“ ‘The Whale’ is laughably earnest,” Anthony Lane writes. “The film presents us with obesity as tragedy, and as a preventable scourge inflicted on the hero by a hostile and traumatizing world.”
Few actors have done more to promote the power of innocence than Brendan Fraser. Go back to the first wave of his fame, and to the gag that ran through his drollest roles. In “Encino Man” , he was an early human, frozen solid during an ice age, defrosted by high-school kids, and invited to party down. In “George of the Jungle” , he was a Tarzanesque vine-swinger let loose in San Francisco.
“The Whale” is laughably earnest, larded with melodrama, and designed to shut down the long-standing association of human bulk with high spirits. Forget the tumid wit of Falstaff—“that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts,” as Prince Hal calls him—or the sinister bonhomie of Sydney Greenstreet. The film presents us with obesity as tragedy, and as a preventable scourge inflicted on the hero by a hostile and traumatizing world.
How to respond to this? Well, readers of Collodi will warm to the blend of fatalism and hope—“When the dead cry, it means they’re on the way to recovering,” as a crow says in the book. And parents will ask themselves if it wassuch a good idea to drag their youngest offspring to the new movie, and what the chances will be, come evening, of getting them to sleep.
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