Brendan Fraser in ‘The Whale’.
It is worth seeing the great work of Brendan Fraser, nominated for an Oscar, even if he has to star in a story that turns into a caricature due to his excesses in search of drama
It seems like a horror movie, perhaps unintentionally, the latest proposal by New Yorker Darren Aronofsky, whose mystique of a New Age manual arouses philias and phobias. The character played with his guts, under layers of makeup and latex prostheses, by a huge Brendan Fraser – please give him the Oscar – is an isolated and self-destructive individual, plunged into the solitude of heartbreaking confinement. He is devoured by depression, an unbearable existence marked by the death of a loved one, while he gobbles down vast amounts of junk food. A difficult role, which moves between compassion and rejection, between empathy and disgust. His drama is stratospheric and food is his drug, the same one that is killing him. He can barely move from the sofa, he is huge and no one can stop the tragedy. The heart does not give for more. A cruel portrait of obesity that leaves no room for hope.
As he did in ‘El luchador’, a Golden Lion at the Venice festival in 2008, his best film, debut feature aside – left more than one detractor speechless with the visceral portrait of the decline of a successful athlete in low hours putting all the meat on the spit-, in ‘The Whale’ its greatest creator has also been able to count on an actor whose real life has been beaten, as if the weight he carries, the personal drama, soaked up the tragic character he embodies in fiction . In his day he rescued the ineffable Mickey Roorke from ostracism, with his face disfigured by boxing, Botox and bad life, and in his new bet the director of ‘Pi, faith in chaos’, the debut with which he broke the mold in 1998, he has called out Fraser, whose meteoric career in Hollywood suffered a setback when he was the victim of sexual harassment, an unfortunately common scourge in show business. The protagonist of the blockbuster saga ‘The Mummy’ fell into a deep abyss from which he is currently emerging, little by little, after publicly denouncing an embarrassing fact. Sadness is seen on his face.
The work of the ‘airheads’ actor in ‘The Whale’ is absolutely brutal. A pity that the script, based on a play, is so manipulative, as well as the direction. Aronofsky fascinates or horrifies, there are no half measures before his work. Here he lets himself be carried away by the tearful side of human dramas like ‘The Sea Inside’, forcibly elevating to the cube, every imaginable maneuver to move the public. The result is crude, typical of a Sunday telefilm, as this type of film used to be called that does not shy away from squeezing the cheapest resources of audiovisual language in pursuit of whining, going over the line. All the mechanisms work at full speed, throughout almost two hours of emotional porn, brand of the house? Fortunately, Fraser’s work is worth seeing. What’s more, every Aronofsky film is worth watching: he always has something interesting in his images and we must applaud his desire not to leave the audience indifferent. His filmography is peculiar and eclectic, erratic at times, always controversial. A priori his films do not resemble each other, nor does his result, but as a filmmaker he always knows how to leave his own personal imprint. Many viewers were already mesmerized from his first steps, with titles like ‘Requiem for a dream’. For some, a magnum opus. For others, postcard cinema, excessively moralistic, even reactionary.
cult
Darren wants to wear the author’s label, whoever falls. His obsession with showing his difference from the rest led him to DJ with ‘The Source of Life’, a tedious film, bordering on ridiculous in some passages with Hugh Jackman characterized as a mindfulness guru before he got into trouble. fashion. Critical and public success came again thanks to ‘Black Swan’, always betting on genre cinema, with which he plays at will with more or less success. ‘Mother!’, closer in time -let’s forget about the absurd ‘Noé’-, highlighted his status as a controversial creator, raising a somewhat tricky and uncomfortable film, remarkably pretentious, which was revealed as a bargain theology lesson which inevitably referred to Polanski from ‘The devil’s baby’. Within this framework is ‘The Whale’, whose story, summarized, could be a brilliant short film, telling more and better in less time. We are left with that sublime performance, and that of his casting partners, equally excellent: Hong Chau especially, along with the young Sadie Sink and Samantha Morton. A full-fledged interpretative tour de force that marks the main artist, physically and mentally. Narratively classic, gloomy in its aesthetics -oppressive at times-, the piece seeks lyrics too late and its correction in the face of possible vulgarity ends up disrupting substance and form.
