When I first heard about The Whale, it was in the context of it being Brendan Fraser’s comeback role. I loved The Mummy growing up and still think it’s a great series, and somewhere along the way I learned that Fraser had unfortunate circumstances abound surrounding his (now thankfully temporary) decline. It was nice to hear that he managed to prove that not only does he still have his acting chops, but they had arguably improved over the years.
Though, I didn’t watch the movie. It looked good from stills, but I was afraid that it perhaps might hit a little too close to home. I’m nowhere near as bad off as Charlie—the main character and Fraser’s role—in health, weight or life circumstances, but a common thread of us emotional eaters well into excess is we don’t enjoy being confronted with the worst of who we are, fictional or otherwise.
How I wish I had watched this movie sooner! It’s so much more than a morbidly obese man eating himself into an early grave. It’s about addiction, it’s about coping; it’s a film that in just under two hours manages to beautifully showcase the gamut of flawed humanity without holding anything back. The characters are perfectly imperfect. Thomas, the missionary sincere in his desire to help, yet so shackled by his close-minded faith that he could never see someone like Charlie—whose cardinal sin in Thomas’ eyes was not his gluttony, but his homosexuality—as anyone more than a lost soul in need of realignment. Ellie, the precocious and acerbic daughter of Charlie who is so quite plainly a child ravaged by the traumas of a broken family, made all the worse by how much she cares—and how much she hates herself for caring. Or Charlie himself, a man who followed his heart and hurt everyone around him in the process. He copes with the trauma by eating, and is tirelessly positive and insistent on honest, heartfelt writing despite him willfully living in apathetic squalor and not being able to speak his true feelings to the one who needed to hear it most until the movie’s (and his life’s) end. There’s layers to Charlie’s flaws, and they’re all too real. His well-intentioned desire to provide for Ellie was ill-thought (leaving a fresh adult six figures with no strings attached is a recipe for disaster) and in its single-minded selflessness, utterly self-centered to the point of disregarding Liz, Charlie’s dear friend and dutiful nurse/assistant.
The acting is more than believable, it’s real. For a man as iconic as Fraser to vanish into Charlie is no mean feat, and even a character as minor as Dan the Pizza Man felt like an actual unrelated outsider who reacted as one might, not knowing anything we viewers knew. Charlie’s eating is presented in the same light as his ex-wife Mary’s drinking. It’s not for pleasure, not anymore; now, it’s just a way to cope with the pain of the wounds left by other people’s mistakes, and their own. No one is innocent of making things worse for someone else; despite Ellie’s traumatic childhood, she still freely humiliates both of her parents on social media and has no qualms about outright telling her father she wants him to die. Even Liz isn’t entirely free of blame; to bring a nigh-immobile, housebound man dying from poor eating habits unhealthy food in spades is just as damning as giving the heroin addict another baggie, even if it does ease their pain. That’s the core, that’s why this movie feels so real. We all make mistakes, and we all end up hurting people as well as helping them throughout our lives. There’s a piece of each character we can all relate to, even if for different reasons.
In the end, the movie ends on a note of catharsis and vulnerability. To accept one’s true feelings and embody the honesty Charlie constantly expressed a desire for in writing is to make oneself utterly vulnerable. For those who have to confront past trauma to do this, it’s painful, but a kind of pain that’s as freeing as it is agonizing. If the movie has a central theme, it’s that it’s never too late to make amends. Even though the process will be arduous, painful and not guaranteed to succeed in the way you might want it to, it brings a sort of peace that lets you face the rest of your life—whether it be measured in decades or seconds—with clarity and surety.
