The Whale

 

Director Darren Aronofsky's best work could easily be written off as brainy and bleak, films about people doing badly, who often deteriorate further over the course of the film. Movies that are experienced more than savored.

Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Mother! are all pictures about sadness and suffering, spiritual disconnection and emotional deterioration, defeat. They are heavy works.

Some stories Aronofsky writes himself; others he options from previously published works. His latest celebrated movie, The Whale, is a barely adapted film version of a stage play by prize-winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter.

It is the contained, nearly claustrophobic, story of a morbidly obese and ailing college English instructor named Charlie (an amazing Brendan Fraser) living in near-seclusion in Idaho, his only constant contact being his nurse, Liz, (an equally amazing Hong Chau). Charlie also interacts with the students he teaches remotely, but he refuses to turn on his laptop's camera. That's been the extent of his world since the death of his lover some years before.

Soon after we meet Charlie, he has a heart attack in front of a young canvassing evangelist named Tom (Ty Simpkins), whose story over the course of the play intertwines with Charlie's own.

Liz delivers news that Charlie is dying, only days to live if he refuses treatment. He refuses to go to the hospital, preferring to stay in his dingy, cluttered apartment and gorge himself on pizza, delivered night, meatball subs, chocolate bars and pop. It's apparent he wants to kill himself.

Charlie gets the notion to reconnect with his teen-aged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he's not seen or spoken with in years. Not since he left her and her mother for his male lover. Ellie comes over to Charlie's and is neither thrilled nor sympathetic. She lashes out, rejects Charlie outright, at first, but finally agrees to continue visiting as long as he does her schoolwork and pays her. It's the intersection of all of these damaged lives that is the film's concern.

True to Aronofsky's form, The Whale immerses viewers into a world of gloom, unhappiness and regret and not just a little fist-waving at the heavens.

Good and bad intentions, good and bad acts, are equally as devastating. It's a painful story and was an endurance test for me.

Charlie's resignation, Liz's enabling, Ellie's resentment and Tom's obliviousness will no doubt be hard for many to take, but Aronofsky's unique vision is always worth a screening, if only for the once.