WHAT I LIKED: Darren Aronofsky and Samuel D. Hunter's 'The Whale,' is about a morbidly obese man called Charlie (played brilliantly by Brendan Fraser) who's close to dying, and it follows him throughout the course of a week in his apartment. Between visits from his nurse friend Liz (Hong Chau), we watch him struggling to do everyday tasks, indulging in his addiction to food, lecturing online English courses with the camera off, and obsessing over an essay about the Whale in Moby Dick.
We know very little about him from the start, but the empathetic depiction and performance of the character means we long to find out what drove him to this destructive addiction, and where his loved ones are. After a New Life missionary arrives on his doorstep and his estranged teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) visits, we learn like picking layers off an onion that he left his wife and child for a boyfriend who then committed suicide after feeling guilty about being gay and Christian.
These are tragic realisations which, along with the fat phobia he expects and experiences from strangers, only make you feel more sorry for him. But these traumas rearing their heads also help to reveal the thematic core of the film; about the importance of embracing honesty and truth.
For one that comes from the Moby Dick essay, as the more times it's recited, the more it becomes clear that it's an allegory for Charlie's own life. Two men are together, one is struggling and wants to kill a whale because he thinks it will help him, but the whale is just a poor innocent creature. Then, when we meet Charlie, just like in the whale in the Whale Chapters, he's burying his head in the sand and using food to distract "himself from his own sad story."
It's only when Ellie visits with her brutal honesty and he sees that she's similarly suppressing her sadness with anger, that he gets a mirror held up to show him what he's been doing to himself. In the spirit of truth, this spurs him to reveal some secrets he's been holding from his family, confront his trauma and acknowledge his real part in the whale story, and eventually accept his fate, resulting in a hugely moving character arc.
But it also gets him to encourage others to acknowledge their truths too, as he tells his students to submit an honest piece of writing, and also laboriously tries to get Ellie to open herself to empathy and see what a good person she really is. The essay is once again used to do this, as it's revealed that she wrote it as a child, and she realises that he was partly absent from her life because he thought he was protecting her "from his own sad story." The result is a heart-wrenching character story with a truly transcendent conclusion, and it's brought to life brilliantly by all involved.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It is a tough watch at times...
VERDICT: 'The Whale,' is a brilliantly powerful character study about people who are burying their heads in the sand laboriously acknowledging their truths.
