Brendan Fraser Saves This Foundering ‘Whale’

Minutes prior to the New York City premiere of “The Whale,” director Darren Aronofsky took the stage at Alice Tully Hall, gave his thanks to key people who helped make the film, and spoke of the play by Sam D. Hunter on which it is based. Mr. Aronofsky recounted the 10-year process of developing Mr. Hunter’s work after having seen the stage production. “The Whale,” he informed the audience, had to be made into a movie.Did it, though? Adaptations of one medium into another have been with us since there were artforms to be discerned and differentiated: Stories into music, music into painting, painting into performance, performance into film — cross-fertilization has long been a natural byway of the arts. Still, the relationship between stage and screen has always been problematic not least because of their congruences. Both employ similar means — dialogue, direction, and stories, stories, stories — but admit to different types of scale and verisimilitude. One is local, confined in formatting, and given to elaborate modes of acting; the other is reproducible, elastic in its ability to traverse time and space, and given to a naturalism that stems from the photographic image. In the press materials accompanying “The Whale,” Mr. Aronofsky states that the play’s handling of the “promise of love and redemption … in every human existence” makes for an inherently cinematic venture. One would expect, though, the director of “Black Swan” and “The Wrestler” to avoid trading in generalities typical of a Hallmark greeting card homily. A cinematic venture should, you know, be cinematic. The rest of it — love, redemption, and the like — follows in its wake.All of which is to say that “The Whale” doesn’t escape the staginess commonly seen in screen adaptations of plays. Notwithstanding attempts to make the home and, especially, living room of our protagonist Charlie (Brendan Fraser) an extension of his trauma, Mr. Aronofsky can’t shake off a hit-your-marks artifice in order to establish a setting more intimate or specific. Compare Charlie’s environment, as well as to how the players navigate it, to those found in “Rosemary’s Baby,” say, or “Amour,” and you’ll glean the difference between expert contrivance and a home that’s been lived in.Who is Charlie? He’s a 600-pound Idaho man who works as an online instructor of expository writing. He’s wracked with self-loathing, miserable, and lonely. Charlie’s obesity can be traced to the death of his lover, a former student for whom he abandoned his wife and daughter. His ex-wife, Mary (a starkly effective Samantha Morton), has never forgiven Charlie for leaving her for a man, and has subsequently kept their daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) at arm’s length. The only friend Charlie has is Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who worries about his health even as she enables him by providing meatball subs slathered in extra cheese. Thomas (Ty Simpkins) comes knocking at Charlie’s door, a missionary for the New Line Church, an apocalyptic religious sect that seems a thinly veiled version of Mormonism. Then Ellie re-enters Charlie’s life, and, boy, is she a piece of work: Her father’s help with homework and the promise of a sizable inheritance don’t prevent a barrage of abusive comments, both face-to-face and online.Anyone paying even the least attention to media hype knows that “The Whale” belongs to Mr. Fraser. An affable actor as comfortable in big-budget shlock as he is in more idiosyncratic fare, Mr. Fraser brings his signature doe-eyed generosity to a role that could’ve easily devolved into stunt casting or sheer grotesquery. As it is, the actor’s congenital good will does much to mitigate Mr. Hunter’s often ham-handed symbolism and the wiry misanthropy that tends to filter through Mr. Aronofsky’s aesthetic. How well “The Whale” will fare after the current fanfare fades is a good question. Yet the integrity of Mr. Fraser’s performance is indisputable and worth any serious moviegoer’s consideration.

Brendan Fraser Saves This Foundering ‘Whale’

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