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"The Whale" is an abhorrent film, but it also features excellent performances.

It gawks at the grotesquerie of its central figure beneath the guise of sentimentality, but it also offers sharp exchanges between its characters that ring with bracing honesty.

It's the kind of film you should probably see if only to have an informed, thoughtful discussion about it, but it's also one you probably won't want to watch.

This aligns it with Darren Aronofsky's movies in general, which can often be a challenging sit. The director is notorious for putting his actors (and his audiences) through the wringer, whether it's Jennifer Connolly's drug addict in " Requiem for a Dream ," Mickey Rourke's aging athlete in " The Wrestler ," Natalie Portman's obsessed ballerina in " Black Swan ," or Jennifer Lawrence's besieged wife in "mother!" (For the record, I'm a fan of Aronofsky's work in general.)

But the difference between those films and "The Whale" is their intent, whether it's the splendor of their artistry or the thrill of their provocation. There's a verve to those movies, an unpredictability, an undeniable daring, and a virtuoso style. They feature images you've likely never seen before or since, but they'll undoubtedly stay with you afterward.

"The Whale" may initially feel gentler, but its main point seems to be sticking the camera in front of Brendan Fraser , encased in a fat suit that makes him appear to weigh 600 pounds, and asking us to wallow in his deterioration. In theory, we are meant to pity him or at least find sympathy for his physical and psychological plight by the film's conclusion. But in reality, the overall vibe is one of morbid fascination for this mountain of a man. Here he is, knocking over an end table as he struggles to get up from the couch; there he is, cramming candy bars in his mouth as he Googles "congestive heart failure." We can tsk-tsk all we like between our mouthfuls of popcorn and Junior Mints while watching Fraser's Charlie gobble greasy fried chicken straight from the bucket or inhale a giant meatball sub with such alacrity that he nearly chokes to death. The message "The Whale" sends us home with seems to be: Thank God that's not us.

In working from Samuel D. Hunter's script, based on Hunter's stage play, Aronofsky doesn't appear to be as interested in understanding these impulses and indulgences as much as pointing and staring at them. His depiction of Charlie's isolation within his squalid Idaho apartment includes a scene of him masturbating to gay porn with such gusto that he almost has a heart attack, a moment made of equal parts shock value and shame. But then, in a jarring shift, the tone eventually turns maudlin with Charlie's increasing martyrdom.

Within the extremes of this approach, Fraser brings more warmth and humanity to the role than he's afforded on the page. We hear his voice first; Charlie is a college writing professor who teaches his students online from behind the safety of a black square. And it's such a welcoming and resonant sound, full of decency and humor. Fraser's been away for a while, but his contradictions have always made him an engaging screen presence—the contrast of his imposing physique and playful spirit. He does so much with his eyes here to give us a glimpse into Charlie's sweet but tortured soul, and the subtlety he's able to convey goes a long way toward making "The Whale" tolerable.

But he's also saddled with a screenplay that spells out every emotion in ways that are so clunky as to be groan-inducing. At Charlie's most desperate, panicky moments, he soothes himself by reading or reciting a student's beloved essay on Moby Dick , which—in part—gives the film its title and will take on increasing significance. He describes the elusive white whale of Herman Melville's novel as he stands up, shirtless, and lumbers across the living room, down the hall, and toward the bedroom with a walker. At this moment, you're meant to marvel at the elaborate makeup and prosthetic work on display; you're more likely to roll your eyes at the writing.

"He thinks his life will be better if he can just kill this whale, but in reality, it won't help him at all," he intones in a painfully obvious bit of symbolism. "This book made me think about my own life," he adds as if we couldn't figure that out for ourselves.

A few visitors interrupt the loneliness of his days, chiefly Hong Chau as his nurse and longtime friend, Liz. She's deeply caring but also no-nonsense, providing a crucial spark to these otherwise dour proceedings. Aronofsky's longtime cinematographer, the brilliant Matthew Libatique , has lit Charlie's apartment in such a relentlessly dark and dim fashion to signify his sorrow that it's oppressive. Once you realize the entirety of the film will take place within these cramped confines, it sends a shiver of dread. And the choice to tell this story in the boxy, 1.33 aspect ratio further heightens its sense of dour claustrophobia.

