The Whale

I got to screen this film for awards season purposes.

It was very hard not to cry during several scenes.

Branden Fraser is simply amazing. Under direction of Aronofsky it's probably the best dramatic film of the year.

Fraser portrays the role to perfection. You feel sorrow for his character. The lady from Stranger Things that plays his daughter he is trying to reconnect with is going to be a huge star.

There is nothing unlikable about this film. Fraser tugs at your heart strings with the struggles his character goes through.

It's almost hard to watch at certain points in film; I had to take several breaks it's very emotional.

Fraser is a very genuine guy in real life I have met him twice a decade apart and he was the same amazing guy.

I hope this film does very well and ushers back a long awaited revival for Mr Fraser in Hollywood.

Brilliant actor & film.

10/10.

Imagine that there was complete silence in the hall for 2 minutes after the end of the movie (The Whale). You don't come across something like that very often. Brendan Frazer, directed by Darren Aronofsky, gave an incredible, amazing performance. When you watching this movie, you felt certain feelings at once. Such films don't happen often, but when they do, they change the cinema for the better. This psychological drama about guilt, loss, and trauma is one of the best films of this year. I hope it wins all the awards it will be nominated for, most importantly in the best actor category ( Brendan Frazer). He will probably win.

See The Whale just to watch consummate actors, Branden Fraser and Sadie Sink, playing father and daughter, furiously catch up with each other after years of separation. Set in Charlie's apartment, just big enough for his morbidly huge body, The Whale is not only about the reconciliation of this odd couple and the survival of obese Charlie but rather about how obsession can consume faster than a greasy piece of pizza.

Besides his abuse of food, Charlie refuses to let the Zoomed-in students see him in his rolling flesh. Yet, he is not self-centered or food-obsessed enough not to care about others, especially his flinty daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink, so much like a young Ellen Page), for whom he writes college essays (he teaches writing) and saves for her over $100K. His heart is as big, well, as his body.

Writer Samuel D. Hunter (also author of the play) and director Darren Aronofsky move Charlie toward either reclamation or death; they remind us he did abandon normal life for a gay love, who eventually committed suicide, and over whom Charlie has not recovered. Good enough for Charlie to despair and abandon himself to food.

Ellie's finishing high school is Charlie's other obsession, and whether or not they all can survive their confrontation is the abiding suspense. Pervading the drama is a sense of regret in almost every character except maybe the pizza delivery boy, Dan (Sathya Sridharan). Even Charlie's ex, Mary (excellent Samantha Morton), suffers the sorrows of their split family.

Hong Chau, who has had a great year, if only for her role in Triangle of Sadness, plays the gritty Liz, a caretaker for Charlie and true friend, regretting Charlie's descent that allows no trips to the hospital and hides his money for his unstable daughter.

The itinerant Jesus fan, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), is food for another essay but for now an effective emblem of the intricate characters supporting Charlie's journey. Herman Melville lends figurative richness to the proceedings. If I haven't convinced you of the gold in this small film about a big man, go see it to witness my prediction that Fraser will win Globes and Oscar.

I looooved this movie. It is clearly based on a play, and if you can accept that from the start and just take it all in, this movie really takes you into emotional spaces i didn't expect.

At some parts I admittedly laughed when I shouldn't but when the film reaches culmination it's impossible to not be taken by the beautiful agony of this tale.

This will win a best lead Oscar and bc Aranofsky used so much restraint I suspect he will be snubbed but as with all his films I guarantee you wont be able to shake this movie off.

This is legit art and it will make you uncomfortable, but unlike Mother -- it will be totally justified in the end.

I think there are some good reasons to criticize this film. It's a fairly stage bound adaptation of a play. That's not always a bad thing. In many cases, staging a film very similarly to the way the play was staged accentuates what works about the play. I don't think it really does here, and the film's repetitive structures leads to some dead patches. There's also a powerfully melodramatic tone to this film that I'm frankly just a bit unsure of.

I also think there are extremely bad reasons to criticize the film, and these reasons are starting to emerge as the consensus among critics in the mainstream media. This isn't a film about a very fat man. It's a film about someone with an extremely destructive eating addiction caused by grief and regret and the complete lack of self-worth that accompanies those feelings sometimes. There have been films that deal with drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex, but apparently when it comes to food, the only thing that this film can be doing is inviting you to gawk at the big fat guy. It's a very strange conclusion to reach that I speculate is generated by coming into the film dead set on the idea that this is all it can be doing.

I did not come away from this film with any notion that I was supposed to see Frasier as anything less than a human being deserving of our deepest empathy. The film parades in some shocking imagery, especially up front, but I found that once I confronted it, my initial reaction subsided and I was seeing Frasier for who he was. I think it's an extraordinary double-standard that people can watch Nicolas Cage indulge in ridiculous and cartoonish bouts of binge drinking in "Leaving Las Vegas" and declare brilliance, but balk at Frasier's fits of VERY CLEARLY self-annihilating eating in this film and think we are only supposed to be processing it as some kind of freak show.

I don't think this is an incredible film, and I wouldn't place it among Aronofsky's best. I do think Frasier's performance is brilliant, and the film is a flawed, but often marvelous character piece about a kind of addiction we seldom confront.