My personal scoring for this film is particularly arbitrary this time around because I’m having trouble contextualizing a ranking for a film that I can’t find myself sitting through again precisely because of how well it accomplishes its intent.
Films/performances done in one setting like this have been interesting to me since I read Death of a Salesman, the Glass Menagerie, and watched the play A Number. At times the single room can be used as a method to insulate and further hone in the subjects and themes of the play and help to distance what is going on in this vessel away from the reality outside(which this film has done to a powerful effect). In particular with The Whale, putting the film in a square frame, in a dark lit room with a narrow corridor at the end, made the entire experience suffocating, which I think was at least to an extent intentional, and helped make the last scene even more worthwhile.
The performances of the cast were across the board captivating to the point where I felt immersed in the story and the reality of it all. I could feel the layers of pain and suffering, yes, but also how certain thoughts and repeating practices (habits) have compounded a series of personality factors and reactions to issues and events that ultimately culminated to the premise and events of the film. I saw so many unhealthy behaviors that not even people who were trying to help were able to avoid, and while there is no simple solution to any of what was shown, I consistently felt uncomfortable, having seen similar things fold out in my life and of friends, being only a silent witness to something that could have been preventable (or at least done better between the characters). I felt this with Liz, who cares for Charlie and only thinks for the best of him but implicitly validates his behaviors and refuses outside help (shown through her outburst to Thomas). Throughout this film I felt there were so many opportunities to save Charlie’s life, and especially as the film goes on I felt that there was so much for him to continue living for, and that a flat sum of money, while significant in value, is not what Ellie wanted from her father. Her indifference to his money and last call to him as “daddy” are signs of this, if her emphasizing how he left her life were not enough to drive this point home.
The film does a great job working with time, in that by putting a “ticking time bomb”, death, that we don’t know when will go off, we cling on to every moment thinking it may be the last, where a fight or scene ends poorly where we (and Charlie, in the film) know it may be the last these characters see each other. It made me as the viewer acutely aware of every interaction and made me hypersensitive to Charlie’s reactions. I wonder if the “five days” have some sort of biblical significance. It’s been on my mind but I purposely haven’t researched any analysis on the film before I wrote this.
As for themes, I’m struggling to reach a conclusion on 1) the crow/food outside the window and 2) Thomas’s character arc. What does the food outside the window/the cracked plate symbolize? Did Thomas end up “saving” somebody after all? With the latter, I feel like on the surface, he was saved as he gets to go back to his family, and in a way Ellie is his savior. But is he really saved? Is going back to his family really the right thing for him, or will he regress back to the society he was so disenchanted with? I think this is shown well in his final outburst to Charlie, where Thomas knows he is going back home, and sheds all intent to “save” Charlie. Though maybe that burst of “honesty” is what Charlie needed. Thomas may have helped save Ellie, where he helped her unlock her empathy though she puts that into use in unorthodox ways.
Besides these more gray themes, I felt like some topics, like Charlie’s homosexuality and the money for Ellie were unnecessarily mentioned beyond the point of effectiveness, where unspoken cues and shots did enough to drive those topics home.
Going full circle to my first comment, to provide criticism to the film’s framing I felt like there were a bit too many angles from which the scenes were shot. I wanted to have few angles and fewer cuts so we the audience are further tied to and restrained with the characters in their moments. The cuts and angles I think dilute the impact of putting everything in one, suffocating vessel. Maybe the cuts and angles were necessary to prevent this film from being too overwhelming.
While not organized into a thesis or a clean essay, these are my honest thoughts. The Whale is a film of many compelling themes and performances but deals with a heavy subject (no pun intended) with a number of small flaws.
