I was standing outside the exhibition room door, waiting for The Boy to season his popcorn (caramel & cheesy jalapeno!), reading the poster and pretty happy to be seeing Brendan Fraser in a film again when I saw the following, chilling words:

A FILM BY DARREN ARONOFSKY

“Darren Aronofsky! Aw! AWWWWW!”

Seriously had I known, would I have gone? I’ve only seen two of his movies: The Fountain and Black Swan. And I didn’t actually hate either, though they both struck me as modest success layered over high pretentiousness. Then came 2014’s Noah, which I interpreted as Hollywood saying “Fine. You want Biblical movies? Take this!”

A sidebar probably only of interest to similar geeks: If you look up Noah on Wikipedia, it will tell you it was “an unmitigated hit…by almost every measure.” It’s Aronofsky’s only #1 movie, sure. And it’s made more money than any of this others, sure. But it made $100M on a $125M (minimum, maybe $160M) budget which makes it a non-hit by the most obvious measure. (It had more success overseas, but I don’t think it could’ve done much more than break even.)

Well, whatever the case, The Whale is in no danger of breaking any records, unless it’s by poundage. Let me set the scene for you: There’s a prologue where our protagonist is on a video call with his students (he teaches English) exhorting them to write something true and meaningful, and punch up their five paragraph essays. His screen is blacked out, mysteriously. (Except it’s not mysterious to us because we’re watching a flippin’ movie called The Whale.) The camera zooms in on the black square until it fills the screen.

CUT TO

Fat guy in his apartment jerking off to gay porn.

Back in the ’00s, my parents, who had been going to live plays for years stopped. Why? Because every single play was about homosexuals. (For years they put up with it!) I thought of that here because it’s so incredibly unnecessary and also kind of passé. Should’ve made Brendan Fraser’s character a fat transexual.

I was also reminded of the constant refrain about representation. “How,” we are asked, “can we expect people of various sexualities to relate to movies that don’t feature those specific sexualities?” Well, if that’s true, then why should anyone not of any given sexuality (or race, since that’s also brought up) be expected to go to movies that aren’t specifically about them?

But that’s not enough! Not only do we have a niche sexuality, we have a niche (though increasingly popular) body type. And the movie is being skewered for “fatphobia” by portraying the horror show of a 600+ pound man eating and drinking his way to death.

At what point does “insightful social commentary” become carnival sideshow?

The premise is very simple, like stupid simple, would’ve been edgy in 1975: Professor Charlie (Fraser) has left wife Mary (Samantha Morton) and daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) for a student lover. Mary is pissed off and prevents Charlie from communicating with Ellie in any way. Charlie’s only friend, Liz (Hong Chau), happens to be a nurse who keeps him alive so that he doesn’t have to go to the hospital which he can’t afford (though there’s something fishy going on with his finances). His former lover is dead now, apparently due to guilt over his sexuality, and it just so happens that when our story opens:

Charlie’s having a heart attack, Ellie shows up on his doorstep for some reason (trouble in school?) and missionary Thomas from the very church that is responsible for the former lover’s death also shows up on his doorstep to convert Charlie before he dies. (Liz is able to tell him he’s going to die within a few days because he won’t go to the hospital after his heart attack.)

Charlie could’ve had a female lover, instead. The character’s not even in the movie. But then we wouldn’t get to have our whole anti-Christian section, as Thomas, the young man so passionate about ministering to people door-to-door to deliver Christ’s word (instead of standing out on a street handing out chick tracts, I guess) that he commits a crime and runs away from home, is also completely unable to talk to a gay man about homosexuality. I mean, it comes down to this:

“So you’re saying God is punishing me because I loved [dead guy].”

“Yes.”

Good lord. You’d think, minimally, as a writer, you’d get bored of writing such flimsy straw men. You’d think you’d be embarrassed to have your noble lovers to be just complete victims.

