Venice Review: Brendan Fraser In Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Whale’
deadline.comWho would have thought that, of all the top-shelf auteurs in Venice’s big comeback year, the most constrained would be Darren Aronofsky?
His new competition film The Whale opens with that very intent — the screen is cropped to 1:33 — which turns out to be most appropriate for a small and intimate movie about a very big man.
Aronofsky first staked his claim at the festival with The Fountain in 2006, but it was the double whammy of The Wrestler and Black Swan (in 2008 and 2010, respectively) that pretty much established Venice as an Oscar launching pad, just when the festival faced a war on two fronts with Telluride and Toronto.
After his spell in the self-indulgent wilderness with Noah and Mother!, however, The Whale suggests the director is very much back as that Oscar bellwether, cutting the line to put a never-better Brendan Fraser at the front of the Best Actor race.If you didn’t know that The Whale was based on a play, you’d work it out pretty quickly, not from the staging — everything happens in a dingy sitting room — but because of the arch, mannered dialogue and a schematic framing device that involves Charlie’s (Fraser) obsession with a student’s essay about Melville’s Moby-Dick.
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