Review: 'The Whale,' Brendan Fraser's comeback movie, has good performances in an atrocious story

There are few things more depressing to a movie critic that watching good performers trying to hack their way through a garbage screenplay — which is the fate assigned to Brendan Fraser and the supporting performers in director Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” an insufferable wallow of one character’s self-loathing.

Fraser, in what’s been positioned as his comeback role and a likely Oscar win, plays Charlie, a community college English instructor who conducts his classes virtually — and always telling his students his laptop camera is busted. The truth is something different: Charlie weighs around 600 pounds, and doesn’t want his students to see him in his bloated condition.

Aronofsky — who has depicted heroin addiction in “Requiem for a Dream,” madness in “Black Swan,” and Biblical catastrophe in “Noah” and “mother!” — isn’t so shy about showing Charlie as he is. Or, more rather, how Fraser portrays Charlie through movement and a prosthetic fat suit. He gets around his Idaho apartment with a walker, he picks things off the floor with a grabber stick, and he strains to wash himself in the shower.

Charlie has been told by his nurse, and only friend, Liz (Hong Chau), that he has congestive heart failure, and will die within days if he doesn’t do something. But Charlie — like Nicolas Cage’s alcoholic character in “Leaving Las Vegas” — seems to be ready to die. His eating habits, which include double-stacking his pizza slices and shotgunning a meatball sub, indicate that he is not-so-slowly killing himself with food.

Two other visitors to Charlie’s apartment may persuade him whether to stick around. One is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary from the nearby evangelical megachurch — whose pastor happens to be Liz’s adoptive father, and the father of Charlie’s now-departed boyfriend. The other is Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie’s estranged and super-angry teen daughter, who wants nothing out of Charlie except some term-paper advice so she can graduate from high school and escape this town.

Unfortunately, for all the powerhouse acting from Fraser, Chau and Sink (a veteran of both “Stranger Things” and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” short film), it’s in service to a cliche-ridden script by Samuel D. Hunter, who adapted it from his own play. The script feels like a play, both because the action is confined to Charlie’s apartment, and because the emotions are being thrown to the upper balcony.

Fraser’s performance does nail the mannerisms, the slowness of movement and gravity-pulling defeat of Charlie’s morbidly obese character — with a touch of melancholy about how he got this way. His performance in “The Whale” deserves to be talked about in the annual award conversation, even if the movie doesn’t.

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‘The Whale’

★★

Opens Wednesday, December 21, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content. Running time: 117 minutes.