In this annual period of giving and receiving, even the most secular-minded have cause to think about “the less fortunate,” particularly since our inboxes and actual mailboxes are stuffed with solicitations on their behalf. Even the movies are helping out this week in providing some entreaties to empathy. Sometimes, though, a little screen victimization goes a very long way.
I didn’t know while watching it (at least until the end credits) that Darren Aronofsky’s new The Whale was based on a stage play, but finding out certainly made more sense of the film. This is the movie that’s been getting a lot of attention since its fall festival premieres (at Venice and Toronto) for the career comeback of Brendan Fraser, a popular favorite from popcorn movies of the 1990s and early 2000s (notably as an Indiana Jones-like figure in The Mummy series) who seemed ubiquitous one day, then vanished the next.
In fact, he never stopped working. Whether for reasons of changing fashion or something else (Fraser himself has suggested various explanations, including payback from his accusing the Hollywood Foreign Press Association president of sexual assault), he fell off the “A-list,” as stars often do. His role in The Whale is the kind of dramatic “transformation” that attracts Oscars like a refrigerator does magnets. Buried under mountains of latex, only his familiar kind eyes recognizable, he plays middle-aged Charlie, whose “morbid obesity” has (at 600 pounds) approached a life-threatening point. This is duly pointed out by his haranguing best-only friend Liz (Hong Chau), who conveniently happens to be a nurse. Measuring his vitals, she determines he’s at immediate risk of congestive heart failure, and should check into a hospital ASAP.
But Charlie—though he can barely move from his rural Idaho living-room armchair, even with a walker—doesn’t want to do that. He has no health insurance, and getting care would decimate the funds he has left, which he’s reserved for a different purpose. It involves the future of his only child, though they are incommunicado. At least they have been for some years, until bitterly resentful teen Ellie (Sadie Sink) turns up one day, seemingly more in search of revenge for perceived abandonment than reconciliation. She may be awful, but Charlie is willing to put up with almost anything to repair their estrangement.
Indeed, just about everyone is awful to Charlie. Liz radiates “furious about loving a gay guy” vibes, ranting while seeming even more dependent on him than vice versa. Ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), whom he left for a man some years ago, naturally turns out to have blocked his contact with Ellie all this time.
Charlie had a true love, but tormented by guilt from the homophobic evangelical Christian group he belonged to, that lover committed suicide—which tragedy in turn drove Charlie to his reclusive current status as a disabled binge-eater. Such is his shame that Charlie feigns a broken laptop camera in order to not reveal his ginormity to the online students he conscientiously tutors in English composition. Even when a well-meaning youth (Ty Simpkins) doing church missionary work shows up, eager to be helpful, his presence is another torture—because he belongs to the same sect that “killed” Charlie’s boyfriend.
Fraser was always a very likable actor (and in fact seemed out of depth in rare dislikable roles, such as Gods & Monsters), so he easily makes this protagonist’s essential goodness palpable. It’s not really that much of a stretch—where once he played guileless good guys dodging CGI perils, now he’s a stationary guileless good guy taking emotional punches from unfeeling people. The Whale (a title that actually references Moby Dick, not Charlie’s weight) is one of those contrived narratives in which every other character must be deliberately or unknowingly antagonistic in order to heighten the principal figure’s martyrdom.
It’s a ruthlessly stacked deck, an arm-twisting assault on the tearducts you’ll either succumb to or resist as excessively, theatrically fraudulent. (It presumably felt more organic onstage in Samuel D. Hunter’s original play, which won a Drama Desk Award a decade ago.) We’re meant to feel for Charlie’s profound, victimized, self-loathing isolation—yet every five seconds there’s another person stomping through the front door, demanding their confrontational dialogue with him. These actors are all good, but there’s only so much they (or cinematographer Matthew Libatique) can do with this kind of stagey, telling-rather-than-showing content.
Did this film really need to get made, or was it just the least-risky project Aronofsky could shoot under lingering COVID restrictions about 20 months ago? It’s certainly the least cinematic feature he’s ever made. And while he’s certainly gone further out on an artistic-conceptual limb (with for instance Noah, The Fountain, and Mother!), I’d argue even prior failures were more fundamentally interesting than this gimmicky tearjerker. But such reservations may well stay a minority opinion, and will hardly dissuade Academy voters if they’re inclined to give Brendan Fraser that Oscar. The Whale opens in Bay Area theaters Wed/21.
