Don’t call it a comeback
Peter Tonguette
Brendan Fraser’s performance in The Whale has been as widely heralded as any in memory. Thirty-one years after Encino Man, Fraser has received endless plaudits and is nominated for an Oscar for best actor, the winner to be announced next month. In director Darren Aronofsky’s film, Fraser stars as Charlie, an elephantine — or cetacean, if you prefer — English professor who spends his days wolfing down whatever food is available or can be delivered to his shabby, inadequately lit apartment. His consumption is interrupted by periodic health scares (at one point, he is said to have a blood pressure reading of 238 over 134), bickering with a visiting nurse (Hong Chau), discussing the meaning of life with a purported Christian missionary (Ty Simpkins), and explaining, to his daughter (Sadie Sink), that he remains a caring father despite having abandoned his family to set up house with a man, now deceased. Charlie also conducts empty-headed lectures on Zoom. And although he turns the camera off to spare his students the sight of him, he might as well turn the sound off too: Charlie’s advice to aspiring writers — he keeps prattling on about the essay form — amounts to little more than babble.
We are not accustomed to thinking of movie stars as vulnerable people. Apart from royalty, elected officials, and sports heroes, few people on the planet appear more insulated from reality than the gods and goddesses of the silver screen. No one is clamoring for the formation of People for the Ethical Treatment of Movie Stars.
But imagine, for a moment, that your name is Brendan Fraser. You have been kicking around Hollywood for nearly three decades, but at age 50-something, you are still best known for Encino Man, George of the Jungle, and a bunch of Mummy movies. You have proven you can do deeper, more demanding work, evidenced in your persuasive performances in admirable films, including Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American.
But then you started getting older. You were once built like a jock, but now, your body is heavier, stiffer, and slower — beaten up by movie roles, too. Worse, your hair — what was your best feature in Encino Man, for Pete’s sake — is starting to recede. You are beginning to look like a balding former NFL lineman. You have had tough times: a divorce, financial woes, and bad parts. You stepped forward to say you had been the victim of a sexual assault by a powerful industry figure. You are a good guy, but things are not getting easier.
Now, imagine that you, Brendan Fraser, are offered the leading role in a new movie — and it’s not just any new movie, but the latest effort of a filmmaker consistently ranked among Hollywood’s most dynamic and imaginative. Yes, Darren Aronofsky, the hotshot hipster auteur of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and Black Swan, has chosen you for his next movie. No matter that The Whale will ask you to don a fat suit, pile ranch dressing onto a pizza, regurgitate into a trash can, and inhabit a character who alternates between two states: pleading and weeping. Maybe the magic Aronofsky worked with Mickey Rourke on The Wrestler will be repeated.
But wait a minute — is that what you really want, Brendan Fraser?
When Aronofsky offered Rourke The Wrestler, the actor was then as washed-up as Fraser was until recently. The Faustian bargain went like this: Rourke could have a comeback so long as he was willing to debase himself thoroughly. So Rourke, who traded on his good looks and volcanic presence in such films as Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, Adrian Lyne’s 9 1/2 Weeks, and Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours, was cast as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, an out-of-gas professional wrestler. The part was meta in all the worst, most obvious ways — let’s cast a has-been actor as a has-been wrestler, fellas! — and the performance consisted of little more than moments ready-made for Twitter GIFs or YouTube clips: say, Randy shaving his armpits or, at a particularly low moment, managing customers’ requests at a grocery store’s deli counter.
Everyone pretended to take The Wrestler seriously as a comeback vehicle. Rourke was given an Oscar nomination, the first of his career. But the dirty secret was that it was always intended to be consumed as high camp. Even if Aronofsky had not approached the project with utter cynicism, he must have known that the sight of a bleached-blonde Rourke behaving like a buffoon would be viewed like people watching a car wreck, not an achievement in the art of acting.
Movie star comebacks often acknowledge the star’s troubles, absence from the screen, or aged appearance. Think of Judy Garland in A Star is Born, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, or Robert Forster in Jackie Brown — great films and performances all. But there’s something peculiarly cruel and craven about reviving a performer’s career just for the pleasure of spoofing them. Directors who came of age in the 1980s seem particularly vulnerable to conducting their casting sessions this way: “Hey, remember so-and-so? What if we cast him as such-and-such?” In Richard Kelly’s influential adolescent fantasia Donnie Darko, deep in the supporting cast, we find Patrick Swayze, the straight-arrow leading man of Dirty Dancing, as a motivational speaker with a hidden life as a child predator. If this were the only type of role Swayze could win by the early 2000s, perhaps he would have been better off following the model of Cary Grant: When the good parts dry up, hang it up.
But some actors can’t afford to stay retired. Swayze probably couldn’t; Rourke and Fraser almost certainly can’t. In their hearts, they would probably prefer to play dignified star parts rather than broadly conceived caricatures, but what can they do?
Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale presents its protagonist less as a human being than a checklist of conditions meant to be perceived as pitiable, but Aronofsky directs the film in such a way that upends even the uncomplicated empathy one may rightly feel for one of society’s rejects. The problem is Fraser himself, or, more precisely, the choice to cast him. Because the actor comes into the film with a reputation as a fallen star, we spend the early moments focusing not on Charlie’s plight but on the degree to which Fraser’s own life might mirror Charlie’s. We never feel for Charlie as we do for, say, John Hurt in the title role of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man or even Gwyneth Paltrow as the overweight Rosemary in the Farrellys’ underrated farce Shallow Hal. We just keep thinking: “The guy from Encino Man has rolls of fat around his neck.”
As the film lumbers along, we wait for the next gross-out scene as adolescent viewers wait for a nude scene from a famous actress. Charlie choking on a sub sandwich and then being practically assaulted by his nurse as she attempts to perform the Heimlich maneuver. Charlie breaking a table while attempting to extricate himself from a sofa. Charlie gorging on a bucket of fried chicken. It feels longer and longer between each one. This is no more sophisticated than an episode of My 600-Pound Life. If Aronofsky were actually a humanist, he would resist all shots of Charlie’s massive frame. He would not ask us to believe that Charlie actually gained hundreds upon hundreds of debilitating pounds merely because of his lover’s death.
In his early hits, Fraser’s appeal depended on his physical gifts. But here, buried in a fat suit and directed to speak in a whisper underneath a torrent of wheezing and gasping, he is hobbled. In our decadent age, one must make oneself freakishly ugly to win the applause of the beautiful people. To be less than beautiful on screen is hardly a crime. But to subvert beauty intentionally is a sign of spiritual rot. This is why Marlon Brando’s degradation of his body bothered so many moviegoers and why the Oscars’ high regard for gorgeous performers who make themselves look lousy or strange — say, Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Charlize Theron in Monster, or Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye — is so phony.
For Fraser, though, The Whale is a particular catastrophe. If he wins his Oscar, what will his next move be? As it turned out, Aronofsky did no favors for Rourke, who, following his performance in The Wrestler, regressed to subpar roles, possibly even worse than those that preceded his “comeback.”
No animals were harmed during the making of The Whale. But one mighty decent former movie star continues to be.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.