But then "Stranger Things" star Sadie Sink arrives as Charlie's rebellious, estranged daughter, Ellie; her mom was married to Charlie before he came out as a gay man. While their first meeting in many years is laden with exposition about the pain and awkwardness of their time apart, the two eventually settle into an interesting, prickly rapport. Sink brings immediacy and accessibility to the role of the sullen but bright teenager, and her presence, like Chau's, improves "The Whale" considerably. Her casting is also spot-on in her resemblance to Fraser, especially in her expressive eyes.

The arrival of yet another visitor—an earnest, insistent church missionary played by Ty Simpkins —feels like a total contrivance, however. Allowing him inside the apartment repeatedly makes zero sense, even within the context that Charlie believes he's dying and wants to make amends. He even says to this sweet young man: "I'm not interested in being saved." And yet, the exchanges between Sink and Simpkins provide some much-needed life and emotional truth. The subplot about their unlikely friendship feels like something from a totally different movie and a much more interesting one.

Instead, Aronofsky insists on veering between cruelty and melodrama, with Fraser stuck in the middle, a curiosity on display.

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Whale (2022)

Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content.

117 minutes

Brendan Fraser as Charlie

Sadie Sink as Ellie

Hong Chau as Liz

Ty Simpkins as Thomas

Samantha Morton as Mary

Sathya Sridharan as Dan

Darren Aronofsky

Writer (based on the play by)

Samuel D. Hunter

Cinematographer

Matthew Libatique
Andrew Weisblum
Rob Simonsen

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The Whale ending explained: Brendan Fraser breaks down Charlie and Ellie's final scene

Fraser explains his interpretation of what the last exchange between Charlie and Ellie (Sadie Sink) means for both characters: "He's liberated."

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Whale .

It's easy to get swept up in the emotions of Darren Aronofsky 's searing drama The Whale , which follows Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a reclusive, 600-pound literature professor struggling, in the last days of his life, to reconnect with the teenage daughter, Ellie ( Sadie Sink ), whom he abandoned years prior. The film's conclusion, however, might be more difficult for some viewers to read, so we asked Fraser and screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter to break down what the final scene means for Charlie's journey.

The film slowly builds to a key moment for the father-daughter pair, after Charlie spends most of the movie defending Ellie's sporadic outbursts and prickly, wounded disposition — particularly to his longtime caregiver and friend, Liz ( Hong Chau ). Charlie maintains that Ellie, like most people, has an innate capacity for empathy, and regularly heralds one of her blunt, years-old school essays criticizing the classic novel Moby Dick . He see it as a signifier of her purity, honesty, and unbridled passion. Still, Ellie remains skeptical of Charlie during most of the film's running time.

"Ellie torments him, when she cases him out the fist time she sees him," Fraser observes, noting a specific piece of blocking. "You notice that she stands behind him. She knows he can't look over his shoulder. She's torturing him a little bit. She's cross, she's angry for the sadness she feels, and that's how this 17-year-old brilliant kid comports herself. She goads him into taking to his feet, knowing well that he likely can't and that it would make him very uncomfortable to do that without even having the assistance of his walker — but she takes it from him anyway and makes him prove himself, and he can't."

That scene, Fraser says, is key to understanding the film's conclusion, which brings Ellie and Charlie together for a genuine connection, as she reads the essay aloud. Again, Charlie attempts to rise up and walk toward her. That's where things get fantastical, as Fraser calls the final sequence an act of "contrition" for Charlie, in which he's "liberated" after finally breaking through her defensive armor, reaffirming to Ellie that he sees her for the person she is — and always was.

"It's important because it's a Herculean effort that he makes to even get to his feet," Fraser says. "For him to finally break through to her, humble himself before her, and let her know that he made a mistake and is sorry for it. While his life has not physically ended in that moment, I think that he knows he doesn't need to live any longer, which is why he takes off his breather, he's got her reading the essay, and he does take to his feet like three Olympic dead-lifters, takes his baby steps to his baby, and in that beautiful two-shot, a great white light appears, and they look skyward. Depending on your belief system, spiritually or otherwise, we see that Charlie — with a touch of magic realism — finally does fly."

Screenwriter Hunter calls the run-up a "hero journey where he gets the elixir."

"He's struggling this entire film to put a mirror up to his daughter to say, 'This is who you are,' and in those final moments, that mirror is this essay," Hunter explains. "When she looks at it, she can't deny turning it in and getting a D, but then, here's her father, all these years later, being like, 'This is the best essay I've ever read.' At long last, he's the only person who sees her, and she knows it."

