JJ Reviews: The Whale Review

I don't even know where to start.....

I watch a lot of movies and I've always gravitated toward the sadder ones, it's the same with music.

This movie is one of the most harrowing 2 hours in the theatre I've ever experienced in my life.

Ultimately this is a movie about people running away from either themselves or the pain they have endured over their lifetimes. an essay about the novel Moby Dick repeatedly comes up during the runtime and it's always the part of the essay where the novelist tries to spare the reader parts of his sad life by writing chapter after chapter about whales. 

Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a man at the end of his life. After a traumatic experience, he shuts himself away from the world and is slowly destroying himself with food. He can,t get around his apartment without a walker and needs to have everything delivered to his place to survive. He lives with so much shame that he doesn't even turn on his webcam while trying to teach an online university course to the point that students joke about his "broken" webcam.

The first time Charlie appears on screen I openly gasped and covered my mouth. It's not even the obesity that made me react this way it was just the idea of this self-destruction that I was just about to learn more about. I know it was prosthetics and makeup on Brendan Fraser but it just hit me like nothing else in a movie has in a long time. That was just the first emotional reaction this movie got out of me.

I'm not going to dive into spoilers or anything like that but as the movie progresses it was just one emotional gut punch after the other. I've teared up at movies plenty of times but I've never openly wept like that before. It occurred 3 times during the run time and it's something that is going to stick with me for a long time. Usually, when I rate a movie I base some of the scores on rewatchability but I'm not going to be able to use that this time. This movie is incredible but I will never be able to watch it again. 

I wanted to see if this was the award buzz that Brendan Fraser was getting. I assure you that all the buzz is correct and I would be stunned if he doesn't walk away with an Oscar for best male lead performance come oscar time. It's almost poetic in a way that this is when Brendan will get his due since he was been kinda tossed away in recent years only to recently start making a comeback and getting universal praise for the roles he has been in. I know I'll be rooting for him and it couldn't happen to a better person.

Despite everything Charlie has done to himself and others he never lost his positive outlook on people. Despite being at his absolute lowest he always believed in people and how incredible they can be and that's something I want to be able to always have in my heart as well.

8/10