The Whale

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.

There's a part of this movie that even before going in I was apprehensive about. Is it exploitative? More than probably, yes. Is it phobic in a certain way? It isn't impossible to think that. But being far removed from certain aspects of what the movie shows and yet being so close and feeling related to a lot of other things the movie portrays, I can only speak from what I got and felt about this movie.

Performances by Brendon Fraser, Sadie Sink and Hong Chau were absolutely fantastic. But that's something almost everyone knew even before going in. What really touched me was the detailing through which they showed why each character behaves in certain ways and how everything ended up this way. The absolute helplessness of humans under a system and subsystems across various levels of power that are meant to make life better creates more obstacles for everyone involved are arguably the root of the evils here. But the way each person deals with the evils they face is entirely different even when those reactions have so much in common. That is really reflected in each of the performances. Each of them shows a variety of emotions that are so humane and makes your heart break even more with the contrast between their philosophies on life and how life treats them.

For me, the film wanted to tell us that everyone is flawed, but it's the authenticity that should matter more than anything else which should be the road to happiness in life.

Darren Aronofsky surprised me with this film as he kept the characters and their reactions to circumstances as the center of what's happening on screen.

What was further surprising to me was the thorough nuance with which the film's sensitive themes are explored. Aronofsky is not a subtle filmmaker, but each of these characters is given such satisfying depth and is portrayed with their flawed perspectives and endearing desires on full display.

The film has no hero or villain. Everyone is made out to be both to an extent and it's heart-wrenching to come to know these people throughout the film and watch them seek redemption.

Some have criticised the screenplay as melodramatic-I didn't find this to be the case. I found it largely authentic, tragic, and full of intrigue that compounds as more information is revealed.

My only glaring issue with the film is that one of the characters starts out as complex and with a singular nature, only to have that completely altered, oversimplified, and abandoned in his final scene. It seemed to me that this was done for the sake of the desired themes but at the expense of the character.

But Brendan Fraser's performance alone marks this film as a colossal triumph, and there is much excellence to be seen throughout its entirety.

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.

I recomend this movie and authorize it as factual from my life standpoint. The doctors told me I only had 5 to 10 years left in me. It was suggested that Bariatric surgury is the only way things will change. Since December 27th, 2022, 6 months later, I am 220lbs. I have had diabetes. I no longer have diabetes since I changed my diet. I never knew how disgusting I was or how much food I ate in one day because the chemicals in the High Fructose Corn Syrup that soda contained were causing my addiction to drinking more soda. My house was filled with garbage on the ground, and I couldn't even wipe myself or turn around; I couldn't even fit in the car that well to drive.

I only drove my car to the doctor and had the groceries delivered. Watching these academy award winners on the big screen affected me emotionally because it reflected my life. It destroys me, showing my life from a different perspective. This is as real as it gets people; this exists, and this story has no fiction in it. My issues were PTSD, X's wife, and her taking my children away. My children are older now, and we are getting reconnected. I do not blame anyone else for my problems, only me. I cried when the Xwife wanted to hear his heart and lungs; that scene hit home and affected me in many ways. What about my daughter? Well, it's not been easy, she doesn't talk much to me, and I am only in her life when she needs something; like Fraiser, I saved up all the money for her.

Thank you for reading my review, The doctors now say that I might reach 90 now because of all the changes I made and hopefully I will witness a few grandchildren along the way. I am alive today because I made the choice to live. It was hard to make that choice because psychologically I didnt believe anything was wrong with me even though I was deathly ill. Makes me think.... Am I creating my own life simulation? AmI still deathly ill even though I am healthy again? How much do we take our lives for granted?