As for whether Hunter feels Charlie is actually walking in the final shot, he says it's open for interpretation.

"I think it's an apotheosis — you can take it how you want it," he says. "In the play, the way I wrote it is that you hear a sound of waves and they slowly intensify through that scene, so, there's a way to read it both ways. It wants to be miraculous, either literally or figuratively, and I think you can watch it either way."

You can watch and interpret for yourself: The Whale is now in theaters nationwide via A24 . See Fraser explain the movie's ending in the video above.

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‘The Whale’ Ending Explained: Brendan Fraser’s Uncomfortable Drama Ends With a Final, Cruel Tragedy

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To say The Whale is a difficult watch is the understatement of the century. The movie—which is now available to purchase on digital platforms like Amazon Prime Video —is a relentlessly uncomfortable and cruel two hours documenting the (spoiler alert!) final week of a 600-pound man, who has isolated himself from the world, and is now facing imminent death due to health issues caused by his weight.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky—the same man who brought you uncomfortable, divisive movies like Black Swan and mother! — The Whale is based on a 2012 play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter. Hunter, who also adapted the screenplay for film, based the story on his own experience with obesity in college. “I know many people who are big, happy, and healthy, but I wasn’t,” Hunter said in an interview for the films’ press notes. “I had a lot of unprocessed emotions from attending a fundamentalist Christian school where my sexuality came to bear in an ugly way, and that emerged in an unhealthy relationship with food. When I started writing The Whale, I think it all just came pouring out of me.”

Thus , The Whale features many hard-to-watch sequences of binge-eating junk food, beads of sweat rolling down Brendan Fraser’s heavily make-upped face, and Fraser struggling to move around in a squishy, rolling fat suit. If you manage to make it to the end of the film, you’ll be met with a moving but ambiguous conclusion. Don’t worry, Decider is here to help. Read on for an analysis of The Whale plot summary and ending explained, including what happens at the end of The Whale , and whether Charlie dies. Major spoilers ahead.

The Whale plot summary:

We meet Charlie (Brendan Fraser) as he is giving a virtual lecture for an online college English course. He keeps his camera off, telling his students that his webcam is broken. In reality, he is ashamed of his appearance as an obese, 600-pound man. Charlie can’t walk on his own and never leaves his house. Through the course of the film, he is visited by several recurring characters. There is Liz (Hong Chau), Charlie’s nurse friend who cares for him. Liz informs Charlie that his blood pressure is at a dangerous level, and that he needs to go to the hospital, or he will very likely die of congestive heart failure by the end of the week. Charlie refuses to go, citing the fact that he has no money and can’t afford the hospital bills. He instead decides to spend his last week of life attempted to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

Another visitor of Charlie’s is Thomas, a door-to-door missionary from an evangelical church called New Life. Thomas walks in on Charlie while he is hyperventilating and at risk of having a heart attack. Charlie thrusts an essay about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Thomas’s hands and instructs him to read it. After Charlie calms down, Thomas asks why Charlie asked him to read it. “I thought I was going to die, and I wanted to hear it one last time,” Charlie says. “It’s a really good essay.”

Charlie is also visited by his teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he hasn’t seen since she was 8 years old. Charlie, a gay man, left Ellie and her mom when Ellie was 8 because he fell in love with one of his (adult) students. Charlie tells Ellie he wanted to be part of her life, but that her mother forbade him from seeing her. Ellie is an exceptionally angry teenager and is exceedingly cruel to her father. When Charlie learns that Ellie is in danger of flunking out of high school, he offers to help her with her upcoming essay. He also offers to pay her to spend time with him—all the money he has, which is over $100,000.

brendan fraser

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Thomas the missionary returns to Charlie’s home because he believes he was sent by God at the exact right moment to help Charlie. Liz is upset by Thomas’s presence and tells him to leave Charlie alone. We learn that Liz’s brother, Alan, was Charlie’s romantic partner, as well as a member of the New Life church. Liz blames New Life for her brother’s extreme unhappiness—because he was told his sexuality went against the will of God—which eventually led to Alan jumping off a bridge and killing himself. Charlie, in his grief, began binge-eating in response.

