Perspective: Brendan Fraser’s comeback says less about him than it says about us
Fraser plays a very big man in a little movie called “The Whale,” which opens in theaters Dec. 9. When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, the actor received an eight-minute standing ovation that left him and the audience in tears. Best actor trophy talk immediately ensued, and three months later he’s still the bookmaker’s choice, in part because no one outside festival audiences has seen “The Whale” and in part because everyone seems happy to have Brendan Fraser back.
Regarding that specific interview, what had happened was the actor’s mother had died the previous week. More pertinent to his career, his role as a villainous prison guard in the third season of “The Affair” introduced a new Brendan Fraser: heavier in body and in spirit, wiser to the world’s disappointments and much less nice than before. No longer a leading man but one of those fringe benefits you look forward to running into halfway down a movie’s cast list.
The new movie partakes of that same sense of damage, regret and reconciliation. Based on a 2016 play by Samuel D. Hunter and directed with few frills by maverick filmmaker Darren Aronofsky , “The Whale” is about a 600-pound man named Charlie who never leaves his apartment, teaching high school English by Zoom — not surprisingly, Melville’s “Moby Dick” is on the curriculum — and trying to make amends to an angry teenage daughter while binge-eating his way toward coronary failure.
Perhaps the first movie star comeback was Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard” — the first only because Hollywood hadn’t been around long enough in 1950 for film actors to even have a second act. Billy Wilder’s acid-etched Beverly Hills freak show depicted the titans of the Silent Era as egotistical monsters playing to a camera that had long ago stopped rolling, and Swanson’s fearless performance changed her image from a has-been drama queen to a genuinely talented diva.
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