‘Whale’: Misery that doesn’t love company

  

A vast expanse of artificial flesh encases Brendan Fraser in The Whale, enabling the 54-year-old actor to play Charlie, a man who has compulsively eaten his way to a monumental 600 pounds. 

 Not surprisingly, Charlie is self-conscious about his weight: He teaches on-line writing courses at a local college but doesn't allow his students to see him. He keeps the camera on his computer off.

  Charlie's immobilizing bloat began when his gay lover committed suicide, a double tragedy because Charlie had left his wife (Samantha Morton) and daughter (Sadie Sink) to pursue what he expected to be the love of his life.

  Living alone in a cluttered apartment in a small town in Idaho, Charlie is visited by Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse, friend, and the sister of Charlie’s dead lover.

  Liz starts the dramatic clock ticking: If Charlie doesn't head to a hospital, his death from congestive heart failure is imminent, Liz tells him.

  Intent on self-destruction, Charlie refuses to budge. He relies on Liz to bring him hefty sub-sandwiches and has large pizzas delivered to his door. He leaves cash and tips in the mailbox so that the delivery kid doesn't see him.

   Much has been made of Fraser's performance. Many think he has put himself on an Oscar track. Some of this has to do with Fraser's previous work in movies such as Encino Man, George of the Jungle, and several Mummy movies, not exactly Oscar bait.

    Oscar nomination or not, Fraser deserves credit for creating a character who could have been little more than a gimmick. Flashes of humor peek through Charlie's bulk, assuring us that he retains his humanity. Maybe he's just a decent guy who lost control of himself.

    But two hours of watching Charlie wallow in self-recrimination isn't enough to fill a movie and that's where the trouble starts.

     As the supporting cast arrives, Aronofsky cranks up the unpleasantness.

     Charlie's visitors aren't exactly fully developed characters; they're illustrations of Charlie's problems: An estranged former wife (Morton); an aggrieved teenage daughter (Sink) who spews venom; and a missionary (Ty Simpkins) who believes faith and fervor can save Charlie.

     Put another way, The Whale is one sour movie, full of harsh encounters that can feel as repellent as Charlie's compulsive eating, which includes buckets of fried chicken and as many candy bars as his mouth can hold.

     The movie's title, by the way, doesn't refer to Charlie. When he's agitated, Charlie recites a passage from a cherished essay on Moby-Dick, repeating it as if it were a prayer. 

    Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler) peers into the waning days of an emotionally wounded man whose life has been sadly diminished. 

    Fair enough, but The Whale sometimes feels more like an intrusion than a movie, invaded privacy wearing the mask of drama.

    Toward the end, Aronofsky tries to give Charlie, and presumably, the audience, a redemptive lift. It's too late.

    Put another way: I think I was supposed to root for Charlie to be saved; I just wanted him to be left alone.

It's one 'Mother!' of a movie

Director Darren Aronofsky's wild-ass horror movie aims big -- maybe too big..

Take the exclamation point in the movie's title seriously. Watching director Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is like reading a book in which every word has been italicized for effect: the silences are oh so ominous, the creak of a shoe on a wooden floor can be jarring and when a furnace fires up, it's like a bomb has exploded. The aural atmosphere of Mother! has been amped up to take what starts as a chamber-piece helping of horror and inflate it to the point of explosion -- maybe beyond that.

In his efforts to harness as much on-screen venom as possible, Aronofsky has enlisted an A-list cast led by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem. Bardem plays a poet; Lawrence plays his devoted wife. The couple has just moved into an isolated country home.

Irritable to the point of hostility, Bardem's character ignores Lawrence's character. She plasters walls and works on turning the house into a little piece of paradise. You probably have a pretty good idea where all attempts at creating paradise wind up.

Buried in an increasingly chaotic plot, you'll find a mordant comedy about the burden of uninvited guests. The first of these is a man who identifies himself as an orthopedic surgeon (Ed Harris). The surgeon excuses his intrusion by saying he thought he had arrived at a bed and breakfast inn.

Harris' character smokes when asked not to, and claims to be a devoted fan of Bardem's work. He also says he's dying. It doesn't take long for the surgeon's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) to show up. She's so rude, she makes Harris's character look considerate. She leaves a mess wherever she goes and pushes Lawrence's character into all manner of unwanted conversations.

