Film / The Whale

"Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring? People are amazing."

"You're an amazing person, Ellie. I hope you know what an amazing person you are. I couldn't ask for a more incredible daughter."

— Charlie

The Whale is a 2022 American drama film written by Samuel D. Hunter (who adapted his own 2012 play of the same name) and directed by Darren Aronofsky.

The story follows Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a morbidly obese, reclusive writing teacher who is mourning the death of his partner. He's now dying of congestive heart failure and has no desire to try and improve his health, despite the best efforts of his friend/nurse Liz (Hong Chau). However, he wishes to reconnect with his daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), before he finally dies and attempts to reforge a relationship broken by betrayal and estrangement.

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The Whale contains examples of:

#-G

• 20 Minutes into the Past: Since news coverage of the 2016 Idaho Republican presidential primary has been seen on television several times, it can be extrapolated that the film takes place in early March 2016. As a result of this, Charlie's video conferencing software and cell phone are seen as slightly more primitive than they likely would have looked in 2022. What Darren Aronofsky intended by setting the film during this controversial period of American politics is open to interpretation. Given how Charlie values honesty, it could be that Aronofsky used hindsight to convey that the future Republican nominee, Donald Trump, often questioned the credibility of the media and was seen by his detractors as a dishonest man.
• Abusive Offspring: Ellie. She steals from and is sporadically physically abusive towards her mother. She also physically abuses her disabled father, throwing away his walking frame and drugging him (which could've killed him due to his illnesses), cyberbullying him by shaming him online, and being constantly belligerent and demeaning to him, both for his weight and sexuality. She also shows no remorse for any of this.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Charlie cracks up when he sees what Ellie wrote in the notebook and realizes it's a haiku. He also looks to be on the verge of laughter when he sees what his daughter said about him online.
• The Alcoholic: Mary, Charlie's ex and Ellie's mother, is stated to be a functional alcoholic. After the drama involving Ellie and the money, Mary finds a bottle in Charlie's cupboard and starts drinking from it.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Charlie is a Rare Male Example. He's a gay man, and Mary openly accuses him of having married her just so he could have a child. He doesn't deny it.
• All-Loving Hero: Charlie doesn't have a single bad bone in his body and is still cordial to those who treat him like dirt, particularly his daughter Ellie. That being said, he does manage to lose his cool near the end of the film.
• Ambiguously Gay: Ellie. She receives homophobic bullying on her social media, and she makes a point of telling Thomas that she is not attracted to him, though it's unclear whether she means that she's not attracted to him specifically (after all, she makes a joke about her having to sleep with a drug dealer to get the prescription pills for Charlie before revealing she took them from her mother) or men in general.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Ellie revealing Thomas's crimes to his family. On the one hand, Thomas was forgiven and decided to return home, causing Charlie to decide Ellie was simply helping Thomas. On the other hand, Ellie has been shown to bully pretty much everyone she meets, including drugging her father for her own amusement, suggesting that her most recent attempt at ruining someone's life simply backfired.
  • The film leaves it open for interpretation whether Charlie dies at the end of the movie. It certainly doesn't look good for him, but it's also possible his ascension is metaphorical and what flies away at the end is his guilt.
• Apologises a Lot: Charlie tends to frequently apologize for every little thing, to the extent that Liz threatens to stab him if he says it one more time.
• Beauty Inversion: The handsome and well-groomed Brendan Fraser plays the disheveled and slovenly Charlie. Even though Charlie only stopped caring about his appearance after Alan's death, Charlie maintains that he was not particularly good-looking beforehand.
• Big Eater: Deconstructed and Played for Drama. Charlie frequently binges on unhealthy foods despite his overall health, to the concern of his nurse Liz. He even has an infamous Binge Montage that ends with a Vomit Indiscretion Shot. It turns out that Charlie's binge eating is a coping mechanism for his traumatic experiences, most notably losing his partner, Alan, to suicide several years prior.
