My second viewing of The Whale was both the viewing in this series I was looking forward to most and the one that worried me most.
The trepidation resulted from the fact that the praise for this film was by no means unanimous. Yes Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for this role, but many critics disliked it, for reasons ranging from it being fatphobic (I disagree with that) to it being too tied to its origins as a play (I can see that) to it being highly melodramatic (I can see that too, but in the best sense of that word).
On a personal level, I wondered if my emotional reaction to watching the movie last December -- I cried on four or five different occasions -- had crippled my critical faculties, and boosted this movie beyond the level of adoration that was warranted.
It was actually a rather cut-and-dried case, in that moment. Darren Aronofsky's primary competition was Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling, a film that had even more detractors than Aronofsky's film. Despite my also being enthralled by that movie, the haters had more time to get under my skin since I saw it two months earlier. The films in my third and fourth positions (Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once) had no real shot at leap-frogging these two.
But whether I had justly chosen The Whale as my #1 movie of 2022 or not, I knew there were red flags about it, including the notion that some people found it fatphobic. When a movie may be biased against an entire demographic group, and I still name it my #1, I have to ask myself if I am failing to recognize a core insensitivity that makes people in that demographic group actively hate it.
There was also a bit of pressure on this second viewing. Way back at the start of the year, when I was watching Pi or Requiem for a Dream and it came up with my wife that I intended to finish with The Whale, she said she would watch it with me. Since I always like to show my wife my favorite movie of the year, I was sort of looking forward to this all year.
But then when December actually rolled around, she found the weight of all the end-of-year activities too exhausting, and it seemed likely that she would opt out of his verbal commitment. My wife is down to maybe only ten to 20 movies a year as it is, and spending nearly two hours with a man who is eating himself to death probably did not seem like her idea of how to spend the holidays.
We're down in Tasmania right now visiting my mother-in-law, and I calculated that Wednesday night was the best time for me to watch it, to make sure I did actually get it in before the calendar ticked over to January. As it happened, not three minutes into the movie, she saw I was watching it and settled herself on the couch of the place we're staying, not knowing how much she would fit in but willing to give it the old college try.
This hadn't worked during our last high-pressure (for me anyway) viewing, which was Skinamarink at Halloween time. As that movie is one of my favorites of 2023, and as it is scary as hell, I had hoped my wife would find it a good Halloween-themed viewing. Instead, she gave up after about 45 minutes -- which is more than some people would give that movie.
I'm glad to say my wife made it the whole way through The Whale, and got a little teary at the end. However, she couldn't give it her full endorsement, saying she wasn't sure exactly what she had thought of it. I guess that's better than the people who hated it outright.
For me, I could tell the viewing wasn't going as well for me this time as the first time. I felt being stuck in Charlie's apartment more than I had the first time, which is kind of the point of the movie but also something that can exhaust a viewer for the wrong reasons. My viewing circumstances were decidedly different this time: on holiday, after a few beers, whereas a year ago I'd attended a morning screening.
The other pressure was self-inflicted. When I revisit a movie where I cried the first time, I'm always curious to see if the reaction will be the same the second time. In a way, tears are like laughter, as both result from being taken off guard by something the movie is doing, for very different reasons. Just as I don't expect to laugh as hard at a movie on my second time watching it, I don't expect to cry as hard. But if I didn't cry at all during The Whale, what would I be left with?
Although the tears did not flow freely, I did get moist on a couple occasions, which maybe was as much as I could have reasonably hoped. The Whale had a tough act to follow, as my previous year's #1, the cancer family drama Our Friend, actually caused me to cry more on the second viewing than the first. That's basically unprecedented, and unfair to The Whale.
The scene that still got me the most was between Charlie and his ex, played by Samantha Morton. The script prepares you for her to be a boozy asshole, so on both viewings I was utterly taken aback by her emotional generosity in her one powerhouse scene. Like every character in this movie, she's a real person, not a one-dimensional sinner or saint. And the way she refers to the man who stole Charlie away from her, calling him "your friend" with this touch of sentiment and possibly even love, just broke my heart.
There were scenes that I felt were a little stagey, a little on-the-nose, where I was wrapped up enough in everything not to notice those aspects the first time. Overall, though, if I'd had it to do again, I still would have slotted this ahead of Don't Worry Darling last year. It's still a powerhouse movie with an incredible central performance, and excellent performances around it.
And on the subject of its fatphobia or lack thereof ... I ultimately come down to this conclusion: If you are ever going to make a movie about a morbidly obese man, you are going to get accusations that the film is repulsed by him. So either the choice is never to make a movie about such a character, or to go beneath the knee jerk reaction and decide to grapple with what the film is actually doing. The film is obviously concerned for Charlie, but not because he "looks gross." It's because the condition of his body is most likely going to kill him, and because it's a reaction to a depression that results both from things he could control and things he could not control. I said it at the time and I say it still: This is a movie about a person, not a body.
Interestingly, though, it may be no better than my third or fourth favorite Aronofsky movie. I'd definitely place Requiem for a Dream and mother! ahead of it, the latter benefitting from repeat viewings after finishing at #15 in 2017, and the former remaining a singular nightmarish vision of addiction that finished at #13 in 2000. And then don't forget the film that actually won Aronofsky his coveted #1 ranking in 2008, The Wrestler, which remains steady in my appraisals each time I watch it.
In other words, four of Aronofsky's eight feature films are movies I absolutely cherish, with Black Swan and Pi both staking a strong claim to my affections.
That makes Darren a king in this or any year.
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