Charlie’s health is rapidly declining. Liz brings Charlie a wheelchair to help him move around his house. Ellie once again visits Charlie and demands that he write her essay assignment. Charlie agrees. Despite how cruel Ellie is to Charlie, he insists she is an amazing person. Ellie slips Charlie sleeping pills, and while he is unconscious, Thomas the missionary once again comes to visit, and Ellie threatens to kill her father if Thomas doesn’t smoke pot with her. She snaps an incriminating photo of Thomas, and then confronts him: She knows he’s not from New Life, because she knows that New Life no longer has door-to-door missionaries.

Thomas confesses that while he used to be a missionary—after his parents sent him away to the church when they discovered him smoking pot–he grew frustrated with the church’s lack of social outreach and felt he wasn’t truly helping people. After a blow-out argument with the pastor, Thomas stole all of the church’s petty cash and left. He confesses to Ellie that he is almost out of money, but is too afraid to go home. Ellie secretly records his confession.

Liz and Ellie’s mother, Mary (Samantha Morton), show up and discover that Ellie has drugged her father. After Liz coaxes Charlie back to consciousness, she finds out that Charlie, despite his protests about hospital bills, does, in fact, have money. He’s just been saving all of it to give to Ellie. Liz is furious that Charlie has refused to buy the medical care and equipment he needs, and storms out. Ellie storms out too, telling her dad to “just fucking die already.” Charlie gives Ellie the essay she asked for before she leaves.

Charlie and Mary talk about their life and marriage. Charlie shares a memory of going to the beach with Ellie and Mary and swimming in the ocean. Mary tells Charlie one reason she kept Charlie away from Ellie is that she was afraid Ellie would hurt him. Mary says Ellie is “evil,” and shows Charlie a cruel picture of himself that Ellie posted on social media, mocking him. Charlie continues to insist that Ellie is amazing and that she’s a great writer. Mary leaves in tears, and Charlie, also in tears, tells her that he has to believe he’s done one good thing in his life, aka Ellie.

After Mary leaves, Charlie goes on a binge eating session that ends in him vomiting. He rashly posts a prompt on his students’ online message board, challenging them to write something honest. Thomas visits one last time and shows Charlie a Bible passage highlighted in Alan’s old Bible. Thomas believes Alan died because he turned his back on God and gave into “the flesh,” aka homosexuality. Charlie, for once, stands up for himself, and more or less tells Thomas to piss off. Thomas informs Charlie that Ellie sent his recorded confession to his church and parents, and that both parties forgave him, meaning he can finally go home.

In his final webinar class, Charlie reveals he has been fired. He reads some of his students’ responses to his prompt to be honest. Moved by their honesty, he vows to be honest in return and turns on his web camera to show them his entire body. The students react in shock and disgust.

The Whale ending explained:

On the last day of his life, Liz returns to Charlie to take care of him. Even though she is angry, she loves him. Charlie tells Liz that he believe Ellie ratted Thomas out because she wanted to help him, because, “people are amazing.” Ellie storms into the house, angry with Charlie because she failed her essay assignment. When she sees the shape Charlie is in, she uncertainly asks Liz what’s wrong. “He’s dying,” Liz replies. Ellie says to call an ambulance, but Charlie replies, “No.” Ellie asks to speak to Charlie alone, and although Liz doesn’t want to leave Charlie, she agrees. Liz seems to realize that she is saying goodbye to Charlie, and tells him she’ll wait downstairs.

Ellie demands to know why Charlie failed her assignment and accuses him of purposefully screwing her over. Charlie, who is beginning to hyperventilate, tells Ellie that he didn’t write the essay—she did. It’s an essay on Moby Dick that Ellie wrote in 8th grade. Ellie’s mom sent the essay to Charlie, and Charlie believes it’s the best essay he’s ever read. Charlie sobs that he is sorry for leaving Ellie. As he begins to actively have a heart attack, Ellie turns to leave. Charlie begs her to read her essay to him, and she relents. As Ellie reads about the whale in Moby Dick , Charlie stands to his full height, entirely on his own. (Get it? He’s the whale!)

With a massive effort, Charlie walks toward Ellie. When Ellie reads Charlie’s favorite line in the essay—”And I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters, that were just descriptions of whales, because I knew the author was trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while,”—Charlie imagines stepping into the ocean, all those years ago when he wasn’t so obese.

Ellie steps toward Charlie. She begins to read the next line of the essay, “This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me glad for my–” but she cuts off. Charlie and Ellie smile at each other. Then with a gasp, Charlie floats off the floor and into a bright white light. With that, the movie ends.

Does Charlie die in The Whale ?