• Big Fun: Downplayed. Charlie is shown as being depressed and self-loathing, but he is also incredibly kind and gentle.
• Binge Montage: The shame of being seen by the pizza delivery guy leads to Charlie going on a massive eating binge of pizza, candy, Doritos, sandwich meats, and other foods. To top it all off, the montage ends with a Vomit Indiscretion Shot.
• Bittersweet Ending: Charlie may be able to demonstrate to his daughter that he truly loves and cares about her despite leaving her years ago, but his health only gets worse over the course of the film, and he's stated to have roughly a week to live at the beginning if he doesn't go the hospital as soon as possible. The final scene of the film heavily implies that, while Charlie is on the very precipice of death, he has finally managed to reach his daughter emotionally and convince her of her worth, thus attaining a sort of salvation.
• Boomerang Bigot: Ellie appears to be homophobic based on how she has no issue addressing people as 'faggots', but it is indicated that she is actually lesbian herself.
• Bottle Episode: Other than a brief moment at the start where Thomas gets off a bus and a flashback to a visit to the beach at the end, the film takes place entirely within or just outside Charlie's apartment.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Exaggerated in Ellie. She is rude, standoffish, and confrontational until the last moments of the movie, when Charlie finally breaks down her defenses. Cyberbullying is also a thing with her, as shown when she fat shames her own father on the internet. Her mother says she has done that to several people several times over; she recently got suspended for threatening someone online.
• Break the Cutie: Charlie has a lot of these moments, but two stand out in particular — when his wife confronts him and when the pizza delivery man notices him.
• Brutal Honesty: Charlie repeatedly asks people for honesty. He characterizes Ellie's rudeness as honesty, and his final assignment to his class is to write something honest. He reads aloud several rather depressing submissions, impressed by the uninhibited honesty.
• Bullying the Disabled: Ellie frequently treats her morbidly obese father like dirt. At one point, she pushes his walker so that he must stand up even though he is unable to.
• Chekhov's Skill: Early on, Ellie says that she never forgets anything. At the end, when we find out the significance of the Moby Dick analysis, she instantly remembers it as something she wrote years ago.
• Condescending Compassion: Thomas claims he wants to save Charlie, but he's very much against pretty much the entirety of Charlie's lifestyle and at one point tries to insist that God will accept Charlie again if he forsakes his love for his dead boyfriend. This results in Charlie getting angry for the only time in the movie and giving a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech to him.
• Covers Always Lie: The frame from the main promotional posters never actually crops up during the film.
• Creator Thumbprint: Several themes from the director's previous works appear.
  • A middle-aged man estranged from his daughter, who is implied to be a lesbian. In this case, the roles are switched around, where the daughter is the less sympathetic one.
  • A character dying of an illness with an interest in classic literature, who desperately tries to get a family member to read something that ties into that. This time, it's from the point of view of the former.
  • An ending in which the protagonist appears to die but does so as they achieve something difficult. This time, it's slightly more uplifting.
• Death Seeker: Charlie is making no effort to keep himself alive and refuses to go to the hospital, planning instead to save all his money so it can go to Ellie once he dies.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Implied at the end — after she finishes reading her Moby-Dick essay from middle school, Ellie is shown with a genuine smile on her face for the first time as Charlie catches up to her, possibly a sign that she has finally opened up to him after years of resentment.
• Domestic Abuse: In addition to her treatment of her father, Ellie is also noted to be very hostile and violent towards her mother, even stealing from her medicine cabinet.
• Double-Meaning Title: The Whale begins and ends with the reading of an essay about Moby-Dick, but it also references Charlie himself, as "whale" can be used as a rude term for obese people.
• Despair Event Horizon: Charlie puts up with a lot of crap over the course of the movie, such as being told he probably has less than a week to live, being told off by his daughter and ex-wife, and enduring visits from Thomas, which reminds him of how his boyfriend died. However, what really pushes him over the edge is being seen by the pizza delivery man, which triggers a binge eating episode.
