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.

Review: Historical mystery 'The Pale Blue Eye' is awash in melancholy, but in need of more tension

A brooding melancholy hangs over the historical murder mystery “The Pale Blue Eye,” and there’s nothing writer-director Scott Cooper can do to break through the fog and deliver something other than a somber, pedestrian costume drama.

The setting is New York’s Hudson Valley in 1830 — specifically, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. One dark night, a cadet is found hanging from a tree. The death could be counted as a suicide, another casualty of the rigors of cadet training, except for one thing: The next day, the officers discover the heart has been surgically removed from the dead cadet’s body.

The superintendent, Col Thayer — who was a real person (and is played here with cartoonish gruffness by Timothy Spall) — summons a nearby civilian, a retired New York City detective named Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to investigate the case. Landor consults with the academy’s physician, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), about the method of the cadet’s death and dissection, but has trouble getting much from the cadets.

The one cadet not committed to the code of silence is an oddball student, who volunteers his opinion to Landor that the killer must be a poet — which this cadet should know, since he’s a poet himself. The cadet introduces himself as Edgar A. Poe. Yes, that Edgar Allan Poe, the future writer of “The Raven” and other macabre tales. (Poe is played by Harry Melling, who has developed since his days as the bratty Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” films.)

Encouraged by Landor, Poe talks his way into a group of cadets with an interest in the supernatural. This group includes Dr. Marquis’ son, Artemus (Harry Lawtey), who invites Poe to dinner with the family, including Dr. Marquis’ wife Julia (Gillian Anderson) and their fragile daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) — on whom Poe develops a strong attraction, which irks another cadet, Ballinger (Fred Hechinger).

That’s a lot of characters, era setting and plot development, and Cooper (“Antlers,” “Hostiles,” “Out of the Furnace”), in adapting Louis Bayard’s novel doesn’t take shortcuts — though there are moments when a viewer might believe he should. The dramatic tension is bogged down in overly long exposition and oppressive camerawork.

It’s good that the movie doesn’t scrimp on space for Bale to give a lived-in, haunted performance as Landor, a man battling his demons and beset by memories of his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson). Her absence is unexplained (to us), but has left a hole in Landor’s heart.

Melling’s performance as Poe seems cut from a different movie than what Bale is working. Rabbity and given great swaths of dialogue to deliver, Melling’s portrayal takes Poe’s eccentricities as a given, rather than treating his short West Point stint as the origin story a character like this needs.

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 23, in some theaters; starts streaming January 6 on Netflix. Rated R for some violent content and bloody images. Running time: 128 minutes.

Review: 'Babylon,' Damien Chazelle's massive story of old Hollywood, is an epic of excess with flashes of brilliance

It seems clear while watching “Babylon” that no one — an actor, a producer, a studio executive — gave writer-director Damien Chazelle a note to “pull it back a little.” Or, if they did, he never took their advice.

Everything in “Babylon” is bigger, bolder, brassier, more explicit and more open-hearted than any previous movie about the early days of Hollywood. All the sex, all the drugs, all the sexism, racism, and a few other -isms are here, in glorious Technicolor — even if they weren’t all there yet in the silent black-and-white movies the characters are making in between parties that make Sodom and Gomorrah look like an ice-cream social.

Chazelle’s story starts with Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican-born lackey for studio chief Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), trying to get an elephant up the hill to the boss’s mansion — where a serious bacchanalia is about to start. Chazelle even maneuvers for the elephant to defecate, quite prodigiously, onto a truck driver (and the camera), practically setting up the old joke about the kid shoveling crap in the circus, who responds to the suggestion of quitting with “What? And give up show business?”

Many of the movie’s key players are at this party — if you can pay attention for all the dancing, debauchery, and people having sex in the dim corners of the room. Jazzman Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is leading the band. Gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) is taking notes and taking compliments from up-and-comers wanting to advance their careers with a mention in her articles. Heartthrob star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) arrives fashionably late, arguing with his latest wife (Olivia Wilde, who doesn’t hang around long).