To augment this bizarre scenario, the couple's two grown sons (Brian Gleeson and Domhnall Gleeson) show up and immediately engage in a Cain-and-Abel style fight over their father's will.

The credits identify Lawrence's character only as Mother; Bardem is referred to as Him. This tells us that we're watching a film that wants to mine a metaphorical motherland. As is often the case, Aronofsky aims big.

Aronofsky toys with every horror trope he can find: eerie basements, spurts of blood and a steady stream of unexplained noises.

All the while, Aronofsky frames Lawrence's face in booming close-ups; Lawrence expresses perpetual consternation over the fact that her husband insists that these uninvited guests stay; his desire amounts to a betrayal.

Generally, Lawrence's character behaves in ways that make little sense, a problem that afflicts much of the rest of the movie, but Aronofsky seems intent on making us ride a wave that swells with bizarre shocks.

With a movie such as Mother!, much hinges on whether Aronofsky can tie things together. Watching Mother! is like listening to a very long (and not entirely interesting joke) hoping that the punchline makes the time we're investing worthwhile.

Now if you want to excavate some meaning from all the stylistic bric-a-brac, try this. Bardem's character is a self-absorbed artist who pays very little attention to his wife. He allows his guests to insult and berate her, every now and again offering his apologies. The fact that Harris's character is a fan suggests that Bardem's character will put up with anything -- so long as it's accompanied by massive adulation.

Aronofsky carries this notion to wild extremes in the movie's final act, which I won't describe here because Aronofsky's images do have a surprising quality that should be discovered in a theater.

Aronofsky (Noah, Black Swan, The Wrestler and The Fountain) certainly knows how to create vivid images but when he finally wraps up his movie, I had the sense that I had just watched a perversely overproduced and willfully malicious episode of The Twilight Zone. It's as if Aronofsky has channeled impulses from filmmakers such as Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby) and Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and given them an even more twisted spin.

Mostly I felt sorry for Lawrence, a gifted actress playing a character who takes a psychological and physical beating as the film progresses. Aronofsky may be trying to describe a particularly loathsome form of male behavior, especially among artistic men, but to make his point Lawrence must become the movie's sacrificial lamb.

Whatever the case, it's worth noting that in enlarging the characters played by Bardem and Lawrence to float his allegorical balloons, Aronofsky mostly ignores their humanity. I took the movie's preoccupation with close-ups as significant, a way of locking its characters in the prison of a tormenting vision.

With Mother!, Aronofsky huffs, puffs and damn well tries to blow the house down. But this time out, I found myself wondering whether there was anything more to the movie than the ominous howl of all that huffing and puffing.

'Noah' didn't totally float my boat

Darren Aronofsky makes an intermittently arresting Bible movie.

Early on, director Darren Aronofsky's Noah looks as if the director of movies such as The Black Swan, The Wrestler and The Fountain wants to turn a familiar Bible story into a bit of second-rate sci-fi.

What else to think when watching Aronofsky reprise the Genesis story in bite-sized visual chunks. If that weren't enough, Aronofsky later introduces giant rock creatures called Nephillim, fallen angels who stomp about the Earth like refugees from a Michael Bay movie.

Part spectacle, part attempt to wrestle with Big Questions (capital letters intentional) and part the story of a family in crisis, Noah provides Aronofsky's take on a tale in which God -- always called The Creator in the movie -- decided that mankind was too corrupt to preserve.

You pretty much know the story. Noah (Russell Crowe) is the last good man in a rotten world. Here, he's presented as a kind of proto-environmentalist who suspects that the world is doomed. Noah doesn't speak directly to God, but he reads signs and omens -- flowers that sprout magically in an instant, for example.

Understandably troubled by the prospect of global annihilation, Noah gathers his family, and sets out to visit his great-grandfather Methuselah, Anthony Hopkins as a kind of Old Testament Yoda. Perhaps Methuselah will know what to do.

Noah's accompanied on his journey by his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and this three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth (Douglas Booth, Logan Lerman and Leo McHugh Carroll).

