A feast of a performance
Ta´ r (M)
Lydia Ta´r has ruthlessly climbed to the top of the orchestral pile, but her past might be catching up.
— Jeremy Quinn
Babylon (R18)
Damien Chazelle’s epic threehour tale of bacchanalian excess in 1920s Hollywood. — Jeremy Quinn
My Old School (E)
Brandon Lee began attending Bearsden Academy, near Glasgow, in 1993, impressing all and sundry. But maybe all was not as it seemed.
— Jeremy Quinn
THE WHALE
Director: Darren Aronofsky Cast: Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, Sadie Sink, Samantha Morton
Rating: (M) ★★★
Darren Aronofsky is probably best known for directing Black Swan and has a reputation for exacting artistic standards. However, I found the direction here so clumsy and dull I began to wonder whether The Whale (Rialto and Reading) was the work of a firsttime filmmaker who was a little out of their depth.
Possibly, the decision to film something that was originally a play with the stage directions seemingly unchanged has some very sound reasoning behind it, but I doubt that ensuring the audience was aware of the source material was the sum of his intentions.
Playing the title role of a reclusive teacher eating his way to death, Brendan Fraser has been cleaning up at the awards shows and justifiably so. He is the beating heart of something that is constantly teetering towards melodrama and it is only the sweetness of his performance that keeps it bearable.
Charlie is full of selfloathing. His best friend Liz (Hong Chau) is a nurse and she provides medical assistance, but she also enables his terrible eating habits.
They have a complicated back story, which is the most interesting subplot, possibly because Chau is the only other actor to match Fraser.
There is also a lacklustre storyline about Charlie’s attempts to reengage with the daughter he lost when he left his marriage for the love of his life, and an even more unlikely subplot, which involves shoehorning a young missionary from the local megachurch into Charlie’s life, none of which rings particularly true.