Manny meets a party crasher, who calls herself Nellie LaRoy — and played by Margot Robbie, who commands attention from partygoers and the movie’s audience with her in-your-face sexuality. She and Manny find the party’s drug room, and Nellie soon is dancing with abandon on the party floor. When Manny’s boss, Bob Levine (Flea), is trying to move an overdosed actress out of the mansion unnoticed, he tells Nellie to be on the set in the morning in her place.

Nellie shows up and discovers a world of glorious chaos. Chazelle’s staging of the open-air craziness of a silent-era film production — with half-a-dozen movies shooting simultaneously, using the sun as a floodlight, and the noise not affecting the films at all. Nellie is paired as the bad girl against a virtuous ingenue (Samara Weaving), and the director (Olivia Hamilton, who’s also Mrs. Chazelle) captures Nellie’s irrepressible sex appeal. Suddenly, a star is born.

Meanwhile, Manny is trying to rescue Jack Conrad’s epic, after the horses trampled all 10 cameras and the light is disappearing. Manny’s resourcefulness saves the day, and his rise as a studio executive begins.

More parties, more movies, and more crazy moments with our main characters are in store. Then, at a certain point, a bombshell hits Hollywood that threatens to upend all of their lives: The talkies.

Suddenly, Manny’s Kinescope Pictures (the front gate is the classic Paramount entrance) is having to retool, building massive soundstages, turning fluid action into stilted drama, and finding out which actors have voices that match their faces. (Yes, this was all covered in “Singin’ in the Rain” back in 1952, and Chazelle knows it. In fact, he goes out of his way to show us all that he knows it.)

The question as the three hours of “Babylon” unspools — to use an antiquated reference to film on reels — is whether the manufactured mythology Chazelle constructs with these fictional movie stars is ever enough to supplant the real thing. Chazelle name-drops real stars, like Gloria Swanson, and even plugs in wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), mogul William Randolph Hearst (Pat Skipper) and actress Marion Davies (Chloe Fineman) in smaller roles. But often they’re reminders that the real stories are more compelling than the fake ones.

Some of the moments Chazelle stages feel like strangeness for shock value — such as the bit with Nellie’s manager father (Eric Roberts) and a rattlesnake, or Manny’s descent into the den of a giggling crime boss (Tobey Maguire, seemingly channeling Jim Parsons). Other characters, like the Chinese cabaret singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), suggest another, more nuanced, movie happening in the next room.

Chazelle knows star power, and he gets maximum mileage out of Pitt and Robbie as the twin pillars of his sprawling narrative — the aging lothario who recognizes that the jig is up, and the sexpot whose rise is matched by her decline. Both performances are show-stoppers — which, unfortunately, means that Chazelle has to start the show up again.

“Babylon” is a deeply flawed movie, and its excesses often outshine its moments of stunning brilliance. There’s a masterpiece in here somewhere, if one can shovel through all the elephant dung.

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‘Babylon’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, blood violence, drug use, and pervasive language. Running time: 188 minutes.

Review: With 'Avatar: The Way of Water,' director James Cameron is back delivering the spectacle and visual fireworks

More so than any of his previous films, “Avatar: The Way of Water” — the 13-years-in-the-making sequel to the mega-successful partly computer-generated adventure “Avatar” — is very much a James Cameron movie.

That means — as “Avatar,” “Titanic,” “The Abyss” and “True Lies” have done before — that the visuals are incredible, and the story not so much. And that’s OK.

Cameron starts with a quick refresher for those whose memories don’t recall a movie you saw in 2009: Jake Sully (performed by Sam Worthington), a paralyzed Marine sent to the planet Pandora and plugged into the artificial body of one of the 10-foot-tall Na’vi people who live there, became fully part of the Navi at the end of the last movie. 

Now, Jake is a clan leader of the Na’vi in the jungle, and he and his wife, Neytiri (performed by Zoe Saldaña), have four kids — one of them the adopted teen Kiri, who shares some genes with Dr. Grace Augustine, a human who died in the first film. (Kiri, like Grace, is performed by Sigourney Weaver.)

There are those, though, who haven’t forgotten how Jake left the human colony behind to become one with the Na’vi. Some of them have become “recombinants,” lab-grown Na’vi with the embedded memories of humans. Leading this group is a new version of Col. Miles Quaritch, the hard-nosed Marine who got killed at the end of the first movie. The new Quaritch (performed, like his human character, by Stephen Lang) has two goals: Finishing the human colonization of Pandora, and taking revenge on Jake and Neytiri.

