REVIEW ***

THE WHALE

The Whale is by any measure a stunning film. Brendan Fraser is mesmeric as the morbidly obese teacher turned online tutor who refuses to show his face to students because he’s so repulsive. The movie is full of drama – and when I say ‘full’ I mean chock-a-block to overflowing. It’s so damned obvious that it’s an adaptation of a play that it’s annoying by the end. Whereas film is the medium for subtlety and tact, the play is in your face for two hours. It’s hard work. That’s not to say it’s unmoving – it’s poignant and devastating in parts. But it's laboured!!! When all’s said and done it’s a story about a very fat man who loses his gay lover and can’t cope with real life. So, he turns to eating everything that doesn’t move and, as a result, become a hideous self-loathing blob. His only redeeming quality is his love for a daughter he conceived in some straight moment of madness when a younger man and for that he’s been self-tortured for the eight years (or so) following his abandonment of his family. When a dodgy end-of-days bible basher crashes into his life, he’s forced to re-evaluate his life. That's it. Then he dies. I think there’s little doubt that Fraser will win on Oscar for this turn (how much of it should go to the prosthetists though, I leave to your judgement). But that’s where it will end – while the acting by the support cast is evenly great, the directing, writing, and production of the whole thing is terrible. This is one play that I feel would have been a hell of a lot better viewed in a theatre, not a cinema. In short, a film that one man (a very, very, very big man, cannot save single handed).