A Whale of a Tale: A Small Movie Offers One of the Best Films in Ages
By Arnold Wayne Jones
There was a time, not too long ago, when the queer community desperately sought out and embraced gay content in mainstream movies … especially those blessed with Oscar validity: Remember panting over The Color Purple, Philadelphia, Longtime Companion and The Crying Game? All excellent, but few and far between.
My, how we’ve progressed in the intervening two decades, with the success of films like The Kids Are All Right, Moonlight and more. But this year? This year feels especially significant. There’s the queer daughter in Everything Everywhere All At Once (and, in one timeline, a touching romance between Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis); Cate Blanchett as an arrogant lesbian in Tar; gayness aplenty in Triangle of Sadness. But no nominated film this year is quite so profoundly meaningful and unexpected as The Whale.
Based on a play, almost all of the action takes place in a single set, and yet it doesn’t feel anticinematic at all; rather, it’s an incredibly intimate film that takes full advantage of the benefits of motion picture magic. The opening shot is a bold one: The camera tracks in on an immensely obese man (Brendan Fraser) watching gay porn on his laptop while jerking off. It’s simultaneously titillating, disgusting and invasive – one of the many cycle that the film constantly juggles. We learn the man is Charlie, a college writing professor who teaches online classes only with his camera turned off so his students can’t see his grotesque body.
Charlie was, until a decade ago, a seemingly straight father of a girl, married to a woman, when he met a male student and fell in love. He divorced and married his much younger paramour, only to be heartbroken when the young man dies, sending Charlie into a spiral of over-eating and self-destructive weight gain. He lives in a modest apartment, never venturing to the outside world except via his class Zoom calls and a dear friend, Liz (Hong Chau), who brings him food, nurses him and clucks about how he’s killing himself with food. Charlie seems fine with that, though.
You’d expect that we’re meant to be revolted by Charlie’s gross physical appearance and ravenous appetites, but that’s not the case; neither, however, do we outright pity him. Instead, we come to understand and sympathize with the sadness in his soul, the bottomless well of despair that comes from his broken heart.
This couldn’t have been accomplished without Fraser’s breathtakingly vivid and detailed performance. Charlie suspects – well, knows – that most people would judge and despise him on sight, but he never wallows in his own tragedy; if anything, he empathizes with their predictable reactions – self-awareness overpowers self-pity. He’s basically disgusted by himself, though content with it as well. There are several scenes where Charlie attacks food – pizza, sandwiches, etc. – with the voracious energy of a jungle cat feasting on a kill. He’s post-sex; calories are his passion. Eating is the replacement for human intimacy.
His life is thrown into additional chaos when a Mormon missionary enters his life, and he unexpectedly renews contact with his now-teenaged daughter. How all of these elements eventually coalesce around themes of love, redemption, betrayal and sacrifice is the greatest joy in discovering the film.
It might seem that, other than the brief porn at the top, Charlie being gay is incidental, or that you can’t otherwise peg this as “a gay movie,” but nothing could be further from the facts. The isolation, the body issues, the love, the identity issues, the guilt? It’s one of the most incisive portraits of queer anxiety ever committed to screen.
Whether it wins Fraser a well-deserved best actor Oscar this year I can’t predict with certainty. What I can be sure about is the loveliness and power of The Whale (even its title has layers). Its stellar performances, beautiful direction (by Darren Aronofsky), flawless makeup and multifaceted writing make this one of the best films in the past year.