Yes. While one could argue that The Whale ending is up for interpretation, my interpretation is that Charlie’s feet leaving the ground is a clear metaphor for Charlie’s body leaving this earth, aka, that he has died of heart failure. The movie has made it clear throughout that Charlie only has about a week to live, and is careful to denote each day of the week. Liz said at the beginning of the final scene that Charlie is dying.

This is slightly different from how the stage version of The Whale ends, with a hard cut to black. But in an interview with editor Andrew Weisblum for the film’s press notes, it seems clear that the filmmakers intended this scene to indicate “the end” of Charlie’s life, and that it mirror the first scene that Charlie has with Ellie. “It was important to set that up structurally, these two moments that reflect each other—where in one Charlie fails and in the other, he succeeds. The cutting patterns and shot choices of the two scenes are very similar. But the power of that final scene is that we know Charlie is facing the end.”

What was the end of Ellie’s essay in The Whale ?

But what about that final line of Ellie’s essay, that we never got to hear? What is she glad for? Unfortunately, we’ll never know. The full essay is never read in the movie and always cuts off before that final line.

While we never get to hear what it was that Ellie was glad for in her own life, it’s clear that this is the most impactful part of the essay for Charlie. Did she write that she was glad family, perhaps? Or is she glad her dad left her when he did, to spare her his sad story? Or for the fact that she has books to read, to escape her own sad story, just for a little while?

It’s up to you to fill in the blank. Because the movie is so bleak, I choose to interpret it as Ellie feeling grateful for both her mother and her father, who love her. I just need Charlie to know that Ellie was grateful for his love. He needed to know he did one good thing with his life, he said. Maybe he’s clinging to that essay because the final line, written by Ellie, confirms that he did.

Ending Explained
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Film Colossus

Your Guide to Movies

The Whale (2022) | The Definitive Explanation

Welcome to our Colossus Movie Guide for The Whale . This guide contains everything you need to understand the film. Dive into our detailed library of content, covering key aspects of the movie. We encourage your comments to help us create the best possible guide. Thank you!

What is The Whale about?

The Whale is a reflection on guilt, consequences, self-deceit and the power of honesty. Specifically the way in which these things can erode someone’s life. For Charlie and Liz, it’s the loss of Alan. For Alan, it was feeling abandoned by his father. Ellie, Charlie’s daughter, also feels abandoned by her father. And Thomas stole from his church, ran away, and is too scared to look back. We see how easy it is for each of them to lie to themselves about the pain they feel. They fall back on distraction. It’s only once they start being honest with themselves, with one another, and with others, that any progress is made.

Movie Guide table of contents

The ending of the whale explained, the themes and meaning of the whale.

Why is the movie called The Whale?

Important motifs in The Whale

Questions and answers
Charlie – Brendan Fraser
Ellie – Sadie Sink
Mary – Samantha Morton
Liz – Hong Chau
Thomas – Ty Simpkins
Written by – Samuel D. Hunter
Directed by – Darren Aronofsky
Based on the play – The Whale

The ending of The Whale begins when Thomas comes over and tells Charlie that he, Thomas, is going home thanks to Ellie. The conversation takes a turn when Thomas tries to “save” Charlie. Charlie pushes back on the idea of God and an afterlife and explicitly states his shame, guilt, and frustration with himself over his weight.

The next day, he tells his online class that he’s been replaced. This is the consequence of posting an assignment to be honest where he used cuss words. During this “last lecture”, Charlie makes a big point about honesty and being yourself. This culminates with him turning on his facecam for the first time, revealing to the class what he looks like. Some are shocked. Some are awed. Some are concerned. Embarrassed. Stunned. “These assignments don’t matter. This course doesn’t matter. College doesn’t matter. These amazing, honest things that you wrote, they matter.” As a sign off, he throws his laptop across the room. It breaks.

Liz shows up with food. Charlie doesn’t look good. He’s audibly wheezing. These two now have their final talk. Liz is upset at the revelation that Charlie has over $100,000 in the bank he’s refused to use to get himself medical help. She compares what happened with Alan dying from not eating to Charlie dying from overeating. “I can’t do this anymore.” Charlie says he told Alan he didn’t need anyone else, not God, not anyone else. Liz says, “I don’t think I believe anyone can save anyone.” Which leads to Charlie talking about Ellie and Thomas. “Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring? People are amazing.”

