Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's "THE WHALE" For Film- Page 3
Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's "THE WHALE" For Film
#50Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 12/23/22 at 5:35pm
maybe one of the least enjoyable miserable theater going experiences, ever. Fraiser is really good but it doesn't make up for this torture porn of a film.
chrishuyen
Broadway Legend Joined: 11/12/14
#51Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/1/23 at 1:36pm
Saw this recently and would be curious to hear from people who saw the play as well. I agree with the other two posters about the film, it just wasn't an enjoyable experience. I went to see it because I really enjoyed the characters in A Case for the Existence of God, and compelling characters are a big factor in how much I like something, but I just didn't really care about anyone in this movie. Brendan Fraser does tremendous work, but I felt that I pitied more than empathized with Charlie. I thought the best part of the movie was really his conversation with his ex-wife, Mary, but everything else just seemed really heavy-handed between the rain and the score trying a little too hard to create obviously emotional moments. Then again, the two friends I went with were crying by the end so I guess it works out for some people.
#52Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/1/23 at 4:28pm
I saw this the other night sitting with someone who is fat. They hated it, and thought it was fat-shaming. My response was, "this movie is not about being fat. It is about a character who is suicidal and is purposely eating themselves to death, and has gone beyond being any typical standard of morbidly obese. Charlie is not fat, he is in his own category." We agreed to disagree. And seriously, I'm all for "body positivity" but the entire plot revolves around the fact that he is five hundred pounds and is subsequently dying of congestive heart failure.
Anyway, I understand why some people don't like it. It's an upsetting movie on many levels. It is, in a way, a "body horror" movie, is hard to watch, and it is very, very depressing. Also, any perceived "fat-phobia" aside, it's just not a great script. In an intimate theater, I imagine it made for a decent play, but on film it comes across as only a couple notches above a Lifetime movie or something. Hunter's attempts to make some sort of literary or philosophical connection between Charlie and Moby Dick are not really fleshed out (no pun intended), and it's not the "play of ideas" it seems to think it is.
HOWEVER, Brendan Fraser was absolutely perfect and totally heartbreaking, and if his main competition for the Oscar right now is Colin Farrell in Banshees of Inisherin (which I also didn't like very much despite my love for Martin McDonagh), then there is no contest IMO. Fraser absolutely deserves an Oscar for this. If he doesn't get it, it's merely because some voters don't think he shouldn't have taken the role in the first place, which is ridiculous. Whoever they had play Charlie would have had to have worn a fat suit and prosthetics anyway, and if we are talking about representation...Brendan Fraser is, um, not thin. His George of the Jungle days are long gone. He's just as qualified to play the role as was Shuler Hensely, who originated the part.
Anyway, give the man the Oscar he deserves.
KevinKlawitter
Broadway Star Joined: 1/21/20
#53Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/1/23 at 7:03pm
It's not a great movie, but there are great elements.
The irony for me about the movie in general and Brendan Fraser's performance in particular was that for all of the emphasis placed on the grotesque nature of his body, the most effective moments of his performance (and it's a terrific performance) are the moments when he's able to have an conversation with and say things to the other characters like a more-or-less normal human being. The physicality, makeup, etc. are well done, but the movie lingers on it for so long that after a while you wonder what else needs to be said about it.
That's a problem with the movie in general. It hammers home the same points over and over again, repeating the same character and plot details so repeatedly to the point of redundancy. There are a handful of really effective scenes between Fraser, Chau, and Sink, but they feel like the occasional gold nuggets in a depressing slog.
I worry that the popularity of the movie will lead to a lot of community theaters putting the play on in ways that are even more irresponsible than the movie.
Dollypop
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/15/03
#54Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/1/23 at 7:15pm
Is the movie that popular? It played for a mere werk in our local cinema and people who saw it there commented the theater was pretty empty.
"Long live God!" (GODSPELL)
KevinKlawitter
Broadway Star Joined: 1/21/20
#55Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/1/23 at 7:22pm
Dollypop said: "Is the movie that popular? It played for a mere werk in our local cinema and people who saw it there commented the theater was pretty empty."
It's made $15 million so far on a $3 million budget, and has only been in wide release for about a month. That's a pretty solid sleeper hit, especially considering the material.
Auggie27
Broadway Legend Joined: 10/13/03
#56Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/2/23 at 8:21am
Plays -- even the best ones -- seldom make memorable films. They're inherently the one thing film can never be: constructed on palpable artifice, on an audience and players pact to fully suspend disbelief. Masking in theaters we were reminded: hey, we breathe the same air as actors pretending to be other people! But The Whale is a curiosity. It was treated as a cutting edge work on stage, given ravishing notices in many regional productions after a successful launch in NY and elsewhere. On film, it's everything non-theater people loathe about plays: reeking of contrivance, larded with unities-fueling convenience and stagey entrances and exits, with announced revelations, and from start to finish talky, full of self-explicating dialog that underscores every metaphor, beginning with a title tethered baldly to Melville.
Yet I come not to sink The Whale, though I thoroughly disliked the movie, but to point out the fascinating chasm between the story's reception in one medium and another. Re-reading the NY Times review this morning (I'll post a little below), I was struck by the distance between the same paper's response to the staged drama. It doesn't help the cause, having the bloated material filtered through the lurid lens of Darren Aronofsky, a man who never met a repulsive image he didn't want to share with a dark auditorium of spectators held hostage to his world view. (To be fair to the playwright, Aronofsky adds binge and bulimia sequences that are the rank stuff of drive-in era horror.) But there's a conversation to be had about how the same tale playing on small and large stages looks so empty and, well, phony on the biggish screen. Even if you love its central, controversial performance (which left me oddly unmoved; only Hong Chau escapes the piled on excesses), you feel the gears of dramaturgy grind. Those same wheels were at work at Playwrights Horizon, yet no one was bothered; in fact, they cheered.
The Times on the film:
"All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic while demanding extra credit for emotional honesty. But the working out of the various issues involves a lot of blame-shifting and ethical evasion. Everyone and no one is responsible; actions do and don’t have consequences. Real-world topics like sexuality, addiction and religious intolerance float around untethered to any credible sense of social reality. The moral that bubbles up through the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s score) is that people are incapable of not caring about one another.
Maybe? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman provide some literary ballast for this idea, but as an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness."
"I'm a comedian, but in my spare time, things bother me." Garry Shandling
Updated On: 2/2/23 at 08:21 AM
perfectliar
Broadway Legend Joined: 7/1/04
#57Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/3/23 at 4:41pm
Dollypop said: "Is the movie that popular? It played for a mere werk in our local cinema and people who saw it there commented the theater was pretty empty."
Obviously, one local cinema is not a barometer for a film's success. I saw the new Avatar in a theatre that seated over 300 with only 4 other people; it's still made $2 billion internationally.
The Whale was nominated for multiple Oscars, which will make the play version inherently "popular" to small community/regional theatres looking for an easy way to market a show in coming seasons.
Observation
Stand-by Joined: 12/3/15
#58Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/3/23 at 5:55pm
This seems like a Renee Zellweger, "Judy" situation. The movie is flawed, however the performance is wonderful!
#59Darren Aronofsky Is Adapting Samuel D. Hunter's
Posted: 2/25/23 at 1:28pm
I saw this film last night, and definitely need to see it again. Fraser deserves that Oscar (but Butler will probably get it). I was very moved by the film - not knowing it's original source was an off-Broadway play 10 years ago - and the only distraction for me was that the movie did come across as a 'play being filmed'. Not that it was a bad thing - just a distraction at times. I'm curious if this will now be revived on Broadway ?
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