Among the films of this year that we will remember there is definitely The Whalethe latest touching work by Darren Aronofsky, much applauded in Venice 2022, with the memorable interpretation of Brendan Fraser which earned him the recent and well-deserved Oscar for best leading actor.
Aronofsky is a director with a great visionary talent, in a career nonetheless subject to ups and downs: if The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke (2008) and The black Swan with Natalie Portman (2010) were significant and important films, the last one Mother! with Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence (2017) remains a poorly written and incomprehensible film, genuinely bad.
The Whale chronicles a week in the life of Charlie, played by Brendan Fraser. He is a seriously and morbidly obese man in his 50s, weighing about 250 kilos, and therefore forced to live at home without ever going out, moving around with difficulty with a walker and wheelchair. He is a literature professor at the university, for which he only teaches writing courses online, hiding behind the black of an icon on Zoom. He reads a lot, eats too much, and doesn’t want to treat himself to remedy his now compromised health.
His friend Liz, a nurse, is the only one who assists and cures him. Charlie is alone, very alone. Years earlier, he had left his wife Mary and daughter Ellie for discovering his homosexuality, falling in love with his former student Alan. But Alan hasn’t been around for a long time: he committed suicide over an unresolved conflict with his family of origin, linked to a millenarian religious sect. And since Alan’s death, Charlie began his decline, becoming ultra obese. Now that his life is ending, he needs to reconcile with his 17-year-old teenage daughter Ellie who hates him (played by young Sadie Sink, star of Stranger Things), Before it’s too late.
The Whale is taken from a famous 2012 play by Samuel D. Hunter, which explains the setting of the film, all inside Charlie’s house. And it’s a film that, like Mickey Rourke’s The Wrestler and Natalie Portman de The black Swanhas the protagonist’s body as its protagonist, in a deliberately disgusting evolution.
The strong, somewhat decayed but vital body of the wrestler; and the artistic and perfect, almost metaphysical body of the dancer have become a mass of flesh and fat that is slowly killing itself. An anti-hero body which in itself has the reasons for its past glory, and its imminent fall. A body that Charlie however does not deny, identifying it with the White Whale of Moby Dick: what for everyone was a monster, when in reality it is just nature in its infinite possibilities; a life made up of mistakes but also of love, a monster body that destroys and self-destructs; and in the background the American obsession with the family that no longer exists, just dysfunctional. But where, you will see, there is still love and the will to take care of loved ones.
Blog edited by: Albert Bucci
Read other posts by: Countercinema
