The Whale Review (2022) – A heartbreaking, and beautiful story about redemption, hope and love!

This month is the coming of Spring! In honor of spring, we will be focusing on stories of hope, renewal, redemption and growth. Our first movie of the month is an exceptionally new one! It just recently wrapped up in theaters and finally became available to us potatoes online. We have been eager to watch this film and after viewing it felt it was perfect for this month’s theme. The movie is called, The Whale!

This movie is the epitome of the concept “hurts so good.” It is so painful, and heartbreaking but also beautiful, compassionate, and so well done that it is honestly difficult to describe all of the feelings that this movie evokes.

We also really love that the film gives us more representation and diversity. It is a truly wonderful film, but it is not an easy one to watch. We want to give a few trigger warnings, there is discussion of suicide, depression, LGBTQ+ discrimination, fat phobia, religious trauma, toxic family relationships, and more.

It is hard to imagine a movie containing all of these things would still be enjoyable…but trust us it is a gorgeous film and we could not recommend this film more!

We will do everything we can to not give too many spoilers in this review but there are likely to be some, so please take that into consideration and read cautiously.

Let us begin!

The movie starts with a short scene of a bus on a lone highway dropping off an unknown individual with a roller suitcase. From there we cut to a scene of a virtual classroom with the voice of our main character Charlie (Brendan Fraser), teaching and discussing English essays.

The camera pulls in on the black screen of the teacher and we hear Charlie say, “Yes, the camera on my laptop still doesn’t work.”

We quickly have the understanding that Charlie is ashamed of something because he does not want to be seen.

The next scene is a bit graphic, we cut to Charlie having a…personal moment with himself while watching some explicit man on man imagery. This is also when we get our first real look at Charlie and his home.

His home is dark, cluttered, and messy. It has a dismal feeling to it that reeks of devastation. We here have a thorough education on depression and feel so much empathy for Charlie. Grief and depression are so difficult. They can be all consuming and can easily take over your life.

During his personal moment, Charlie ends up struggling to breathe and gasping in pain. A young man named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) happens to come to his front door and opens it because he hears Charlie in pain.

Thomas, just by his dress alone, is very clearly doing some kind of religious missionary work, which definitely made us potatoes uncomfortable. We here think that it is incredibly disrespectful and rude to push religion onto other people. Any religion. We feel that religion and spirituality is a deeply personal and private matter. But we digress!

Charlie, gasping around his pain, asks Thomas to read out an essay to him about the book Moby Dick. Confused Thomas reads it. It calms Charlie enough for him to be able to catch his breath and manage his pain. Charlie thanks Thomas but it is clear that this is only temporary relief and Thomas tries to insist upon a hospital visit.

Charlie refuses to go to the hospital but agrees to call his nurse Liz (Hong Chau). He manages to get a hold of Liz and she comes over to check his heart rate, blood pressure, etc. She asks him some questions about his overall health and it becomes even clearer that he is insanely sick.

We feel so much for Charlie. His discomfort and pain are evident and he can’t seem to stop apologizing. He is not just apologizing for any inconvenience he may be causing…he is apologizing for existing. This hit us close to home and broke our hearts.

Charlie is a gentle and sweet person who does not deserve to feel like his very existence is a burden. We wished we could take away his pain.

After completing her examination on him, Liz starts straightening up the house and Thomas turns to leave. It is here that we learn that Thomas is part of a church called New Life. We also learn that Liz’s family is heavily involved in New Life and she cannot stand the church in any capacity. We potatoes do not blame her one bit for this.

She tells Thomas to go and not to bother Charlie with his religion because New Life has caused nothing but pain and death in Charlie’s life. Specifically the death of his treasured, wonderful and beloved boyfriend, Alan.

This did not surprise us potatoes at all but it made our hearts hurt so much. Charlie and his boyfriend Alan deserved nothing less than a long and happy life together.

Liz continues to try to convince Charlie that he needs to go to the hospital but Charlie is insistent that he will not go. He apologizes and Liz drops the bomb... He has congestive heart failure. He does not have very long to live if he does not go to the hospital.

Thomas is still there…for some reason. Hanging around inappropriately which also felt very real to us as well as incredibly icky, creepy and invasive…but Liz finally manages to get Thomas to leave.

Liz is upset and frustrated but the sisterly love she has for Charlie is palpable. She sits with him on the couch for a moment before he quietly says, “Please…Liz, please.” She gets up haltingly and comes back to the couch with a bucket of KFC chicken.

They sit together on the couch, Liz leaning on his arm, while Charlie eats, the lighting and camera catching the grease on Charlies face.

Later Charlie wakes up, Liz has left and Charlie is alone in the dark, on the couch. He gets up to go to bed reciting the Moby Dick essay from earlier. This particular essay touches him and means a great deal to him.

It is also a bit on the nose, but there are not many subtleties in this film so we will overlook it.

We see the constraints he has more fully as he is heading into his bedroom and lowers himself with a chain hanging from the roof into his bed. He shuts out the light and repeats one line from the essay twice, whispering into the darkness, “This book made me think about my own life.”

The next day, Charlie is enjoying a bowl of cereal in his kitchen and reviewing some essays from his students. Wondering what precisely is going on with his health…he takes to google to research his prognosis.

It is not looking good. His prognosis is grim to say the least. Upset, he grabs the candy bars from a side drawer and starts eating. Disgusted he slams the candy bars back into the drawer.

