Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky says he searched for years for the right actor to portray the main character in his new film, The Whale, a morbidly obese man. The least we can say is that he hit the nail on the head by giving this powerful and heartbreaking role to Brendan Fraser.
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Fraser, who we hadn’t seen in a leading role in the cinema for ten years, indeed offers a masterful performance in this cinematographic adaptation of the play by Samuel D. Hunter, which was presented on the boards in New York in 2013.
Physically transformed thanks to the magic of magnifying makeup and prostheses weighing nearly 300 lbs designed by Montreal visual effects makeup artist Adrien Morot, the 54-year-old actor slips into the skin of Charlie, a literature teacher suffering from severely obese who lives alone in his apartment somewhere in Idaho.
Having a penchant for self-destruction (he eats pizza and fried chicken) and no longer able to take a few steps in his apartment without coming close to a heart attack, Charlie is well aware that his days are numbered. Before dying, he will therefore try to reconnect with his daughter (Sadie Sink), a rebellious teenager who still resents him for having abandoned them, her and her mother, to go live with one of his students, a few years earlier. .
tour de force
It is a moving story of redemption offered by Darren Aronofsky (The black swan, Mother!) with The Whale (The whale), his eighth feature film which recalls in some ways his excellent The wrestlerreleased in 2008.
In terms of production, the filmmaker has pulled off a tour de force by making captivating, through a few daring framings, a story that takes place entirely in a dark apartment. The closed-door aspect of the story also allowed him to highlight the richness of the text of the eponymous play by Samuel D. Hunter as well as its finely chiseled dialogues.
But the success of The Whale rests first and foremost on the strong and nuanced performance of a Brendan Fraser totally inhabited by the character, but also on that of the young Sadie Sink, who is poignant in the skin of a disillusioned teenager.
Rating: 3.5/5. The Whale, a film by Darren Aronofsky with Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink and Hong Chau. Showing Wednesday.