Ellie bursts into the house and confronts Charlie about the essay he gave her. It received an F. When she finally reads it, she realizes what it is. It’s an essay she wrote in eighth grade English class. It’s the whale essay Charlie has obsessed over since the opening of the movie. Charlie apologizes to Ellie. He breaks down Ellie’s own self loathing. “This essay is you.” He tells her she’s perfect, that she’ll be happy, that she cares about people. His condition quickly deteriorates. Charlie begs her to read the essay. Ellie’s about to go but opens the door and bathes herself and the room in light. She says, “Daddy, please.” Then turns and begins to read the essay.

Charlie calms. Suddenly motivated, he rolls, he struggles, he stands. He steps. He steps. Closer and closer to Ellie. He flashes to a day of being back at the beach. His feet in the water. Ellie and Charlie share a moment. Then Charlie’s feet lift off the ground, he gasps, and ascends. We get a final wide shot of him on the beach, standing in the surf, young Ellie behind him. It’s a bright, lovely, picturesque day.

There’s a good amount going on here, narratively and thematically.

Charlie’s death

First and foremost, the obvious implication is that Charlie dies. But how should we take his feet lifting off the ground? The flash of light? The final shot? The Whale had been a very grounded, realistic movie. But that ending brings in aspects of the surreal.

There’s an argument to be made that it’s a subjective visual. At that moment Charlie has a sense of peace. He reconnected with Ellie in a major way, breaking through the angry wall she had kept up for so much of the movie. To Charlie, his death isn’t this bleak, horrendous thing. It’s transcendent. The visual supports his sense of the weight lifted from his shoulders, and the grace and peace he feels. It’s similar to the end of Iñárritu’s film Birdman or scenes in Tár . In both those films the filmmaker allows the main character’s subjectivity to influence the film’s form. Aronofsky isn’t a stranger to this tactic, employing similar techniques in The Fountain and Black Swan . The benefit of the subjective visual is that you can do dynamic things with it. The con is how subjective moments can create confusion around how literally something should be viewed.

On the flip side of the subjective visual is the literal visual. In Birdman , we’re not supposed to believe the main character has telekinetic powers and can fly. It’s surreal subjectivity. But in Justice League , yeah, those things are literal. The Fountain , subjective. Inception , literal. Fight Club , subjective. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , literal. Mulholland Drive , incredibly subjective. Hereditary , literal.

The literal visual means that what we see has to be taken at face value. It’s not metaphoric. Like all the transcendent, crazy stuff we see in The Fountain is just a way to demonstrate the grieving process. It’s not literally what Hugh Jackman’s character does. But representative of his journey. In Inception , everything that happens is what happened. The dream-sharing isn’t some euphemism. The memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine is not merely a representation of getting over an ex. It’s a “real” procedure the character’s going through.

So in The Whale , if we read the ending as literal, then we have to try to explain how Charlie leaves his feet. What the flash of light means. And what that last image on the beach is. The clear, primary answer is that it’s a confirmation of God. That at the moment of his death, Charlie has this divine moment, a kind of personal rapture, as his soul leaves his body. Faith is one of The Whale ’s major themes. Thomas embodies that theme. His belief and quest to save Charlie creates a means by which the narrative can explore Charlie’s relationship with religion. It’s not a coincidence that the arc between those characters ends with Charlie decrying God, hoping there isn’t an afterlife. That conversation happens when it happens for a reason.

The nuance here would be that Thomas thinks Charlie must atone for his sexuality. Something Charlie rightfully rejects. If Thomas was right, Charlie shouldn’t have such a divine conclusion. Instead of a light turning on, you’d expect a descent into darkness. It seems the atonement Charlie needed to make was with Ellie. Having done that, he’s redeemed.

It probably doesn’t matter whether the end is surreal or literal. Either way, the point is the same: guilt, fear, and shame can lead us down a dark path where we lie to others and ourselves. If you walk that path, you’re damned. Through honesty, we find redemption. We improve our relationships. We liberate the mind, body, and soul. And it’s never too late to give yourself and those you love that closure. Thomas had the right idea in that it wasn’t too late for Charlie to be saved. But Thomas was wrong in what that meant. And how to apply it. As Liz says, “I don’t think I believe anyone can save anyone.” The Whale makes the point that others can’t know what we need. What will save us. Especially not a random niche religious off-shoot. Only you know what you need to do. If you’re honest with yourself, the answer is clear. If you’re not honest, then it won’t be easy.

