Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
This was a surprisingly hard film to watch (not because of Charlie being so severely obese, which I know triggers a lot of people), but because it showed the human side of Charlie’s struggle.
What Charlie deals with on the outside, visible to everyone else as well, all of us go through in some form or another – even if it leaves no visible marks on the outside.
I came away from the film acutely aware of how human connection is a tenuous thing that is so easily broken and so difficult to repair.
But it’s also incredibly resilient and never fully lets go, because we know, deep down, that we survive through connecting with others.
In many instances, The Whale reminded me of how Brené Brown speaks about shame, how shame neither heals nor corrects, but it only disconnects us from, not just others, but the most essential parts of ourselves.
And it felt like the film was a look at what becomes of humans when shame digs its nails into your soul; recovering from that is incredibly difficult and impossible to do alone.
It reminded me of how isolation drives addiction in rats, of how social connection, being an active, seen and acknowledged participant in a web of connections is how life survives – and how it withers when cut off from that.
And shame, as Brené Brown said, is that thing that disconnects us, and coming back to our own humanity and forgiveness once we’ve been disconnected is difficult.
We all have a complicated relationship with fear and with our self.
Here we love Brendan Fraser, because he never fails to deliver. And his own experiences with body shaming, while not as extreme as Charlie’s, clearly inform this touching and honest performance.
It would have been easy to only focus on the ‘being obese’ part of Charlie, but I love that the film goes a lot deeper than that.
Charlie is never framed as being defined by his physical appearance, rather his external physical appearance and his addiction are a result of the life he lived.
At many turns, he sees that people want to stop at what they see, but he challenges them to look beyond the addiction to see the pain and the humanity underlying it all, to see themselves in him.
There’s that ever-present looming threat of healthcare over his head, but the film isn’t about the failures in healthcare. And I say ‘threat of healthcare’ because with the medical bills that would ensue if Charlie went in for treatment, he could very well find himself physically in a better place, but financially ruined.
So, even though he’s saved money and could potentially afford some kind of treatment, in his head, the question is to what end?
He has already forfeit his own life, made his choices, and the by the combined weight of accepting that and feeling ashamed of where he is now, he’s ready to let go of what his life has amounted to and move on.
His one hope that the next generation do better at life than he did, so he wants to pass on whatever resources he has gathered rather than spend them on himself.
So, in his debilitating isolation, there was always that one thread of connection to his daughter that meant everything to him, even from a distance.
There’s a lot of anger and pain in each and every character.
I felt the way this had first been written as a play and then turned into a script, because each character shows up at just the right time to reveal something new about the story or about Charlie’s life.
That feeling makes this a unique film (or maybe it’s just the theatre kid in me who recognises how things work on the stage).
People are complicated and hurt people are even more complicated, and mistakes were made by everyone and imminent death always brings us face-to-face with our own sorrows and failures.
I see myself in Charlie, in trying to fill the space left by absent human connection with food. Struggling with a fundamentally unhealthy relationship with food and learning how to navigate that.
I see my family in Charlie, fighting an addiction that is relentless and will bitterly kill you even after you manage to heal the bad habits, leaving sorrow and devastation in its wake, and parents to bury their children.
It prodded some of the fears I’ve buried in having gone through that with my relatives battling obesity, things I haven’t wanted to think about, because death is never an easy topic.
On the surface, it’s a story about a reclusive English teacher who’s running out of time and is desperate to set things right before he dies.
But there’s so much more to the story than that; the struggle of being gay in a time and place that has no understanding or acceptance of it, the relationships you leave behind you when trying to make your way through life, and the unyielding need to belong.
In the end, Charlie’s essay, his lifeline, is revealed as his daughter’s essay, and those gossamer human connections refusing to let go even when you think you’ve moved on finally become fully revealed.
We’re left on the beach, the waves shushing on the shore, and a haunting feeling that Charlie was able to make himself whole.
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