massachusetts.

The most recent right whale to die was found floating 50 miles (80 kilometers) offshore east of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, Virginia, last Saturday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a news release. The whale was a mother who gave birth to her sixth calf this season, the agency said.

Preliminary findings of a necropsy show “catastrophic injuries with a dislocation of the whale’s spine” that “are consistent with blunt force trauma from a vessel strike prior to death,” the agency said Thursday.

The right whale’s population fell about 25% from 2010 to 2020 . Numerous environmental groups have said the animal can’t withstand such dramatic population loss.

Waves crash around a dead humpback whale that washed ashore on Long Beach Township in New Jersey's Long Beach Island on April 11, 2024. There was no immediate indication of what killed the whale. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

“Human impacts continue to threaten the survival of this species,” NOAA said in its statement.

The whales were once numerous off the East Coast, but they were decimated during the commercial whaling era. They are slow to reproduce and the population has a dangerously low number of reproductive females.

The whale’s calf is not expected to survive without its mother and has not been seen in weeks, NOAA said.

Environmental groups have called for tighter regulations on commercial fishing and shipping to try to save the whales. They have cited studies that the whales are harmed by ocean warming , which has caused their food sources to move.

The shifting food resources have in turn caused the whales to stray from protected areas of ocean, making them more vulnerable, scientists have said. The whales migrate every year from calving grounds off Georgia and Florida to feeding grounds off New England and Canada.

It’s an increasingly perilous journey. Some environmentalists have sued to try to force the federal government to finalize a new vessel speed rule the groups say is critical to protecting the whales.

“The choice is simple: Vessels either slow down or the North Atlantic right whale goes extinct,” said Sarah Sharp, an animal rescue veterinarian with International Fund for Animal Welfare who assisted in the necropsy. “How many more right whales are going to be sacrificed before something changes?”