Ellie and her essay

We never hear the end of Ellie’s essay. It always cuts off at the same point: This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my…

While objectively we don’t know what Ellie says next, the visuals seem to imply the last word is “dad”. Just in the way that Charlie walks over to her. How she walks up to him. That when she reaches that point we see a shot of Charlie and he smiles. It cuts back to Ellie and she looks at him and smiles. It would also make sense why Charlie cherished that essay so much. Because it’s the one physical reminder he has that his daughter loved/loves him. She was glad for him.

Whether she says “Dad” or not at the end of the essay, the important thing is that it ends with Ellie being glad. That embodies her narrative arc. She starts off so angry. She’s mean to everyone. Her own mom calls her evil. The implication is that she’s so upset about Charlie leaving that she’s been taking it out on everyone else. There’s a lot of fear of abandonment and self-loathing. Charlie slowly breaks down that wall. He keeps telling Ellie she’s amazing. She’s beautiful. Smart. Perfect. Even at the end. He’s adamant about the good in her. That she can be happy. He even says that she is that essay. The essay is ruminative, serious, slightly sad. But it builds to a point of finding joy. And the hope is that Ellie herself will now be able to do the same.

Near the end of The Whale , Charlie and his ex-wife, Mary, get to reconnect. It’s not always pretty but it is cathartic. Eventually, they end up sitting next to each other. Mary lays her head on Charlie. They share a moment. Then Charlie begins to reflect.

When Ellie was little, when we took that trip to the Oregon Coast together, Ellie played in the sand and we laid out on the beach. I went swimming in the ocean. That was the last time I ever went swimming actually. I kept cutting my legs on the rocks. The water was so cold. And you were so mad that my legs bled and stained the seats in the minivan and you said for days after that I smelled like seawater. You remember that?

It’s not a profound moment. Nor a perfect moment. But it is a time Charlie remembers fondly. Through that subjective lens, it would represent simply a time of peace and potential. It’s probably one of many happy memories Charlie would die with. through the literal lens, it would imply something more heavenly, something afterlife-y.

Zooming out from the narrative reasons, two things come to mind. First, most of The Whale is very interior. Aside from the opening shot, the entire movie takes place in Charlie’s house or on his front porch. There’s a claustrophobia to the mise-en-scene. That also influences the color palette. The Whale is a very muted film, full of grays and shows. Typically, art finds the most power through escalation or contrast. So if a story starts in a sad place, the most powerful ending is either complete desolation or a true reversal of fortune. Often you build up the potential of the story going either way. The movie Atonement is a good example of this. It sets up the romance between Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy. But they’re separated by war. You spend the movie uncertain if they will or won’t end up together. The eventual conclusion is insanely emotional.

For The Whale , if it was going to have a negative ending, we’d expect it to double down on the claustrophobia and color palette. It would take those things to the extreme. But since it goes for a positive ending, it embraces aspects of contrast. Which is why when Ellie opens the door it’s such a surprising moment. For her, for Charlie, for the viewer. The light. The air. The sense of space. It’s lovely. The beach is about as opposite from Charlie’s apartment as it gets. It’s open. It’s bright. It’s full of energy. It’s also a time when Charlie had his family. All things that have been missing from his life.

So ending with the beach just has that visual energy that leaves the viewer with a better feeling than seeing Charlie on the floor of his house.

Of course, the movie’s also called The Whale and wants us to use that as a metaphor for Charlie. Not just in terms of his physical size. But as it relates to Ellie’s essay. Given the association with whales and the ocean, ending with Charlie on the beach feels like a way to try and visually connect person and cetacea.

Guilt, grief, control, fear.

Deep into The Whale we find out that Charlie’s boyfriend, Alan, passed away from complications arising from starvation. The starvation was a direct consequence of a falling out between Alan and his father, the leader of the New Life church. When Alan lost his father, he also lost his faith. The existential backlash caused a depression that manifested in a lack of appetite. Both Charlie and Liz (Alan’s sister) struggled to motivate him. Alas, nothing worked. Alan eventually passed away.

