The first
two scenes contrast each other magnificently.
First, the Zoom meeting where a bunch of students talk to a teacher whose small square on the screen is black: The nice teacher with the trust-inspiring voice must have forgotten to turn on the computer's camera.
Then a morbidly obese, snorting man who is half-lying in an armchair and anxiously jerks off to internet porn.
This is Charlie, distance language teacher.
A deeply unhappy man who does not dare to show himself in a picture because he knows it would scare the students away.
Charlie's daughter
shows up every now and then, with the barbs constantly out, pissed off that he abandoned her.
Charlie comfort eats another bucket of fried chicken.
Bite by bite towards the grave.
The claustrophobic feeling is enhanced by the old 4:3 format, which makes the picture far too cramped for such a gigantic man.
Apart from a few brief scenes from the loft corridor, we are never allowed to leave the dingy apartment.
But then this is also from the beginning a play, and the somewhat tired running in the door in the long run is a legacy of the theater set.
This is
the grand comeback of 90s charmer Brendan Fraser.
He wears his fatsuit with mournful elegance, guiding us slowly but surely into Charlie's torn psyche.
The Oscar nomination was obvious, the win likely.
However, there have been complaints that they have fitted a star with fake fat instead of letting the role go to a (severely) overweight actor.
The film has also been accused of being fat-phobic;
and perhaps Aronofsky has chosen to enhance the sloppiness of Charlie's binge eating, but I see it as the director - just like in the masturbation scene - challenging us;
asking if we really ids see the human Charlie through the fleeting surface.
It's about
tolerance and the ability to see past one's prejudices.
"The whale"
is surprisingly conventional, but neither is Aronofsky's own script.
Rather, a utility job that lacks the discordant nervousness that usually makes the soul vibrate, most recently in the mentally mammoth "Mother!"
– watch (re) it instead and wait for the selections to be streamed.