A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.
- Won 2 Oscars
- 50 wins & 122 nominations total
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaFor the role, Brendan Fraser had to don a heavy prosthetic suit that he wore for hours. According to a piece in "Variety", he told members of the media in attendance at the Venice International Film Festival, "I developed muscles I did not know I had. I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed. It was like stepping off the dock onto a boat in Venice, that undulating. It gave me appreciation for those whose bodies are similar. You need to be an incredibly strong person, mentally and physically, to inhabit that physical being."
- GoofsCharlie nicks his skin when shaving, but the cut disappears in the next shots.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Projector @ LFF: The Whale (2022)
Featured review
I think there are some good reasons to criticize this film. It's a fairly stage bound adaptation of a play. That's not always a bad thing. In many cases, staging a film very similarly to the way the play was staged accentuates what works about the play. I don't think it really does here, and the film's repetitive structures leads to some dead patches. There's also a powerfully melodramatic tone to this film that I'm frankly just a bit unsure of.
I also think there are extremely bad reasons to criticize the film, and these reasons are starting to emerge as the consensus among critics in the mainstream media. This isn't a film about a very fat man. It's a film about someone with an extremely destructive eating addiction caused by grief and regret and the complete lack of self-worth that accompanies those feelings sometimes. There have been films that deal with drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex, but apparently when it comes to food, the only thing that this film can be doing is inviting you to gawk at the big fat guy. It's a very strange conclusion to reach that I speculate is generated by coming into the film dead set on the idea that this is all it can be doing.
I did not come away from this film with any notion that I was supposed to see Frasier as anything less than a human being deserving of our deepest empathy. The film parades in some shocking imagery, especially up front, but I found that once I confronted it, my initial reaction subsided and I was seeing Frasier for who he was. I think it's an extraordinary double-standard that people can watch Nicolas Cage indulge in ridiculous and cartoonish bouts of binge drinking in "Leaving Las Vegas" and declare brilliance, but balk at Frasier's fits of VERY CLEARLY self-annihilating eating in this film and think we are only supposed to be processing it as some kind of freak show.
I don't think this is an incredible film, and I wouldn't place it among Aronofsky's best. I do think Frasier's performance is brilliant, and the film is a flawed, but often marvelous character piece about a kind of addiction we seldom confront.
I also think there are extremely bad reasons to criticize the film, and these reasons are starting to emerge as the consensus among critics in the mainstream media. This isn't a film about a very fat man. It's a film about someone with an extremely destructive eating addiction caused by grief and regret and the complete lack of self-worth that accompanies those feelings sometimes. There have been films that deal with drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex, but apparently when it comes to food, the only thing that this film can be doing is inviting you to gawk at the big fat guy. It's a very strange conclusion to reach that I speculate is generated by coming into the film dead set on the idea that this is all it can be doing.
I did not come away from this film with any notion that I was supposed to see Frasier as anything less than a human being deserving of our deepest empathy. The film parades in some shocking imagery, especially up front, but I found that once I confronted it, my initial reaction subsided and I was seeing Frasier for who he was. I think it's an extraordinary double-standard that people can watch Nicolas Cage indulge in ridiculous and cartoonish bouts of binge drinking in "Leaving Las Vegas" and declare brilliance, but balk at Frasier's fits of VERY CLEARLY self-annihilating eating in this film and think we are only supposed to be processing it as some kind of freak show.
I don't think this is an incredible film, and I wouldn't place it among Aronofsky's best. I do think Frasier's performance is brilliant, and the film is a flawed, but often marvelous character piece about a kind of addiction we seldom confront.
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $10,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $17,463,630
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $332,152
- Dec 11, 2022
- Gross worldwide
- $57,615,635
- Runtime1 hour 57 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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