Austin Film Festival review: The lurid, leering disaster of 'The Whale'

Darren Aronofsky told his audience Thursday that they were the largest crowd ever assembled for an Austin Film Festival opening night film. (His source: Festival head Barbara Morgan, who joined him onstage at the Paramount Theatre downtown.)

Seems wild, but it makes sense: Aronofsky, a revered name in Hollywood, has generated enough buzz for his new film, "The Whale," to keep Texas' power grid humming.

On the one hand, plenty of critics have raved about the movie, which premiered at this year's Venice International Film Festival, particularly spotlighting star Brendan Fraser's performance. On the other hand, detractors have called out "The Whale" for its depiction of a main character who is morbidly obese, with some calling it fatphobic.

Here's what we thought about "The Whale" at Austin Film Festival. The festival continues through Nov. 3.

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'The Whale' is a lurid disaster.

OK, well ... we did promise our thoughts.

Cinema challenges its audience, and "The Whale" throws down an "American Gladiators"-level gauntlet, from premise to execution. Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter, who also writes the screenplay, the film concerns the final days of Charlie, a 600-pound man (played by Fraser in extensive prosthetics).

Charlie's a writing teacher who has retreated into self-imposed exile. We are led to understand that, a decade prior, he left his wife and daughter for the love of another man, who met a tragic end. The grief plunged Charlie into a state of self-destruction and compulsive eating. His only contacts are his regular pizza delivery driver and Liz (Hong Chau), a friend and nurse who cares for him since he won't go to the hospital.

As Charlie's health declines, the outside world invades: a young missionary (Ty Simpkins) takes him on as a salvation project, his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) blows in like a tornado and his despondent ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) rides Ellie's path of disruption.

All of them, in one way or another, are trying to save someone or something. That is funny, because "The Whale" is almost two hopeless hours of melodramatic purgatory.

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Aronofsky and Hunter's leering portrayal of Charlie gives into Hollywood's most base instincts in portraying people living with obesity. The prosthetics are one thing, and the film certainly devours any chance it can to gawk at this movie star's transformation. Where "The Whale" pratfalls into real tragedy is its arrogant belief that it's Doing Something Clever, daring the viewer to gaze upon the abject existence of a depressed, morbidly obese man and not be a little repulsed. "You're no better than the society that casts people aside for their differences!" the film grabs you by the shirt and says, shaking you like a vending machine withholding the last Coke Zero. There's literally even such a confrontation onscreen in the movie's final act.

Depicting marginalized people without dignity to make a point, to communicate a lesson about the world that does not actually reflect your own experience, is not the great artistic flex that "The Whale" thinks it is. And this flick has the restraint of a burglar with a skeleton key.

At every moment when subtlety might afford Charlie humanity or control of his own story, Aronofsky takes the lurid path. The score by Rob Simonsen gilds most scenes with swelling sonic pageantry. Characters reference Charlie's body in ways that invite the audience to giggle. The tight aspect ratio of the frame ensures that his form fills the frame, so that it is rendered a context-free object. Most painfully, "The Whale" depicts its protagonist's compulsive eating as manic, slobbering caricature.

This is not meant to clutch a pearl or moralize. Stories that reflect all lives should be told, and a movie about a gay man struggling with morbid obesity, depression and trauma is a valid one to make. But ghoulish depictions of obesity such as this do nothing, actually, to give voice to anyone or to engender empathy. Daring an audience to see monstrosity in a stigmatized person like this just perpetuates harm.

"The Whale" abstracts people with fat bodies into moral failures, and into spectacles to be watched, not humans to be known. It kinda makes you rethink the Aronofsky's garish tragedy "Requiem for a Dream," a movie no one watches twice.

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It's a shame Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink and other great actors are trapped in this movie.

"The Whale" has been touted as an awards-contender comeback for Fraser, a former 1990s heartthrob also once discarded by the system. It's impossible to watch him in this film and not admire his skill and heart; if anyone involved in making this movie loved Charlie, it was probably Fraser. Conversation will still swirl around the decision to cast him in this prosthetic-relying role; wherever you land on that, his powerful performance imbues the character with love amid all this muck.

Sink, meanwhile, is an undeniable star and a pleasure to watch work (c'mon, she's keeping "Stranger Things" afloat), but the script gives her troubled-teen character after-school special levels of realism to work with. Chau and Morton fare far better, and it's a pity they're caught up in this shipwreck.

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Even more frustrating? There's probably a good story somewhere in 'The Whale.'

Grace. Elegance. Subtlety. Words we thought of fondly and wistfully as "The Whale" beat us over the head with cast-iron metaphors.

As a screen adaptation of a play, and as a small-scale fable, one would welcome poetic musings about life in "The Whale." Instead, this movie uses Charlie's job as a writing teacher to launch theses at the audience's heads at Mach 5. So much talk in this talky movie intrigues: dialogues about the corrosive hold of religious hegemony on the lives of queer people and women, tough confrontations about tough decisions, genuinely good sentiments about forgiveness and the inherent worth of people.

But by the third time "The Whale" uses "Moby-Dick" as a symbol, all we could think of is that GIF of Oprah turning to the camera shrugging as if to say, "Well, what are you gonna do?"

'The Whale'

Grade: D

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, Ty Simpkins

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Rated: R for language, some drug use, sexual content

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes

Watch: "The Whale" will hit theaters on Dec. 9.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: The Whale at Austin Film Festival is a lurid, leering disaster: review