The Whale - 2022
Updated: Mar 4, 2023
This film is kind of a miracle. I mean, when have you last seen a picture which contained two titanic performances and at least several more consistently solid ones as well, yet ran so god awful for such long stretches? Enter the white whale (sure, the metaphor is on the nose) - A confounding series of opposites.
The Whale implores its viewers to practice honesty and transparency in all (especially written) communication. It’s a powerful exhortation at face value, but one that is immediately undermined by writing and plot stretches which ring falsely at nearly every turn. If the claustrophobia of this confined space was the messaging of some such sequences, then, yeah, we got it. It’s no secret that Aronofsky (who I adore generally) is a cozy bedfellow to melodrama. His movies always leave you feeling a little dour and far more drained by the big emotions it wrings from your innards.
If you feel like you’re hearing that I didn’t appreciate the grandiose gestures and speechifying nearly as much this time around, then you’re tracking nicely. And YET the final encounter between father and daughter positively blew me away. It is one of the best scenes that I've seen all year while containing all of the things that I just negatively described. I left it in ruins.
Even so, one more mystery remains for me. How is it that this picture, which shares so much DNA with an Aronofsky work 20 years its senior, is but a shell of that masterwork? The Wrestler preceded The Whale by decades. One is near perfect, the other barely average. Directors this sharp typically don’t devolve into more primitive versions of themselves. In a very frustrating film, perhaps that is the greatest conundrum of all.
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