• Driven to Suicide: Alan, Charlie's late boyfriend and Liz's brother, after being cast out from their church. Charlie himself appears to be indulging in a form of this by overeating and refusing to seek medical care.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Implied with Mary, who binges on alcohol, possibly as a coping mechanism for Charlie's departure and having to deal with Ellie's terrible behavior.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Charlie not only forgives Ellie for how she mistreats him, but he doesn't even seem to care about any of it, including that she drugged him.
  • Thomas' parents forgive him for stealing from the church the moment they can get into contact with their child.
• Ending by Ascending: In the film's final scene, Charlie is shown lifting off of the floor as he walks towards Ellie, which potentially indicates that he dies.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Mary isn't exactly the sweetest person around, but she nonetheless won't shame Charlie over his partner's demise. She also doesn't approve of Ellie's treatment of Charlie; she tells Ellie off when the latter continues to lash out at Charlie.
  • Ellie herself is quite nasty towards Charlie, but even she appears horrified when Charlie starts having a heart attack and urges the latter to call an ambulance.
• Evil Redhead: Ellie has red hair and is thoroughly unpleasant and ill-tempered. She is also guilty of crimes such as blackmail, drug abuse, and food tampering.
• Extreme Doormat: Charlie seems rather tolerant of Ellie's behavior towards him, not saying a word when she openly insults and torments him.
• The Faceless: Dan, the pizza delivery man who brings pizzas to Charlie's apartment several times throughout the movie, is only seen as a silhouette through Charlie's window. Subverted towards the end of the film.
• Fade to White: Just as Aronofsky has ended multiple films earlier.
• Fat Slob: Played for Drama and Deconstructed. Even though he's aware of his horrendous health, Charlie continues to binge eat at excessive amounts instead of taking proper care of himself at the insistence of Liz. His obesity and binge eating is depicted as a coping mechanism to the immense trauma he has faced in his life. The "slob" part is also downplayed in that, outside of his eating habits, he does put some effort into taking care of himself and his appearance, such as shaving and showering.
• Fat Suit: Lots of makeup and prosthetics were used to transform Brendan Fraser into Charlie.
• Fiery Redhead: A more serious example with Ellie — she has red hair and is extremely irritable and hostile towards others, Charlie in particular.
• The Film of the Play: Adapted from Hunter's own play of the same name.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Thomas mentions in the first scene that he doesn't have a phone. Later in the movie, he admits he threw it away out of shame and fear after he stole from his church and ran away from home.
  • The essay Charlie insists is amazing and has read enough times to recite verbatim is notably a very amateurish essay, hinting that it's the author, not the content, that he cares about. Sure enough, the essay was written by his daughter in middle school.
• Formerly Fit: Downplayed. Although Charlie still appeared to be overweight in the picture with Alan, he was still clearly in decent shape compared to the morbidly obese shut-in he is now.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Ellie is shown to be The Bully and a Bratty Teenage Daughter who often does things that are quite cruel, such as fat shaming her own father on the internet. But a lot of her issues stem from Charlie leaving her behind when she was 8 years old, and feeling unloved by anyone in or out of her family. It's also shown that she is a victim of bullying herself, potentially due to her being gay, which adds another dimension to her conflicted feelings towards her father.
  • Thomas gradually explains that never feeling good enough for his father, and his own church being more about the appearance of doing good than actually doing good, brought about a crisis in faith and identity. He responded by stealing from the church and running away from home.
• Gentle Giant: Charlie is both very tall and very fat, and he's relentlessly kind toward everyone but himself, even when others aren't kind to him.
• Go into the Light: The ending of the movie where Ellie stands in Charlie's doorway, reading her essay, as Charlie finally stands up and walks toward her, with both of them bathed in the light coming in from the door.
• God Is Evil: Charlie tells Thomas that this was his conclusion after reading The Bible.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Charlie seems to be in denial over Ellie's nasty behavior, claiming she does have some goodness in her.
• Gray Rain of Depression: The weather is grey and rainy throughout the film, matching Charlie's depression and self-destruction.

