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With the Oscar ceremony approaching and the recent statuette won by Brendan Fraser at the SAG Awards, in addition to the same distinction at the Critics Choice Awards, one begins to speculate about the possibility that the American actor will obtain the highest honor of his career. . A career not exactly of great carat, almost always reduced to the film series The Mummy, and where diversity has never been much noticed, although it has its hidden gems. Who remembers Fraser from gods and monsters (1998) or Collision (2004)? Deep down, it is this actor of dramatic nuances that Darren Aronofsky rescues through The whalepulling him out of the waters of his commercial image to reveal someone capable of concentrating the action of a film on his bodily expression, even under a layer of adipose manufactured “body”.
the challenge of The Whale starts with assuming the importance of the actor: Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a man gay with morbid obesity who in the remaining days tries to awaken in his only daughter (Sadie Sink) some form of affection, despite the rebellious teenager’s resistance to the father’s persuasive and benevolent advances. She turns out to be the second most relevant character in this human portrait, as she symbolizes the redemption that the protagonist seeks, but the nurse played by Hong Chau (also Oscar nominated), someone who visits Charlie daily to check his health, is one of those minor characters who dominate the scene with only a strong and confident presence, just as the illustrious Thelma Ritter did in classic Hollywood cinema… There is also a young missionary who gets involved in the noise, but here everything revolves around obsessive confinement by Charlie/Fraser, that English teacher who gives online classes hiding his physical appearance from the students with the false excuse of a broken webcam.
In these times of heated speeches about representativeness, Fraser’s character did not escape some suspicious eyes, because he was not an obese actor, nor gay… Anyway, we’ll just say that it’s an impossible role to abbreviate in the experience of a physical condition (Fraser did his research with people who suffer from obesity), and, above all, what stands out is the symbolic resurrection of an actor, similar to what Aronofsky managed to do with Mickey Rourke in The Wrestlerone of his best films.
Incidentally, Aronofsky’s cinema involves not only the intrinsic purpose of observing the actors at any point of exhaustion – remember Ellen Burstyn in Life Is Not a DreamNatalie Portman in black swan or Jennifer Lawrence in Misunderstood Mother! – how the idea of space works from the body of these actors/actresses. Precisely, Mother!, the previous film by the New York director, with Lawrence locked up in an isolated mansion, establishes a curious affinity with The whale, as the dimensions are inverted: while the house of Mother! it is a labyrinth of rooms where the protagonist walks around in terror, Charlie’s apartment is too small for her body volume, and the very square format of the screen (4:3 ratio) gives the desired feeling of claustrophobia.
In effect, Brendan Fraser is a whaleman whose few and effortful movements combine with the evocation of moby dick, the novel by Herman Melville that appears in an essay read countless times by the protagonist, supposedly written by one of his students. And this reference also works in terms of images: although we always see Charlie sitting on the sofa or in a wheelchair, when he gets up (or tries to do so) there is an aquatic vibration and grandeur that translates something of the strange nobility of this man . The same man that at other times we can see greedily devouring everything unhealthy he finds at hand in the kitchen… Darren Aronofsky didn’t just want an actor who would give him a luminous and positive look like the one that Fraser displays against all the sadness loaded for her character – I also wanted her reverse, what causes discomfort.
But more than that, and recognizing that The whale has its weaknesses in the passage from Samuel D. Hunter’s autobiographical theatrical text to the big screen, at the level of melodrama, what seems to me worthy of note in Aronofsky’s directing is the way in which he creates a suggestive dynamic within that apartment. Charlie forms the energy point of all the psychology that pulsates in the living room – and there is no doubt that Fraser embodies this emotional potency without being embarrassed by the fat prosthesis – but there is a little more cinema than that. Like shots that make our eyes hypersensitive to details, between figures passing by the window, which anticipate the ringing of the bell, or the amount of objects accumulated in the apartment, which makes Charlie’s body merge with this dirty, unattractive landscape and more or less uniform in color palette. A body about to succumb to the inanimate state of the memorabilia around it, but, before that, with a word to say about human nature and a chance to heal the soul by liberating the physical.
dnot@dn.pt