To me, the kind of interesting thing is that both Charlie and his dead boyfriend ended up where they were precisely because they decided canoodling was preferable to keeping a family whole, and Ellie’s rage at being sacrificed to this is legitimate. Nobody is talking about this. Mostly they’re talking about the fat, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Although presented as a monster, when we finally meet Mary, she’s not so bad. Except for the alienating her daughter from her father, which isn’t really adequately explained. Mary claims it was Charlie’s doing, at least at first. Liz is a ball-buster so we kind of like her, but she’s also a world-class enabler. This is necessary so that the play can happen, but she does a lot of what she does because she believes Charlie to be destitute—but if she’s a nurse, she damn well knows there are a million resources for the poor and disabled (and that level of obesity counts as a disability).

This is a minor issue—I mean, it’s not, and it’s a tiresome one that the endless parade of “socialized medicine” propaganda must trot out no matter how preposterous—but it’s a minor issue dramatically speaking. The major issue is Ellie. Because Ellie needs to be a good person. In fact, the underlying issue for Charlie is that he believes Ellie to be a good person, even though by all observable facts, she’s actually evil.

She poisons him, for example. Thomas confesses he has an addiction problem, and she blackmails him into smoking pot. She also threatens to call the police and tell them he tried to rape her. Every awful thing she does she puts on her social media. But our happy ending is that she’s really good and Charlie sees this, and somehow knows she’s going to be okay.

That’s the biggest problem, dramatically, because we need to have a big final scene where they reconcile, and Aronofsky cranks it to eleven, complete with Charlie floating away…to Heaven, presumably…or something.

But what has everyone up-in-arms, by which I mean “the media” is the “fatphobia”. And it’s hard to comprehend what it is Aronofsky is going for. Charlie is fat. As we learn, he’s fat “by his own hand”. One of his few pro-active actions, in fact, is to try to kill himself by overeating. (His lover apparently almost managing to kill himself by not eating, but opting for jumping off a bridge.)

Aronofsky starts the gross level at about 7-8, but by the end we’re at eleven, as the grunting, wheezing, sloppily eating, stumbling Charlie dares us not to find him disgusting. Because if we find him disgusting, a ha! he wins. Or something. Look, this part is really muddled, and boils down to some pretty amazing effects and fat suit. (Idly, for those objecting to Fraser being too lean for the role, I wonder if a movie could actually get insured if the central character were actually 600+ pounds and required to fall and thrash and do the things Fraser has to.)

It’s always possible I just didn’t get it, man. I’m not particularly hep.

We didn’t actually hate it, mind you. Brendan Fraser can still act, and he brings a whole lot of humanity to a pretty awful character. This could be said of all the actors. You can’t fault Aronofsky’s technical skills. He knows what he’s doing, like it or not. Rob Simonsen’s score is just perfect for Aronofsky: Kind of ominous and vague at first, going unapologetically lush and romantic to crank the feels up at the end.

Our enjoyment was greatly enhanced by an old woman in the back row who cackled loudly at inappropriate (presumably emotional) moments.

But to me it’s just more of my 2022 refrain: Who did they expect to go see this? What’s the audience? In this case, I assume it’s the Academy and the few upper middle class white liberal progressive women who aren’t afraid of dying because they mingled with the unclean public in a theater. Gotta be at least a $20M budget, which it probably won’t cover without some serious award love. And even that might not help. (Update: Apparently a meager $3M budget and a $57M worldwide box office.)

Re-watch the 2000 Bedazzled, instead, which features an under-rated comedic performance from Fraser. Or if you must do a gay drama, Gods and Monsters, where a once-again under-rated Fraser plays fiercely hetero pool boy to fading movie genius James Whale (Ian McKellan).

(Originally written in December of 2022 and never published.)

If he hadn’t had his career derailed by a series of mishaps and downright evil, Brendan Fraser would be alongside Tom Hanks in terms of being the modern equivalent of a Golden Age actor like Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda. The difference between the two is that I will go see a movie just because Brendan Fraser is in it, which is not at all true of Hanks.

The excesses of The Whale aside—and its director, Darren Aronofsky, whom Ken Russell calls from the grave to say “Settle down”—Fraser was terrific. A well-earned Oscar.

This is probably a double-edged sword in that we probably permit a character played by Fraser to get away with things he really shouldn’t. In fact, despite the very strong marks for Rental Family, all I could see as the movie started rolling, was all the many, many ways this movie could go bad.