Learning that Quaritch and his platoon are out for him, Jake and his family — older brother Neteyam (performed by Jamie Flatters), younger son Lo’ak (performed by Britain Dalton), 8-year-old daughter Tuktirey, or “Tuk” for short (performed by Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), and Kiri — go on the run, aided by a human teen, Miles “Spider” Socorro (Jack Champion), who feels more at home with the Na’vi than with humans. 

The family ends up with the Metkayina, the ocean-diving cousins of the Na’vi, who are initially wary but give them shelter. They are led by their chief, Tonowari (performed by Cliff Curtis), and his wife, Ronal (performed by Kate Winslet.) Their teen children befriend Jake’s kids, and teach them about life in the ocean: Swimming, diving, and bonding with the animals who are native to the water. 

Kiri, in particular, seems most at home here, developing a spiritual bond with the sea creatures. (Kiri’s old-soul personality makes it slightly less weird to hear the 73-year-old Weaver’s voice coming out of the mouth of a teen-ager.) Meanwhile, Lo’ak befriends a rogue Tulkun, something like a whale — and which are hunted down in much the same way.

These passages are the most thrilling, and visually spectacular, in the movie. Using whatever alchemy of motion-capture performance, computer-generated animated animals, and the occasional flesh-and-blood actor, Cameron conjures a world with such beauty and majesty that it’s impossible not to get drawn into it.

Sometimes, though, the visuals work against Cameron’s intent. There’s an elaborate action sequence, about midway through the movie’s three-hour-plus running time, where a whaling ship (there’s really no other way to describe it) goes after a pod of Tulkun with depth charges, guns and harpoons. Cameron, who spent much of his non-filmmaking time in the last 13 years exploring the seas, eagerly and earnestly uses this movie to present a message of caring for our oceans — but staging an exciting high-tech variation on “Moby Dick” is muddling that message a lot.

Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (who all share story credit with Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno), when they can’t think of anything else, recycle Cameron’s greatest hits. Some of the diving sequences are reminiscent of “The Abyss,” and there’s a prolonged sequence on a whaling ship that replays the tilting decks and underwater peril of “Titanic.”

Of course, there will be a thousand film-nerd arguments about Cameron’s use of high-frame rates in some sequences, or his insistence on bringing back 3D (something I didn’t particularly miss when we were avoiding the glasses because of COVID), or the fact that he’s promised two more of these movies, slated for 2024 and 2026 — though when Cameron’s involved, who knows for sure?

Stuff all of those quibbles out of the way for now. The truth is that nobody creates spectacle like Cameron, and he makes plenty of it in “Avatar: The Way of Water.” And isn’t why we go to the movies in the first place?

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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language. Running time: 193 minutes.

Review: 'White Noise' is a quietly devastating portrait of a family caught in a consumerist nightmare

It may take a second, or even third, viewing to nail down exactly what writer-director Noah Baumbach is doing in “White Noise,” but whatever it is in this story of fracturing institutions — in the family, in academia, in society — it’s working.

Adapting Don DeLillo’s acclaimed novel, Baumbach introduces us to the Gladney family: The father, Jack (Adam Driver); the mother, Babette (Greta Gerwig); and their children, Denise (Raffey Cassidy), Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and Wilder (Henry Moore). It’s the early ‘80s, when the opening of a new A&P supermarket is a huge deal in a college town.

Jack is a professor at the college in this town, delivering lectures that intersect popular culture and the formal structure of storytelling intersect with his chosen field of study: Adolf Hitler. His colleagues, like his buddy Murray (Don Cheadle), treat him as big man on campus, while his students adore him.

In Act II, something happens that upends the natural order of this town’s life. A freight train derails in a fiery crash that releases dangerous chemicals skyward — in what’s referred to as “the airborne toxic event.”

The town is evacuated, and the Gladney family tries to hang together through the fear and chaos going on around them.