En route, the family picks up a young woman whose life Noah saves, Emma Watson's Ila.

Religion aside, the movie gods must be served. Perhaps that's why we're only about 10 minutes into the movie when Noah finds himself wielding a cudgel against barbaric bad guys.

Noah, we learn, is a descendant of Seth, Adam and Eve's third son: The murderous Cain, a better-known son of the first couple, also produced offspring, a group of carnivorous, self-serving louts led by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone).

Needless to say, Noah pours on the special effects when it comes to the flood (death by CGI) and the arrival of the animals that Noah has been charged with saving.

The creatures show up on their own, proving that Noah was the first to understand the now-popular bromide: Build it, and they will come.

Aronofsky is at his most daring when dealing with the post-flood Noah.
Motivated by his faith, Noah goes off the deep end, turning into a zealot who (like most zealots) goes too far.

Noah thinks God has appointed him as the man responsible for wiping out all humanity and restoring the universe to its original purity; i.e., a place with no people.

Other themes rise with the flood waters: The movie pits humanity's boundless hubris against a vegetarian Noah's deeper understanding of man's more humble place in the universe.

In an attempt to bring this already obvious conflict into even sharper focus, Aronofsky's speculative screenplay -- written with Ari Handel -- finds Tubal-Cain stowing away on the ark, and trying to involve Noah's resentful son Ham in a mutinous plot.

Tubal-Cain functions as the proponent of the dark side: The Creator has abandoned the world. He and man no longer are on speaking terms. Man, therefore, is justified in grabbing anything he can. It's not the heavens that rule the world, but man's will.

Noah, on the other hand, understands that man can't despoil the planet without consequences, and at one point, he even wanders through what look like the ruins of an industrialized society, demonstrating that Noah is not taking place in what we might commonly call "the real world."

Those who have seen The Fountain shouldn't be surprised that Aronofosky frequently attempts to operate in full visionary mode. He shows us Noah's prophetic dreams, the snake that tempted Eve and even summarizes the evolution of humanity in a segment that seems a heady mixture of Cosmos and the Bible.

The movie does attempt to answer several nagging questions:

Q: How did Noah care for all those animals?
A: He put them to sleep by waving incense-like smoke over them.

Q: How did humanity continue if Noah had only three sons?
A: Enter Watson's character, who has a romance with Shem. (In the biblical account, Noah's three sons all were married and took their wives on the ark.)

Q: How did Noah build the massive ark, which looks like a giant floating shoe box?
A: Those massive rock creatures helped.

We know from the outset that a message awaits: The movie finally pronounces that mercy and love are important balancing virtues to justice. A dejected Noah finds renewed hope.

The acting doesn't amount to much. An increasingly grizzled Crowe does what he can with Noah. He's playing a character who must read the divine tea leaves. Noah finds himself in a frenzy as he approaches a pivotal incident that seems to have been inspired by the story of the sacrifice of Isaac.

A little Bible story here? A little Bible story there? What's the difference?

Oddly, the only character who seems to operate with palpable conviction is Winstone's Tubal-Cain. But he's also mildly extraneous. With God wiping out almost all of humanity, did we need a big-screen bad guy for added melodrama?

I get the problem, though. Without a little something extra what would Noah and his family do once the Earth -- made as bleak and forbidding as possible -- is flooded? Play canasta and wait for the waters to subside?

Overall, Noah stands as a decidedly mixed achievement, less a compelling story than an attempt by Aronofsky and cohorts to illustrate cosmic ideas.

And sometimes, even Aronofsky's considerable visual skills fail him, as when he references The Creator by tilting his camera skyward.

Oh well, this strange mishmash of a movie considerately shortens the purported 40 days and nights of rain, and certainly doesn't feel like any other Bible movie. Maybe I'd have felt better about the whole thing had it begun with these words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

Portman spreads her wings in 'Black Swan'

Director Darren Aronofsky's latest is at its best when its wild, furious and flirting with incoherence.

Black Swan begins with Natalie Portman - as ballerina Nina Sayers - dancing in a dream. It doesn't take long for an ominous-looking figure to invade Nina's sleep, thereby establishing the strategy that increasingly will dominate director Darren Aronofsky's arty thrill ride of a movie: Sensation will trump sense, and the movie's commitment to overstatement will be frenzied and brazen -- even intrusive.