Fraser plays Phillip Vandarploeg, an American who moved to Japan seven years prior after becoming a sensation as the star of a toothpaste commercial, has fallen on hard times when he’s called by his agent to play—well, I’m not going to say what, exactly, because while this movie doesn’t have really big twists or surprises, the ones it does have shouldn’t be spoiled. Despite not doing very well at the gig (because he’s completely unprepared) he’s approached by Shinji, the owner of a company called Rental Family. They need a token American.

Philip is obviously used to this, although I can’t help but note that he’s not a token at all.

You see, the business that Shinji has is that he supplies people to act out parts in other people’s lives for various reasons. One of their most popular jobs is euphemistically called “Apology Services”, where a woman (Aiko, played by Mari Yamamoto) pretends to be a man’s mistress and apologizes to his wife for having an affair.

This is the important thing about this job: He’s lying to someone, and he has considerable issue doing so. The first job he has seems relatively harmless. And he has a kind of nice one where he plays video games and acts friendly toward a shut-in. But the first big job he gets is pretending be a girl’s father.

The girl’s mother is trying to get her into an elite private school, and the school isn’t interested in single mothers. The mom doesn’t want to force the child to have to lie, so instead has Philip pretend to be her father to her.

This, and another job, where Philip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an old, forgotten actor (played by Akira Emoto, who has over 700 credits to his name) are the ones where you can see the train wreck coming. As light a touch as the movie has, you just wanna yell “Don’t do it! You’re not cut out for this, Brendan Fraser!”

Because there are two main ways you can go with a story like this, right? You can pull a Rain Man and have your Tom Cruise character be a semi-sociopath/narcissist who learns a little something about being human.

But Philip is alone in Japan. He has no family. The only people we see him interact with are his agent (on the phone) and a prostitute. Professional relationships, in other words.

You know, immediately, that Philip is going to end up caring too much, and possibly caring in ways that are culturally inappropriate.

The director (the mononymic Hikari) handles this with a deft touch: Very light, very Japanese, able to clearly communicate the issues that arise from arrangements like these without being moralizing or heavy-handed. This might not be “true” on some level, I wouldn’t know. But it makes for a pleasant and emotional experience that still manages to avoid being mawkish.

Seriously, I look more for (and celebrate) movies avoiding pitfalls these days than achieving high aesthetic points. This does both. The cinematography of Japan is perfect in that sense: It shows lovely shots of Tokyo and the countryside—but it isn’t a fairy tale like (e.g.) Amélie. The wonderfully scrubbed and saturated views of France worked perfectly for that film: This one looks like a Tokyo you could actually go visit.

Terrific acting. Good story structure. Strong ending. Highlighting the issues with these arrangements but still managing to pull out a happy ending.

It’s an increasingly rare “general recommendation”. If you like movies about people with humor and drama, the only negative (for the average moviegoer) is the use of subtitles. I would argue the film excels at that, too, though because there are just enough subtitles to make you remember where you are. There are a lot of excellent touches that enhance the fish-out-of-water feel, like Fraser being 6’3″ and having a pot-belly. (Although Takehiro Hira is six-feet tall, Fraser is always bigger and taller and paler than everyone else.)

It probably won’t get a lot of award nominations, but it should.

Oh, there is a theoretical negative that filled me with dread: The idea that somebody would remake this movie, but base it in America, and have it star, I dunno, Kevin James and Adam Sandler. Or Vince Vaugh and Chris Pratt.

One of the best movies of the year and a rare mix of award and box office bait. You know, what used to just be known as “a good movie”. And one of three in 2025 I would recommend for general audiences—which, honestly, is two or three more than I’m able to recommend in the past few years. The other two are Mission: Impossible 8 – The Final Reckoning and The Naked Gun reboot.

Destined to be crushed by Wicked, Zootopia and Five Nights at Freddy 2, and to under-perform Bugonia, Heart Eyes, Chainsaw Man, the re-release of Wicked—all of which serve as a challenge of my ability to estimate what “general audiences” will go for.