In Act III, the toxic event is over and people move back into their homes. But something has irrevocably changed. Uncertainty and paranoia are everywhere — and nowhere more pronounced than in Babette, who is sneaking doses of a mysterious pharmaceutical, called Dylar, when she thinks no one is looking. But Denise, the product of Jack’s first marriage, is looking. 

Baumbach has taken DeLillo’s story — the first time he’s written and directed an adaptation (unless you count co-writing the script for Wes Anderson’s animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) — and dug into the dark heart of American consumerism and excess in the Reagan years. The candy-colored production design, by Jess Gonchor, dances around the Gladneys in the supermarket aisles, with products meant to improve our lives but instead making them more complicated.

“My life is either/or,” Babette confesses to Jack one night. “Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps. … I hope it lasts forever.”

Gerwig’s performance is a marvel, depicting Babette as an energized ball of anxiety, her hope overwhelmed by her doubts. She’s nicely matched by Driver, a master of his universe who is faced with the frightening prospect that the uncaring world is bigger than that universe.

“White Noise” is set to stream on Netflix after a theatrical run, but there’s nothing Netflix-and-chill about it. It’s a movie that challenges the viewer’s assumptions that things will go where you think they do. Baumbach means to provoke, to agitate the audience into thinking about our consumer culture and whether it’s making us as happy as the advertising promises.

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‘White Noise’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters; starts streaming December 30 on Netflix. Rated R for brief violence and language. Running time: 136 minutes.

Review: 'Spoiler Alert' is a heartfelt and tear-producing romance about love, grief and cancer

If “Bros” was supposed to be the pioneering raunchy relationship comedy for the LGBTQ+ community, then director Michael Showalter’s “Spoiler Alert” does the same for the poignant romantic drama — with a great deal of help from its charming stars, Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge.

In the first shot of the movie, we see those actors lying on a hospital bed. Aldridge’s character, Kit Cowan, is clearly sick and about to die. Parsons’ character, Michael Ausiello, is with him for those final moments. 

What follows takes us back to the beginning of Michael and Kit’s relationship, as told by Michael. The movie is based on Ausiello’s memoir, “Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies,” which tells you exactly what that opening scene was about — and what the rest of the movie will capture.

Michael, a journalist writing about television for TV Guide, is goaded into going to a gay bar to flirt with the guys there. That’s where he meets Kit, a photographer. Flirting commences, when Kit tells Michael, “You’re a good dancer,” and Michael replies, “You’re a terrible liar.”

The script — by actor and “A Million Little Things” writer David Marshall Grant and activist and sex columnist Dan Savage — follows the steps of Michael and Kit’s relationship. There’s the awkward first time going to Michael’s apartment, which has an alarming amount of Smurf memorabilia in it. There’s the even more awkward moment when Kit has to tell his parents, Marilyn (Sally Field) and Bob (Bill Irwin), that he’s gay and that Michael is his boyfriend. (After the initial surprise, Marilyn and Bob take the news quite well.) And there’s when Michael and Kit buy a house together — and, years later, go to couples’ therapy to save their relationship.

Then there’s the moment you knew was coming from that first scene, when they learn that Kit has colorectal cancer.

Credit Showalter, the writers and the actors for not sugar-coating this part of the story. The movie presents the struggles of a cancer patient — the chemotherapy, the depressing news from doctors, and the fear that wells up in a cancer patient’s friends and family — with tenderness and authenticity.

When the movie is dealing with Michael’s emotions, and how he’s prepping his heart for the inevitable, Showalter goes for a more allegorical approach. The movie depicts Michael’s flashbacks to childhood — and losing his mother to cancer — in the format of an ‘80s family sitcom, where young Mikey (played by Brody Caines) and his mom (Tara Summers) are the central characters. The scenes make a rough kind of sense, based on Michael’s personal identification with TV, but they can be jarring in the context of a tearjerker.

The tears do come, in large part because of the strong performances by Parsons and Aldridge, who find sensational chemistry as the mismatched couple — the nerdy Michael and the adventurous Kit — work to overcome the obstacles the universe puts in their path. The paired performances make “Spoiler Alert” a deeply effective and powerful romance.