H-Z

• Hates Their Parent: Ellie makes no secret that she still resents Charlie for the latter's departure years prior. It takes a while for her to warm up to him a little bit.
• Hereditary Homosexuality: Ellie is Ambiguously Gay (see the entry above), while her father Charlie is gay.
• Heroic BSoD: After being seen by the pizza delivery guy, Charlie goes onto a massive eating binge and sends a curse laden email to all his students.
  Charlie: Fuck all these readings. Fuck all the essays. JUST WRITE ME SOMETHING HONEST!
• Hikikomori: Charlie never leaves his apartment and has as few social connections as possible. Prior to the start of the film, his only social contacts are Liz and his online students, whom he teaches with his camera disconnected. He asks the pizza delivery man to simply leave the pizzas outside his door and take money from the mailbox so he won't see him. His social circle only expands at the start of the film when Thomas drops by, and when he tries to reconnect with his daughter after Liz tells him he's dying.
• Honor Before Reason: Charlie absolutely refuses to touch the money he's set aside for his daughter to help himself for any reason. The only time he's ever considered spending the money was when he offered to pay for Liz's car to get fixed.
• Hypocrite:
  • Ellie is extremely cruel to Charlie, telling him that he's too disgusting to look at or be around due to his food addiction. She's also a smoker who steals her mother's pills to get high (and drugs Charlie with them).
  • Mary is also very unsympathetic towards Charlie, but she is a prescription pill addict and alcoholic who is also, at best, a struggling and overwhelmed mother.
  • Thomas preaches the word of God to Charlie and encourages him to repent for his "sin" (his sexuality), but he is estranged from his own church and family due to stealing money and being seemingly addicted to weed, even falling Off the Wagon when he's with Ellie.
• It's All About Me:
  • Mary is less concerned about Ellie's behavior being unacceptable and more concerned over the fact that it makes herself look bad as well.
  • Ellie is also proven to quite self-centered, usually only hanging out with Charlie just because he was helping her out with her schoolwork.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • While it still doesn't justify her horrible behavior, Ellie's resentment towards Charlie is rather understandable given the latter abandoned her alongside her mother when she was only a child. She remembers Charlie cooking a fine meal for his boyfriend, when he never even cooked for her and her mother gives some validation to her believing he loved Alan more than he ever loved her. Charlie admits he was wrong.
  • Mary is also justified in calling out Charlie on his departure years ago and allowing Ellie to go to his place without her consent, as Ellie already resents him and has treated him horribly during her visits.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • What Charlie believes Ellie to be, even while her own mother thinks the worst of her and didn't want her ex-husband to know how bad things were to avoid being judged as a bad mother. This is brought to a head in the end, when Charlie decides that the reason Ellie broke his birdfeeding plate was actually an act of kindness to send the bird back home. It's left up to the audience to decide whether he's right about her.
  • Liz tends to behave like a Battle Axe Nurse and frequently yells and curses at Charlie, but it's made very clear that they're best friends and she desperately wants to keep Charlie alive.
• Kick the Dog: Ellie frequently has these moments with Charlie, including telling him it's better off that his online pupils are unaware of his appearance and spiking him with drugs to incapacitate him.
• Lack of Empathy: Ellie does not care about Charlie's problems whatsoever; even after Charlie tells her about what happened to his partner, Alan, she still treats him badly.
• Letting Her Hair Down: Both Liz and Ellie wear their hair up or back for the majority of the film. Their key moments involving reconciling with Charlie as he appears to die have their hair being down for the first time.
• Minimalist Cast: Charlie, Ellie, Liz, Thomas, and Mary are the only central characters in the story, with the only others being very minor roles like the pizza delivery man or Charlie's online students.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Although Charlie is a teacher, he teaches classes on literature, and is obsessed with helping Ellie improve her grades in English. He also has a fascination with an analysis of Moby-Dick.
• Motif: Parental estrangement. Ellie, Liz and Thomas are all estranged from their parents.
• Nice Guy:
  • Despite his many faults, Charlie is a genuinely polite and apologetic man who insists on seeing the good in everyone.
  • Thomas is a compassionate and well-meaning, if misguided, young man who just wants to help others. Even when he turns out to be homophobic at the end, it's clearly just the result of the culture he grew up in.
• Not Afraid to Die: When Liz tells him his heart is failing, Charlie simply shrugs it off and says he'd better get to work; he has a lot of essays to grade.
• Nurse with Good Intentions: Subverted. Liz is trying to keep Charlie alive. She has an emotional stake in it as her brother, Alan, died by suicide after being outcast for being in a romantic relationship with Charlie, and Charlie appears determined to follow him in death by intentionally overeating. The trope is subverted in that she actually is a competent nurse, but Charlie has resigned himself to dying and ignores all of her correct advice in the process. Her determination to help Charlie often has her behaving like a Battle Axe Nurse. But that trope is subverted as well in that she cares about Charlie and is trying to save him, even if her behavior makes her a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• Pet the Dog: Mary tells Charlie how she saw Alan, his boyfriend, severely depressed in the supermarket. She wanted to confront and humiliate him, but when she saw how clearly unhappy he was, she changed her mind and helped him with his bags.
• Phoneaholic Teenager: Ellie spends all of her time on her phone, refusing to even look at Charlie.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Downplayed. Even though Thomas turns out to be homophobic, it's clearly the result of growing up in a staunchly Christian community and he does not bear any ill will towards Charlie. This contrasts him with...
