THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
2000s blockbuster darling (The Mummy, george of the jungle, Journey to the Center of the Earth), Brendan Fraser had, for a decade, slowly withdrawn from images. The actor admitted to being physically ruined by his successive overtraining and admitted, during the Metoo movement, to having been traumatized by a sexual assault of which he was the victim in 2003.
Adapted from a play and screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale collects this body ruined by Hollywood machinery to offer it a tailor-made comeback. Fraser is Charlie, a professor of literature who, a long time ago, had to leave his wife and child to live his homosexuality. Now a widower, the man lives recluse at home and drowns his mourning in the food and the copies of his students, in whom he tries to inculcate honesty in literature.
The whale (whale) of the film, it is both him, but also Moby-Dick, a novel that haunts him. Knowing he is condemned by his morbid obesity, Charlie wishes to reconnect with his teenage daughter whom he left behind. She will visit him, as well as a whole gallery of characters who will come to his bedside to offer the man an ultimate redemption.
sadomasochistic ritual
The Whale opens on a black hole: giving a course in literature by Zoom, the man never activates his webcam, at the risk of being mocked by his students captivated by his course. We end up discovering an unrecognizable Fraser, weighted with numerous prostheses which make him a man of 260 kilos who could not be more credible. The actor is going through an ordeal diametrically opposed to those experienced by his body as aaction man : he drags himself painfully from one room to another, perspires profusely, raises his wet and imploring eyes to his daughter who has come to settle accounts.
The Whale orchestrates a real sadomasochistic ritual to which Darren Aronofsky will have accustomed us, subscribed to pontificating Stations of the Cross and clumsy metaphors. The filmmaker, who had already organized the return of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (2009), does not derogate from his deceptively implacable vision of humanity: everything runs to its loss, all fiction aims at its own decay.
Thus transformed, Fraser’s body resembles his cinema. That he chooses an actor as fragile as him adds to the obscenity of the device. And yet, in this suffocating trap, something happens that has to do with Fraser, soul in hell pushing the acting commitment to its point of decay.
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