Film review: how The Whale proves a love-hate film, both at once

You’ll probably wander out of this one not remotely knowing what you think – except most likely that you are glad that it is over. It is difficult to think of many more unpleasant or more uncomfortable films in recent times than this tale of a morbidly obese but desperately kindly English teacher who is sitting there, essentially immobile, just waiting to die.

If it is a film that sets out to persuade us to view those who are tragically oversize with the same degree of compassion with which we view people with anorexia or bulimia, then that is of course a fantastically laudable aim. But if so, then isn’t there just a little bit of cynicism in the decision to do it by plonking a normally-sized bloke into a massive fat suit?

And isn’t there even more cynicism in the decision to opt for a once golden star who’s lost his cinema mojo in the past couple of decades and to do so just before the awards season? After all, this is precisely the kind of make-yourself-ugly role that the awards-givers positively love…

And yet, and yet, and yet… it is an astonishing performance that Brendan Fraser gives as slowly the extent of his sadness, the reasons for it and his boundless positivity filter through. He knows he has got just days to live. He struggles to breathe, he eats absolute rubbish, he is prone to choking, he can barely move and his blood pressure is well into the fatality-waiting-to-happen range. And yet he refuses all treatment. All he wants is to be with his teenage daughter, a positively evil creature – on the surface at least – who hates absolutely everything, especially him.

His crime is to have fallen in love with a man and to have abandoned his wife and his daughter eight years before. Then when his new partner’s life ended in tragedy, Charlie started to overeat… and didn’t stop. But now, as he so movingly says, in his last hours Charlie wants to contemplate his daughter and know that he has got something right in his miserable life.

Oh yes, you can admire it. You can grab at the film’s profundities and persuade yourself they mean more than they actually do. You can ponder Charlie’s huge essential decency, his sense of hope even when he has abandoned all hope. And you can marvel at Fraser’s performance, plus that of Sadie Sink, brilliant as the ghastly daughter, and Hong Chau as Liz, the nurse who looks after him, oozing compassion (and bizarrely his lover’s sister).

But none of that can make you like this film. None of it can make you pleased that you are watching it. For the most part it is a horrible watch, and while appreciation of the film will almost certainly grow in the hours after you get home (as horribly difficult as it is to watch, it is even more horribly difficult to dismiss), you can still sit there wishing you’d gone to see Puss In Boots instead.

There’s really nothing that truly redeems anyone or anything here. Misery is simply heaped on misery. Even worse, though, is the feeling The Whale leaves behind that somewhere along the line we’ve been horribly manipulated. Damagingly for the film there’s something just too contrived about the whole thing all the way through. It’s a love-hate film – both at once.

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