Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, with an amazing Brendan Fraser, is thrilling the public, but has attracted several arrows: why such a mixed reception?
And I feel sorry for Ahab too, because he believes his life will improve if he can kill this whale. But in reality, he won’t do him any good. This book made me think about my life.
In opening his review of The Whale for site columns The PlaylistJack King points out a key element related to the film’s reception: “Coming when almost everyone on Twitter is firmly on the Brendanaissance bandwagon, here is a film poised to stir up a whirlwind of bad faith speech: it will be labeled cruel, it will be labeled blackmailing, it will be denounced as offensive“. It certainly wasn’t a risky prediction, especially considering the reception usually received by the works of Darren Aronofsky; yet it is interesting to highlight the dichotomy between the so-called Brendanaissancea neologism widespread among social media on the wave of other similar phenomena, and the negative criticisms that The Whale has attracted since its presentation, at the beginning of September, in the competition of the Venice Film Festival 2022.
Let’s start from the first aspect, by now well known to anyone who follows even the slightest extent the cinematographic chronicles: 2022 was the year of the professional rebirth of Brendan Fraser, the ex-face symbol of action comedies between the old and new millennium (first the very successful saga of The Mummy), but whose popularity had suffered a substantial decline in the last decade, also due to some personal and physical problems. However, at the age of fifty-four, the Canadian actor suddenly returned to the crest of the wave thanks to one of those roles that are truly worth an entire career: Charlie, a literature teacher suffering from severe obesity and condemned to a self-imprisonment in his home in Idaho, from where he holds video-conferencing lessons with the webcam rigorously turned off.
Behind the Screen: Brendan Fraser’s Oscar-winning effort
It is no coincidence that a black rectangle on a computer screen is the image that marks our first encounter with Charlie: the ‘mask’ of a man who feels defeated by an existence certainly not without difficulties and pains, including the death of her ex-partner Alan and the breakup with her teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink). In short, a figure decidedly at the antipodes with respect to the type of characters to which Brendan Fraser he had used to it in the past; and the actor immerses himself in the part of Charlie with an intensity and a pathos able to conquer practically everyone. In short, the plebiscite for his interpretation is not surprising, received by almost unanimous praise from critics and rewarded with an avalanche of awards, including the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Oscar nomination for best actor, an award for which he is the current favourite.
But beyond the praise for Fraser’s performance, and no doubt in large part because of it, the film by Darren Aronofsky seems to have managed to forcefully touch the sensitivity of the public: this is confirmed by the numerous examples of emotion visible inside the halls, but even more by the figures recorded by a harsh and claustrophobic work, which was not born as a crowdpleaser. In a period that was far from favorable, in commercial terms, for most of the usual “Oscar titles”, The Whale has so far collected over sixteen million dollars at the US box office: a remarkable result, one step away from seventeen million for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and far more than the ten million for Spirit Island, six and a half million for Tár, and four and a half million for Women Talking and Triangle of Sadness.
The Whale, the review: an extraordinary Brendan Fraser in a film that strikes at the heart
Emotion or exploitation?
And yet, if Brendan Fraser’s test has more or less everyone agreed, the same cannot be said for the film as a whole, which alongside the positive reviews has collected several much more ‘cold’ opinions and a large dose of slating. Slams that, in general, converge on certain elements of The Whale and on the way in which Darren Aronofsky, a director who never went too subtle, brings Charlie’s tragic dimension to the fore; starting, on a visual level, from his gigantic tonnage. “(…) you may find them in grotesque contrast: the character whose every moan, gasp and choke serves to inspire both empathy and revulsion, and the actor whose hard-earned dramatic efforts are calculated to elicit praise and applause“, scrive Justin Chang sul Los Angeles Times; “Is this stark scrutiny of a difficult subject about exaggeration, even exploitation? If we are disgusted by what Aronofsky shows us, is it our fault or his?“.
They are Rolling StoneDavid Fear notes that “The Whale seems determined to make you grotesquely see Charlie. There’s something monstrous about the way he keeps framing it, how he almost seems to fetishize every roll of his flesh“. Even more severe and decisive judgments can be found in other international newspapers, but also among the comments of many enthusiasts, clearly opposed to the many consensuses; and although the opposite reactions are by no means a rarity in the critical panorama, because The Whale has polarized opinion to such an extent? The impression is that, in the sacrosanct plurality of exegeses and points of view, it was in particular the approach adopted by Aronofsky and by the screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, already author of the homonymous play, that fomented the arrows of the detractors: the renounces subdued tones and overtones to focus, on the contrary, on the bright colors of melodrama.
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is a physical experience
Do we have a problem with melodrama?
To stay within theawards season: The Whale does not possess the finesse of writing de The spirits of the islandthe classic and enveloping elegance of The Fabelmansnor the complexity and authorial charm of Warehouse. Instead, it is a film that makes explicit the motivations and conflicts of the characters, which lays bare their fragility and sense of shame, and which aims to speak to the public in the most direct way possible; including the choice to use Moby Dick (right from the title) as a literary reference with easy metaphorical references. In other words, perhaps using an unpleasant but eloquent expression: it is a “film for everyone”, which speaks in the language of melodrama and therefore does not hesitate to step on the pedal of emotion. This doesn’t mean it’s a perfect film (it isn’t), but it doesn’t necessarily make it a blackmail film, nor does it imply that Aronofsky’s choices amount to a “pornography of pain”.
If in any case a debate capable of inspiring questions and reflections is welcome, the feeling remains that certain lapidary opinions on The Whale are linked, at least in part, to an eternal prejudice against melodrama; especially when a work appears so emphatic, powerful, at times even excessive (but excessive mélo is by definition), and when filmmakers who have not (yet) fully entered the canon are grappling with this genre. With the risk of underestimating a film that has the undoubted merit of having been able to deeply involve a large number of spectators, recounting the physical collapse and, in parallel, the last attempt at moral redemption of its protagonist: an individual prisoner of his own ghosts, even before his own body, but nevertheless clinging to a contagious humanism and an unshakeable faith in the fact that, deep down, “people are incapable of not loving“.
Darren Aronofsky and Brendan Fraser: “The Whale? It’s empathy that will save the world”