He takes a shower and he sets out fresh food for his bird friends outside. Charlie is such a sweet person. He is not a perfect person, but no one is.

There is a knock on the door…a redheaded teenage girl walks into the house. Charlie is pleased to see her, but she is hostile, rude, enormously angry and resentful. She is his daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink).

We are amazed at how patient Charlie is with her. She is so filled with rage that everything she says is practically saturated in it. Understandably so, but it is relatively jarring.

Ellie is unimpressed and enraged with him on every level because he left her and her mom to be with Alan when she was a small child.

While we understand how devastating that must have been for a small child, and we understand that she is a teenager…we found Ellie to be a hard character to relate to.

Not because we do not understand her pain but because she so clearly cannot see or simply does not care to see Charlie’s pain. This made us feel sad for her and Charlie. Charlie should have been more involved in her life despite having left and now that he is terminally ill he is trying to reconnect.

Comprehensible, but there is such a thing as too little too late, which is how Ellie feels. Ellie just wants to leave, but Charlie offers to pay her to stay. Not a small sum either! All the money he has in the bank!

Angry, frustrated and unsure after hearing his proposal she storms to the front door to leave. Ellie then spins around and demands that Charlie walk to her without the help of his walker. He gives it a strong attempt, but only manages to breaks his side table and fall back onto the couch. Ellie storms off leaving him gasping for breath on his living room couch.

The film progresses with Charlie trying to cultivate a better relationship with his daughter, while getting sicker and sicker. Thomas still insists on coming around and is occasionally helpful, but for the most part he is rude, and obnoxious.

Liz loves him deeply and does her best to try to protect him, but there is only so much she can do and we learn more about how her relationship with Charlie came to be.

Ellie is furious with Charlie and struggles with connecting with him. She comes across as a difficult teen but it is all so much more complicated than that.

Charlie is a gentle, sweet, and kind person who struggles greatly with grief, depression, religious trauma, and so much more. Yet he still has faith in humanity and is incredibly patient. The movie’s ending is heartbreaking, beautiful, and hopeful all at the same time.

We do not want to give too much more of the movie away. We like to try to give a very solid picture of a film and introduce the most important characters. This is an amazing film that we think everyone should see.

Again, this movie is not an easy watch, but it is worth it. The acting is superb, the cinematography perfection, and the choice to keep the picture in letterbox was odd at first, but once you get into the movie you understand completely. The letterbox picture gives the audience an impression of just how small Charlie’s world is. It gave the feeling that he is imprisoned in his own home.

Everything about this film feels very deliberate and purposeful. You can tell that so much time went into every single detail, which was very impressive to us potatoes.

The picture touched us so much that we cried several times. The family dynamics are painful and unhappy. It saddens us deeply that Charlie felt that in order to have a new life with his true love, he had to completely demolish his old one…his relationship with his daughter with it.

It is such a beautifully devastating movie. Charlie is such an amazing person, and he is always talking about how amazing and great others are. He cannot see what a wonderful person he is and how much he deserves his own love and compassion.

This hit us potatoes hard… we are extremely familiar with seeing the beauty in others but not ourselves. Mental health is so important yet it is not treated with the importance that it desperately needs to be treated with. Charlie would have benefited a lot from mental health care, but because it is not given the respect it deserves by our society, it is out of reach not just for Charlie but for many.

Mental health is not given the attention it needs from insurance companies, media treats it like a joke, we are taught that to ask for help or to need help is to be a burden on others which is not true, and society, oh society, well it is still lagging behind in too many ways to even count, and wonderful people like Charlie…they get left behind.

We want to encourage anyone and everyone to seek out mental health care if they can. It is so vital to our overall well-being, so even if you do not feel like you have serious trauma, mental illness, etc. therapy is still massively beneficial. No one goes through life unscathed. We all deserve love, acceptance, and grace especially from ourselves.

We feel that if Charlie had access to, sought out and acquired the mental health care he needed when he needed it. Then maybe things could have been different for Charlie.

Our main and only complaint about the movie, is that the film could be too grotesque at times. It has a lot of compassion for Charlie, but we felt that they went too far to make Charlie look gross. Which we did not feel was kind, necessary or even realistic.

Just because someone may struggle with their weight, does not mean that they are gross in any way…but that seems to be a thing throughout the whole film. We did not love this as it is rather stigmatizing. But! Oddly, despite that, this is still an absolutely wonderful film.

Writing a drinking game for this movie was tough. We were not sure if it was really appropriate for this film! But we decided that if you play the game to honor Charlie’s hardships and grief. Then the game hits well.

If you are someone who enjoys tearjerkers, emotional and deeply moving films that make you think about life then this is the movie for you!

We give this movie…5 Rum and Cola’s out of 5!

The Whale Drinking Game

Take a sip anytime:

1.     The Moby Dick essay is read aloud or quoted

2.     Anyone is yelling or raising their voice

3.     Charlie apologizes

4.     Thomas says "God"

5.     Thomas doesn't listen

6.     New life is mentioned

7.     Anyone mentions Alan

8.     Ellie says something outrageous or mean

9.     Liz takes care of Charlie

10.  The pizza delivery man talks to Charlie

11.  You tear up, cry, or feel for Charlie

What did you think?? Did you like the movie? Did you hate it!? Do you have suggestions for films we should consider?! Let us know here in the comments and always remember to be safe and drink responsibly!