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COMMENTS

The Whale movie review & film summary (2022)
The Whale. "The Whale" is an abhorrent film, but it also features excellent performances. It gawks at the grotesquerie of its central figure beneath the guise of sentimentality, but it also offers sharp exchanges between its characters that ring with bracing honesty. It's the kind of film you should probably see if only to have an informed ...
'The Whale' Review: Body Issues
'The Whale' Review: Body Issues ... Charlie's size is the movie's governing symbol and principal special effect. Encased in prosthetic flesh, Brendan Fraser, who plays Charlie, gives a ...
The Whale
A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale. July 26 ...
The Whale
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2023. Stacey Yvonne The Geekiary. Though The Whale has captured the interest of the public, I can't say that it's earned. I hated this movie, but ...
'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser in Darren Aronofsky's Film
'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser Is Sly and Moving as a Morbidly Obese Man, but Darren Aronofsky's Film Is Hampered by Its Contrivances Reviewed at Venice Film Festival, Sept. 4, 2022 ...
'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser in Powerful Darren Aronofsky Drama
Release date: Friday, Dec. 9. Cast: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan. Director: Darren Aronofsky. Screenwriter: Samuel D. Hunter, based on his ...
'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser Deserves an Oscar and a Better Film
Movie Review. Brendan Fraser Deserves an Oscar for 'The Whale.'. He Also Deserves a Better Movie. The actor's performance as an obese man trying to make things right is as good as you've ...
The Whale (2022)
The Whale: Directed by Darren Aronofsky. With Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau. A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.
The Whale Review: Aronofsky's Drama Showcases A Stunning Performance By
The Whale is being recognized for Brendan Fraser's tremendous performance. And the actor, whose career was paused for a long while, deserves the accolades he is receiving for his turn as Charlie. Director Darren Aronofsky's latest feature, from a screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, is powerful because of Fraser's central performance.It's the key to the movie's success.
The Whale review: Brendan Fraser shines in underbaked drama
The Whale review: Brendan Fraser shines in a overwrought, underbaked drama. The actor is better than director Darren Aronfosky's stagey adaptation. In every awards season, there are certain movies ...
The Whale review
The Oscar-nominated star plays a chronically obese man in Darren Aronofsky's clammy, uncomfortable but ultimately redeeming movie Wendy Ide Sun 5 Feb 2023 06.00 EST Last modified on Sun 5 Feb ...
'The Whale' review: Brendan Fraser delivers the best performance of his
Movie review. Charlie is dying. Morbidly obese, the central character in "The Whale" is literally eating himself to death. Scarfing down candy bars from a desk drawer full of them.
'The Whale' review: Brendan Fraser's performance? It's complicated
It's complicated. Brendan Fraser in the movie "The Whale.". (Zoey Kang/A24) By Justin Chang Film Critic. Dec. 8, 2022 1:20 PM PT. When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in "The Whale ...
The Whale (2022 film)
The Whale is a 2022 American drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his 2012 play of the same name.The film stars Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, and Samantha Morton.The plot follows a reclusive, morbidly obese English professor who tries to restore his relationship with his teenage daughter, whom he had abandoned eight years earlier.
The Whale Review
A deeply emotional glimpse at a troubled man confronting his own white whale. The Whale releases in theaters on Dec. 9, 2022. I'm fat. There's no getting around that. So, unsurprisingly, The ...
Oscar winner The Whale is messy, but wise about religious trauma
Charlie is obsessed with an essay he keeps reading about Moby-Dick, an apocalyptic book if there ever was one, about a man with an obsession and a death wish. There's an atmosphere of dread ...
The Whale Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 6 ): Kids say ( 7 ): Like Darren Aronofsky 's other movies, this dark drama doesn't shy away from the realities of its main character's situation, but what lingers are its deep wells of compassion. The Whale launches with Charlie's masturbation being interrupted by crippling chest pains.
Brendan Fraser's Soft Quizzicality in "The Whale"
Anthony Lane reviews Darren Aronofsky's "The Whale," starring Brendan Fraser; "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"; and Matthew Warchus's film of his and Tim Minchin's stage musical ...
'The Whale' review: Brendan Fraser's standout performance can't keep
The love showered on Brendan Fraser out of film festivals inflates expectations for "The Whale" wildly out of proportion, in a movie based on a play that occurs almost entirely within a lone ...
'The Whale' ending explained by the play's writer, actors, directors
The movie version of "The Whale" ends with a breath, a bright light and a beach. The last visual shows the sun shining, the tide rising and falling, and a younger, slimmer version of the lead ...
The Whale review
Sun 4 Sep 2022 15.30 EDT. Last modified on Thu 2 Feb 2023 13.30 EST. D arren Aronofsky's vapid, hammy and stagey movie, adapted by Samuel D Hunter from his own 2012 play, is the festival's ...
The Whale movie review: Brendan Fraser comeback is grossly manipulative
The Whale review: Brendan Fraser comeback is grossly manipulative to an effective degree The star of 'The Mummy', covered in layers of prosthetics, is sad-eyed and awards-friendly Geoffrey Macnab
God, Please Send A Whale (2024) 'CPH: DOX' Movie Review
Debanjan Dhar April 8, 2024. Julie Bezerra Madsen's film "God, Please Send A Whale" is a portrait of mourning. It captures when mourning has been deferred, and the emotional churn that comes with a lack of closure takes over. Through this film, she is grappling with the loss of her mother, who passed away six years earlier while visiting ...
Another endangered right whale dies after a collision with a ship off
An increasingly deadly year for the endangered North Atlantic right whale got worse this week when another member of the species was killed in a collision with a ship, federal authorities said Thursday. The giant species of whale numbers less than 360 and is vulnerable to ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.
An endangered whale was killed in a collision with a ship this week
On March 30, a company conducting mid-Atlantic whale surveys for the Navy notified NOAA of the dead whale, floating around 50 miles east of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia, NOAA said.