An accusation of cynicism might be even more apt in explaining my resistance to a new documentary also opening in theaters this Wednesday. Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost’s Wildcat (which will also be on Amazon Prime as of Fri/30) sounds like it would trigger a celestial chorus of “Awwww’s”: It’s about a PTSD-afflicted young military veteran who joins a woman working on her PhD deep in the Peruvian Amazon, where she’s trying to save animal species from relentless encroachment (mostly via illegal logging and hunting) on their habitat. He becomes particularly invested in rehabilitating orphaned ocelots to return to the wild.
What’s not to like, or be inspired by? Well, a lot. Still very young, the heavily-tattooed ex-British Army soldier Harry Turner frequently bursts into tears, has suicidal ideations, attacks of panic, rage and hysteria, all of which he addresses by self-harm (i.e. cutting). American conservationist Samantha Zwicker is herself the survivor of a problematic upbringing involving an alcoholic father. The two of them seem to be in relationship, but is it actually helping them, or simply letting their individual issues fester? Even Harry’s interactions with the ocelot (named Keanu) seem primarily about his own emotional needs. He’s got a supportive family back home in the UK, so why is he here? How did he even get here? How did he meet Samantha? Why did such an evidently sensitive soul go into military service in the first place?
Wildcat leaves many such questions unanswered, expecting us to simply feel raw empathy for people in pain. It takes about 80 minutes before Zwicker is told (by a suicide prevention line counselor) what a viewer might have realized from the start: “You don’t want to support him continuing this behavior. You want to support him getting help.” Their rainforest mission may be virtuous, but it isn’t necessarily the right thing for them—at least not for Harry, whose masochistic acting-out seems if anything enabled by the presence of the camera.
You could program an entire festival of films from the last couple decades that present the queasy spectacle of “documentary as therapy.” In nearly every case, it could be argued that they prove how wrong-headed it is to attempt working out one’s psychological problems on video, for an imagined or future audience. Seeing perpetually shirtless Harry cuddle a baby ocelot may be cute, but I’m not sure it does much to save the planet, or even to help him help himself.
Possibly no screen protagonist ever had so much suffering thrust upon them from so many directions as Baltimore housewife Francine Fishpaw (Divine), the heroine of 1981’s Polyester. John Waters’ first stab at the (relative) commercial mainstream is a parody of soap operatics in both the big-screen, Douglas Sirk, Ross Hunter mode of yore and the afternoon TV serials that still flourished upon its initial release.
Suburbia is no safe enclave for plus-sized Francine. Anti-porn prudes picket outside her home, protesting the downtown movie house (current attraction: My Burning Bush) owned by her crass husband Elmer (David Samson), who’s having an affair with his trampy secretary (Mink Stole.) Nor are their teenaged children any comfort: Lu-Lu (Mary Garlington) is a kleptomaniacal aspiring go-go dancer already pregnant by her delinquent boyfriend (The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators as Bo Bo), while creepy angel dust-snorting Dexter (Ken King) is a secret foot fetishist running amuck terrorizing well-heeled women as “The Stomper.” Even Francine’s mother (Joni Ruth White) is a vicious sponge, further undermining her self-worth.
Our heroine’s only ally is Cuddles (Edith Massey), a former “scrubwoman” transformed into aging debutante by inherited wealth. That is, until Francine—now alcoholic and newly separated from her husband—somewhat inexplicably attracts the amorous interest of one Todd Tomorrow (1950s pin-up dreamboat Tab Hunter). He purrs “Lemme kiss away your DT’s, honey.” But that unexpected romantic development, too, will only bring heartbreak.
Departing from his usual stock company, Waters used some actors here that were neither inspired amateurs or first-rate professionals, so some material comes off as more effortful than funny. Polyester isn’t one of his best; the midnight movie sensations Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, as well as later mainstream hit Hairspray, hold up better. Still, it is a lot of fun. The Roxie’s current revival brings back the original gimmick of “Odorama,” a scratch-’n’-sniff card bringing various noxious narrative scents to life for the viewer’s sensory edification. More shows may be added, but at present the film is playing Wed/21 and Wed/28.
