The Whale (15, 117 minutes)
Verdict: Offbeat Love Story
Qualification: ***
Knock At The Cabin (15, 100 minutes)
Verdict: absolute nonsense
Qualification: **
There is nothing funny about morbid obesity, but its portrayal on screen is often in the service of comedy: Terry Jones as Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) inevitably comes to mind.
Overweight characters also populate horror and fantasy movies, but it’s not often you find one as the lead in a love story. It is true that Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is not a conventional love story, it is not at all conventional, but it is about love, nonetheless both destructive and redemptive.
Charlie (Brendan Fraser) weighs over 40 pounds and is not only confined to his house, but practically to a chair. He’s a middle-aged academic who teaches creative writing online from his apartment somewhere in Idaho, but he’s so crippled by his colossal size that he can’t get to the front door without a walker.
He picks things up off the floor with a grabbing contraption like the ones kids aim at fluffy pink rabbits in arcades, and he’s appearance-conscious enough that when teaching, he pretends his laptop’s camera is broken. She can be heard on Zoom, but not seen.
BRIAN VINER: Charlie (Brendan Fraser) weighs over 40 pounds and is not only confined to his house, but practically to a chair.
We enter Charlie’s life with, it seems, very little to go with. His fierce but devoted caretaker, Liz (Hong Chau), tells him that congestive heart failure will soon see him off the hook, that he needs urgent hospital treatment to have any chance of survival. But Charlie doesn’t want to pay expensive medical bills, especially since he doesn’t want to survive. When he believes his death is imminent, he strangely begs a visiting missionary (Ty Simpkins) to read him excerpts from an essay on Moby Dick.
The reason for this will emerge, but in the meantime, Charlie is eating himself into an early grave with a daily intake of pizzas and sandwiches that would feed a hungry family of six.
He wasn’t always this fat, but the suicide of his male lover, for whom he had left his wife, Mary (Samantha Morton), and daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), triggered a spectacular binge habit that he doesn’t have. able or willing to control.
Charlie’s psychological demons become clearer when 17-year-old Ellie comes to see him for the first time in eight years. She is charmless at best and vicious and manipulative at worst, but Charlie, though he has to bribe her to keep visiting him, sees only the good in her. Indeed, it is perhaps the main irony of Darren Aronofsky’s daring drama that Charlie has a generous, almost childish view of humanity in general that he cannot apply to himself.
I was not a fan of Aronofsky’s latest film, the gruesome voyeuristic Mother! (2017). But he’s certainly anything but bland as a director, and The Whale, adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his own 2012 play, deserves all the attention he’ll keep getting until Academy Awards night next month.
In many respects, it’s another exercise in audience voyeurism (you’ve been warned), and from where I was sitting, its intrinsic theatricality diminishes its value as a film. Other than a couple of fleeting flashbacks, we don’t move beyond the confines of his home any more than sweet, self-deprecating Charlie does.
But, with a nod to whoever dealt with the fat suit and prosthetics, Fraser’s performance is genuinely stupendous. He’s the favorite to win the Best Actor Oscar, and I can understand why.
It’s less easy to understand why M. Night Shyamalan thought that Knock At The Cabin, an adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin At The End Of The World, a much better title, would be worth his time or us.
It’s pretty well written and acted, but it’s a really silly story about a gay couple and their adopted daughter. Pictured: The home invaders at Knock at the Cabin
It’s fairly well written and acted, but it’s a truly absurd story about a gay couple and their adopted daughter whose vacation home deep in the Pennyslvania woods is invaded by a curiously polite, modern incarnation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Led by a kind teacher (Dave Bautista) and also featuring Rupert Grint as a grumpy gas fitter (with a lot to be grumpy about), this oddball foursome must convince the family that they should start sacrificing a few to others if they want to save. the planet of imminent death.
It’s really not clear why they’ve been chosen out of 7.8 billion people in the world, and I’m afraid the film is another flop from Shyamalan, who never came close to matching his 1999 masterpiece The Sixth Sense.
In this film he has given himself a Hitchcock-esque cameo, selling fried chicken on TV. . . but maybe he should have chosen turkey instead of him.
Antonio Banderas leads a heavyweight voice cast in DreamWorks Animation’s wildly enjoyable, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (PG, 102 minutes, 4/5).
A sequel to the 2011 film Puss in Boots, itself a spin-off of the Shrek films, it features Florence Pugh as the voice of Goldilocks, with Olivia Colman and Ray Winstone as Mama and Papa Bear. .
As you may have guessed, Joel Crawford’s film, like the original, features an eclectic mix of characters from legends and fairy tales: Jack Horner (John Mulaney) is an obese, hunchbacked villain, and there are cameos from Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, Excalibur and the big bad wolf.
Antonio Banderas leads a heavyweight voice cast in DreamWorks Animation’s wildly enjoyable Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
It’s clever and beautifully animated, though keep in mind that younger children may want to hide under the seat when the wolf shows up.
Gato (brilliantly voiced by Banderas) is a spunky Zorro-esque hero, fearless until the wolf messes things up by pointing out that he’s used up eight of his nine lives.
If he can find the elusive Wishing Star together with his old love Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), Puss can get all eight of his lives back. But everyone else is looking for the Wishing Star too, including, for more nefarious reasons, the monstrous Jack Horner and the Goldilocks and Three Bears crime family. It is made with a lot of imagination.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is already in theaters.
From Matilda’s mom to Texas trash, Andrea is the real deal
To Leslie (15, 119 minutes)
Verdict: Little Movie, Great Acting
Qualification: ***
As in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (see below), there’s something of a fairy tale ending to To Leslie, but it’s preceded by much bleakness, as the title character (Andrea Riseborough) staggers, broke and homeless, living through a miserable, alcohol-soaked existence six years after winning the Texas lottery.
This low-budget film, a feature debut from British director Michael Morris, has been enjoying some mostly welcome attention, after Riseborough (pictured) unexpectedly garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
There’s something of a fairy tale ending to To Leslie, but much desolation precedes it, as the title character (Andrea Riseborough) is reeling, broke, and homeless.
I say ‘mostly’ because there are some who cry, not to mention the racism (African-American actress Danielle Deadwyler, brilliant in Till, was overlooked), but there’s no doubt it’s a praiseworthy performance, at the heart of a Patsy. Cline could have ever voiced it in a song.
Riseborough (a Tynesider, note) was last seen hilariously making her way through the film Matilda, and she proves her impressive versatility by totally convincing as a Texan drifter, stealing her teenage son and looking beyond belief. redemption before returning to his hometown and, with the support of a good man, putting his life back together.
To Leslie is available on Apple+ TV and Amazon Prime Video.