How Aronofsky's 'The Whale' is an empowering story about honesty

There is one value that seems to be becoming increasingly rare these days: honesty. Yes, it's scary, yes, it can be painful, but it's a necessary and important part of humanity. They even make fun of it in Interstellar, with TARS making a joke about how his level of honesty is too high because "absolute honesty isn't always the best form of communication. more diplomatic nor safer with emotional beings." One of my top 10 films of the year is The Whale by Darren Aronofsky, which I saw again when it came out of the Venice Film Festival a few months ago. I recently rewatched the film for the second time and it struck me even more this time - The Whale is about honesty above all else. It's not really about being fat or battling overweight it's about depression and disconnection and how being dishonest puts everyone in the situation they find themselves in right now. The film is about an overweight man named Charlie who tries to reconnect with his daughter over the course of a week, with a very emotional finale where he literally screams to be honest.

Note: spoilers from now on The Whale. The film is adapted from a play and feels like one. It takes place entirely in an apartment, where Charlie lives, and all the other characters come there and interact with him. Charlie, played flawlessly by Brendan Fraser in an award-winning role, learns to be more honest with himself after experiencing so much falsehood in his past. We learn at some point that he left behind his wife and daughter to start a relationship with a man, which hurt them both. It was his first major step to being honest with his sexuality, and his romantic interests led him to be with someone who truly loved him. Unfortunately, her partner's religious beliefs and internal conflicts contributed to her death. This left Charlie in shambles, and his sadness and depression drove him to self-medicate with food, which is now his great source of comfort and relief. That's why he looks the way he does, and he knows it, but he's also unable to break this addiction and doesn't seem to care. Instead, he focuses on nurturing kindness and positivity with the few people left around him, hoping it will make a difference.

The film then introduces Sadie Sink as his teenage daughter Ellie. She is also dishonest with herself and her emotions, caught up in the typical teenage angst of feeling disconnected from everyone. She needs to learn how to properly express her feelings, and Charlie feels it inside her, acknowledging that love and support are what she needs most. Then there's Ty Simpkins as Thomas, a religious boy from New Life Church who shows up on his doorstep as a missionary hoping to convert him. Later we learn that this is all a lie as well and he doesn't want to face who he is, how he really feels, what he's doing there or how he needs to go about redeeming himself in his life. . There's also Charlie's ex-wife, Mary, played by Samantha Morton, who is in a few scenes. Ellie reminds Charlie that she can only be honest and "happy" when she's drinking, which helps Mary have a good moment of reconciliation with Charlie near the end of the film. The only honest person in Charlie's world is Liz, played by the incomparable Hong Chau. There's also Dan The Pizza Man, but Charlie can't make a real connection with him because he's afraid to show himself to anyone else.

Liz is a vitally important character in this story, and Hong Chau humbly takes on that role with one of her best career performances to date. Everyone who watches The Whale says how much they admire it, even if they don't like the rest of the movie. It's because her character Liz is the most honest. She's the only one who not only makes fun of Charlie about his weight, his situation, everything he thinks, but she's also straight with him about his health as an obese man on the verge of death. the death. They're good friends because they have a deep bond that's so pure and raw that Charlie and Liz both appreciate it and are subconsciously intertwined that way. She wants him to lose weight and get healthy, but she also respects his choices and his way of life. She just loves him for who he is, no matter what he looks like or the choices he makes, and t...