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‘Spoiler Alert’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use and thematic elements. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'Nanny' is an emotional thriller about an undocumented worker dealing with demons from her past

Mythology and motherhood collide in “Nanny,” a gorgeously rendered and chilling psychological thriller that asks “Who’s watching the children?”

The title character is Aisha (played by Anna Diop, from DC’s “Titans”), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant who takes a job as nanny for a well-off Manhattan couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). Their little girl, Rose (Rose Decker), hits it off with Aisha immediately — Aisha’s Senegalese food is tastier than the bland stuff Amy orders from Whole Foods or wherever. But Aisha witnesses that the marriage is fractured, with Adam away covering uprisings around the world and Amy trying to get promoted in her company.

Aisha doesn’t have time to worry about her bosses’ problems, though. She’s trying to earn as much money as she can to send to Dakar, so she can bring her 6-year-old son to America. Aisha also starts up a romance with Malik (Sinqua Walls), the doorman in the family’s building.

While Aisha is occupied with thoughts of Malik and making sure Amy pays her properly, she also starts having nightmares — visions of water and evil mermaids and the spider trickster Ananzi. She tries talking these out with Malik’s grandmother Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), who’s rather attuned to the spirit world. The spirits, Kathleen says, “bless us with resilience. But the spirits’ tools are not always kind.”

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu neatly blurs the lines of reality and myth for Aisha, until she’s not entirely sure what’s up or down. Employing a rich color palette and disorienting set design for Amy and Adam’s apartment — big props to cinematographer Rina Yang and production designer Jonathan Guggenheim — Jusu makes space for Diop to take the character to the edge of madness and back.

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‘Nanny’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity. Running time: 97 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 22, 2022, when the movie screened at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Empire of Light' aims to celebrate the magic of movies, but wallows too much in their worst cliches

In contrast to recent movies that celebrate the making of movies — a broad category, encompassing the family story of “The Fabelmans” to the wretched success of the upcoming “Babylon” — director Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” celebrates the serene joy of being in the audience to watch a movie.

Too bad the movie we’re watching isn’t as magical as what Norman (Toby Jones), the philosophical projectionist, puts on the screen of the Empire, a movie house in a seaside English town. It’s 1981, and the old theater has seen better days — when the ballroom upstairs was the site of lively dances, not a nesting ground for the pigeons.

The theater’s manager, Hilary (Olivia Colman), sometimes goes upstairs to the ballroom to have a smoke and get away from the theater’s staff. She also goes up there so she doesn’t have to think about the theater’s owner, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), who makes a regular habit of shagging Hilary over his desk. Hilary is generally quiet and a little distracted — which may be the result of her current medications, which are monitored by her doctor.

Enter Stephen, played by Michael Ward, who needs a job — and gets one as a ticket-taker. He becomes quite comfortable at the Empire, a home away from home, and a refuge from the anti-Black thugs in the streets in the age of Thatcherism.

Stephen befriends Hilary, who finds in the young man a bit of the spark she once had — before she had to “go away” a few months earlier. Hilary becomes so convinced that Stephen is the spark she needs in life that she decides to stop taking her pills, and when’s the last time you saw a movie where someone goes off their meds and nothing bad happens to them?

Mendes (“Skyfall,” “1917”), who wrote and directed, stages some moments of sublime beauty, where Hilary and Stephen’s relationship creates the kind of magic only seen in movies. Unfortunately, those scenes are intercut with some of the the most hackneyed excesses of the movies — and Mendes doesn’t seem able to reconcile the two.

The performances are wonderful, even if they’re yoked to these cliche-ridden characters. Ward is a promising young actor, who carries more weight than one expects, and carries it well. Jones delivers Norman’s monologues about film as an illusion — 24 still images flashing by one’s eyes every second, tricking the eye into thinking there is movement — with gravity, but still a bemused twinkle in his eye. And Colman manages to make even Hilary’s most manic moments feel grounded in the character’s pain and loss.

“Empire of Light” is the sort of movie where it’s expected that critics will swoon at the mere mention of “the magic of the cinema.” Makers of such movies forget that we critics have seen such stories many times — and it takes more than a shared film love to bowl us over. 

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‘Empire of Light’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, language and brief violence. Running time: 119 minutes.