• Politically Incorrect Villain: 'Villain' may be a stretch, but Ellie is nonetheless shown to be homophobic (even though she is implied to be lesbian herself), as she refers to Walt Whitman as a "nineteenth-century faggot" and openly shames her father for being gay.
• Post-Stress Overeating: Charlie is a recluse who spends most of his time binge-eating pizza and other unhealthy foods as a coping mechanism for both losing his gay partner, Alan, to suicide and being estranged from his wife and daughter for several years. Even when he is told he only has one week to live, he still refuses to quit these habits. He gets worse when he finally gets noticed by the pizza delivery man, going wild on eating a vast amount of junk food to the point of violently throwing up.
• Potty Emergency: When Liz first arrives, Charlie says he desperately has to go to the bathroom because he's been "holding it in all day" because how difficult it is to move even short distances at his size.
• Pushover Parents:
  • Downplayed with Mary. Aside from telling Ellie off when the latter keeps acting up at Charlie's place, she doesn't seem to do much else about her behavioral issues (like take her to a mental hospital) and instead abuses drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism.
  • Played straight with Charlie, who puts up with Ellie's attitude due to both his depression and his immobilized state.
• Same Race Means Related: Characters look surprised when Liz tells them who her parents are, and she explains that she's adopted. Though we don't see them, this heavily implies they're white, while Liz is Thai.
• Secretly Wealthy: Downplayed. Charlie lives in a small apartment and largely subsists on takeout, but he has over one hundred thousand dollars in savings. Even his nurse and only friend Liz thought he was dirt poor.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Both Liz and Mary (more specifically the latter) do this towards Ellie when the latter continues to mistreat Charlie in his immobilized state.
• Springtime for Hitler: Implied. Ellie reports Thomas' secret to the latter's family, to which they manage to reconcile with him through forgiveness. Charlie interprets this as Ellie doing him a favor, but her nasty attitude throughout most of the film suggests that it was actually a misfire of her trying to humiliate Thomas, as she didn't consider the possibility that they might want to reconcile with him after all.
• Struggling Single Mother: It is clear that Mary has been struggling to care for Ellie since Charlie's absence. It doesn't help that Ellie directs her anger and hostility towards her as much as she does towards everyone else.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Charlie and his boyfriend met through a night class. Charlie notes that he wasn't young, though, as the night class was for adults, and they waited until the semester was over before getting together.
• Teens Are Monsters: Ellie exemplifies this trope. She has severe behavioral issues, including cyberbullying, drug use, and blackmailing. She was even suspended from school for her behavior; her grades have suffered as a result.
• There Are No Therapists: None of the characters receive any sort of therapy or counseling for their issues. Ellie in particular is never mentioned as having been sent to a mental hospital for her bad habits, such as smoking and abusing drugs.
• Threat Backfire: When Liz gets fed up with Charlie's constant apologies, she threatens to stab him. He laughs it off, stating his organs are "two feet deep, at least".
• The Lost Lenore: Charlie's late boyfriend Alan is said to have killed himself over religious guilt after being expelled from his family/church. This causes Charlie to become a shut-in and begin overeating.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Charlie binges on pizza and meatball subs.
• Troubled Abuser: While it still doesn't justify or excuse her behavior, Ellie has nonetheless suffered major self-esteem issues from Charlie's departure when she was only eight-years-old.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Ellie, a 17-year-old high school student, is shown smoking and stealing pills from her mother to get high. It's implied that she has been doing this for quite some time, likely not too long after Charlie's departure.
• Uncertain Doom: Charlie at the end of the film. The final scene, in which he finally stands up on his own, walks towards Ellie, is bathed in light coming in from the outside, has a flashback to a happy visit to the beach, and then physically lifts off the ground, could very well indicate that he dies, but it's not made certain.
• Unseen No More:
  • Dan the delivery guy waits outside the apartment when Charlie opens the door to get his pizza, causing him to gasp and run away.
  • When teaching his online courses, Charlie keeps his webcam off until his very last class, where he connects it and shows his students what he looks like.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Ellie appears to have been much sweeter as a child, based on the flashbacks and Charlie's monologues.
• The Voice:
  • Charlie teaches online writing classes via Zoom but keeps his camera turned off because he is ashamed of his physical appearance.
  • Dan the Pizza Man is only heard through the door through most of the movie, until the end, when he lingers for a moment to catch a glimpse of Charlie and then hurries away.
• Wham Line:
  • Liz tells Thomas that Charlie was in a relationship with a man who died by suicide, and that was her brother.
  • Happens exactly halfway through, when things come to a head with Charlie, his ex-wife, and Ellie.
    Charlie: I need to know that I have done one right thing with my life!
• What the Hell, Hero?: Liz is furious to learn Charlie has over one hundred grand saved up, citing not only the difficulties taking care of him has caused her but that money like that could have gotten him life-saving surgery or health insurance.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Dan seems concerned and curious about Charlie after many mysterious deliveries to his apartment. In the end, he lingers long enough to catch a glimpse of Charlie, but the sight of Charlie's morbidly obese and ill appearance fills him with such shock or guilt that he hurries away without a word.
• You Are Fat: Charlie is frequently fat-shamed by Ellie, who even posted about his weight on social media.
• Your Days Are Numbered: At the start of the movie, Charlie is outright told he'll be dead by the weekend if he doesn't go to the hospital.

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"This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my..."

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