Say this: Black Swan has a pulse, a feeling of agitated, intoxicating brilliance. Part thriller, part horror movie and part trippy exploration of the clash between reality and mad vision, Black Swan nonetheless is all of a piece.

In the world of ballet, Aronofsky has found an environment that allows him to move beyond the muddled excesses of The Fountain and the sweat-stained realism of The Wrestler. Black Swan is a movie about performance: Portman's, the main character's and, ultimately, Aronofsky's. It's almost as if the movie wants to merge all three in an act of furious consummation.

The story is relatively simple. Portman's Nina dreams of dancing the lead role in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a ballet that tells the story of a princess trapped in the body of a swan. To achieve liberation, the princess must win the heart of a prince. But a black swan also vies for the prince's affections. The same dancer typically dances the roles of the black and white swans.

Portman's Nina has dancing chops, but her repressed sexuality keeps her from fully emerging as the Black Swan. A tyrannical ballet master (Vincent Cassel) goads and bullies Nina toward sexual liberation, telling her that she must "let go'' in order to achieve total command of the role.

This is no easy task. Nina can't quite cross the threshold into womanhood. She shares an apartment with her domineering and sometimes resentful mother (Barbara Hershey) and sleeps in a room full of stuffed animals, not the most subtle of clues but still weirdly effective.

More than a gloss on Freudian themes, Black Swan is a balls-to-the-wall display of cinematic showmanship. Nervous to the point of impatience, Aronofsky's hand-held cameras move toward a finale in which the director searches for a dark and beautiful triumph. Does he find it? You'll have to judge for yourself.

Despite obvious differences, Black Swan covers some of the same ground as The Wrestler. Aronofsky's interested in the merging of personality and role in fulfilling acts of sacrifice. And just as The Wrestler introduces us to the grubby, locker rooms and physical torments of second-tier wrestling, Black Swan exposes us to the pain involved in preparing to dance.

Similarities, yes, but Black Swan plays to Aronofsky's strengths in ways that prove more invigorating than anything in The Wrestler. Aronofsky gives full vent to Nina's stark hallucinations, sexual fantasies, looming fears and acts of self-mutilation. He also uses the world of ballet to create an atmosphere in which technique ultimately means nothing without risk.

Portman reportedly did a lot of her own dancing, but it doesn't take long to notice that a fair amount of Black Swan's dance sequences have been shot from the waist up. This is not to say that Portman's performance is in any way a cheat. She's entirely convincing as a ballerina who's being buffeted by forces she believes to be beyond her control. She's an Alice in a frightening ballet Wonderland.

Some of the images created by cinematographer Matthew Libatique are truly amazing. The sight of Portman dressed as the Black Swan and strutting imperiously across the stage evokes memories of Norma Desmond, the character Gloria Swanson played in Sunset Boulevard. It's a hyper-theatrical immersion in character that celebrates both daring and delusion.

Aronofsky's additional casting is quite good. Hershey makes a convincing monster mom, a woman who sacrificed her own ballet career to raise her daughter. Cassel nicely fills the outlines of a role that's geared toward arrogance and intimidation.

Mila Kunis manages to present the most recognizably human face in a drama in which nearly everyone seems to be wearing a mask of some sort. As Lily, a rival ballerina, Kunis is able almost to sound natural in an environment dominated by artifice.

Winona Ryder, shows up as a fading ballet star who falls into a suicidal depression when she's no longer fit to dance the great roles; she's an inspiration for Nina, as well as a warning.

My reaction to Black Swan varied as the movie danced its way through multiple genres. At times, I found it dizzying and compelling. At other times, I thought it was much ado about far too little. Some of the movie's "horror" ploys struck me as embarrassingly garish. But even when Black Swan flirted with incoherence, I admired its dark showmanship.

Aronofsky isn't telling a great or even novel story, and he certainly owes a major debt to Tchaikovsky, whose music helps establish an air of fretful anticipation. But like a dancer looking for perfect synchronization with a great piece of music, Aronofsky's clearly attempting to fly. When he does, Black Swan soars.