picks

THE BEST STUFF TO WATCH, READ LISTEN TO THIS WEEK!

- Tom Gliatto

The Whale

Brendan Fraser in a tragic comeback role

DRAMA Weighing 600 lbs., gay writing instructor Charlie (Brendan Fraser, buried in prosthetic flesh) has pushed his heart to the point of collapse-his friend, a hectoringly compassionate caregiver named Liz (Hong Chau), warns him that he's mere days from death. He sinks into his sofa as if it's a soft-foam sepulcher, but Charlie will keep on bingeing in the course of director Darren Aronofsky's bruising, strangely inchoate film.

Whale ends on a (literal) note of uplift'

Never thin, Charlie has become what he is now after his lover died of suicide. This is what used to be known, tritely, as eating your feelings, but his emotions aren't easily parsed. Shame, grief and anger are there, as well as guilt over the daughter (Sadie Sink) he neglected after abandoning his wife (Samantha Morton, who turns up briefly, exuding bitterness like a poisonous toad). Is Charlie's self-destruction some kind of mortification of the flesh, the inverse of the anorexia mirabilis of saints? Is he a variation on what was once called a sin-eater? None of these suggestions will lessen the discomfort Whale may cause viewers (Roxane Gay, in The New York Times, called the film "exploitative and at times cruel"). Is it enough, then, that Whale ends on a (literal) note of uplift? Or that Aronofsky's aim is make us recognize Charlie as fully human? (We already knew that.) But let's not fault Fraser's tremendous performance: He lets us glimpse a man's troubled, yearning soul as the light is dying away.