"I need to know I've done one thing right in life," cries Charlie in one of the most moving and affecting scenes in "The Whale."
No one imagined that the fading comedian Brendan Fraser, missing from the big screen for years, could deliver such a magnificent and subtle performance.
Without hardly moving from the couch - in the suffocating and claustrophobic staging that never leaves the grimy living room of that apartment turned into the apotheosis of moral and material abandonment - the actor expresses himself almost exclusively through sad, desperate and sometimes resigned eyes.
Skillfully directed by Darren Aronofsky (the director of the shocking "Requiem for a Dream"), it draws not only the best from Fraser but also a furious, twitchy performance by Sadie Sink as the rebellious teenage daughter who despises and hates her father out of explainable resentment, while at the same time yearning to love him.
The girl seems mean and hostile, but we sense, as the obese father knows, that she is the only one who can justify Charlie's failed existence.
The text by playwright Samuel D. Hunter is very well used, and it doesn't take us more than a few minutes to understand that this film is not about fatness or the drawbacks of morbid obesity, but about depression, mutual incomprehension and the love of a father who is sorry for his daughter, whom he let down.
[Source](https://www.rtbf.be/article/the-whale-du-realisateur-darren-aronofsky-une-incroyable-performance-dacteur-dun-brendan-fraser-metamorphose-11161399)