Charlie and Liz both suffered with guilt, grief, and a lack of control. A person they loved very much is gone. It’s easy for them to blame themselves for their inability to save Alan. Could they have said more? Done more? It’s easy to imagine them caught in a cycle of what ifs. The lack of control they felt in regard to what happened with Alan ends up manifesting around their relationship with food. Charlie begins to overeat, as if eating for both Alan and himself. While Liz facilitates Charlie’s gorging by bringing him food. Even though she knows what Charlie’s doing is unhealthy, she gives in because of everything that happened with Alan. She can’t abide someone being hungry. Even if it kills them.

These same emotions plague Ellie and Thomas, too, just in different ways and for different reasons. Ellie is angry about Charlie’s disappearance from her life. The pain of losing her father has made it hard for her to form and maintain relationships. Her form of control is to distance herself before others can distance from her. Or even push them away through insults and disturbing behavior. For Thomas, he also had conflict with a parent. In trouble for smoking too much pot, his father forced Thomas to go on a mission. He went but was upset by the mission leader only wanting to hand out pamphlets. It was too little. Thomas ended up stealing $2,436 from the mission and running off to do his own work. Which is what brought him to Idaho. Does he want to be there? No. But he’s also too scared to go back home.

The lies we tell ourselves

Charlie, Liz, Ellie, and Thomas all find ways to justify their behavior.

For Charlie, he convinced himself that no one would want to be around him. This is why he keeps his camera turned off while teaching online courses. It’s how he reasoned staying out of Ellie’s life. And it fuels his eating. Because the more he eats, the more he can defend running away from any kind of accountability or confrontation.

Liz is in a similar boat. She knows Charlie isn’t doing well. But he’s the only attachment to her brother that she has left. By feeding Charlie, it’s like she’s feeding her brother. She could put her foot down. Maybe she used to. Maybe there was a time she didn’t bring him two meatball subs with extra cheese or an entire large bucket of KFC? Maybe she used to try to get him to exercise? But it became easier to not fight him. She’d rather enjoy that part of Charlie that reminds her of her brother and gives her a sense of comfort rather than put her foot down and do what’s best for Charlie’s health.

Ellie yells and screams that she wants nothing to do with Charlie. She says a lot of horrible things about him. Not just to his face but on social media. Yet she keeps coming back to his house. Ostensibly, it’s because he’ll do her homework and give her $120,000. But really it’s because she truly does want a relationship with her father. It’s just hard for her to work through those emotions. She’s been upset with him for so long that the process of forgiveness isn’t easy. And you can imagine there’s part of her that wonders if she did something to cause her dad to leave. By continually threatening to go, she causes Charlie to, over and over again, declare he wants her around. Slowly, she begins to believe it.

And then Thomas lies about being from New Life and on a sanctioned mission. He ran away because he messed up and is scared to face the consequences. What will his father say? What will his church do? Will he go to jail? Will his family abandon him? To prevent that, he, much like Ellie, abandons them first. He tells himself and others that it’s the mission that’s important. But the minute he has an opportunity to go home: he does. That says a lot.

The Moby Dick essay that Charlie’s so obsessed with is something Ellie wrote four years earlier.

In the amazing book, Moby Dick , by the author Herman Melville, the author recounts his story of being at sea. In the first part of his book, the author, calling himself Ishmael, is in a small seaside town and he is sharing a bed with a man named Queequeg. The author and Queequeg go to church and later set out on a ship captained by a pirate named Ahab, who is missing a leg, and very much wants to kill the whale which is named Moby Dick, and which is white.

In the course of the book, the pirate Ahab encounters many hardships. His entire life is set around trying to kill a certain whale. I think this is sad because this whale doesn’t have any emotions, and doesn’t know how bad Ahab wants to kill him. He’s just a poor big animal. And I feel bad for Ahab as well, because he thinks that his life will be better if he can just kill this whale, but in reality, it won’t help him at all.

I was very saddened by this book, and I felt many emotions for the characters. And I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while. This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my…

There are a number of resonances with The Whale . It helps to look at these not through the lens of “Why did Ellie write this?” but in terms of “Why did the filmmakers include this? What are they trying to say to the viewer?” First, the reference to Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed is reminiscent of Charlie and Alan. The reference to church brings us back to how much religion is a part of the film. Then the way in which Ishmael’s “entire life” is dominated by this one thing. Lastly, it’s the idea of the author attempting to “save us from his own sad story” through the descriptions of the whales.

As Ellie says, “This book made me think about my own life…” We’re supposed to do the same with the film. Each of us probably has some whale that shapes our life. And other whales we use save others, even ourselves, from the saddest parts of our story.

To put it another way: you have some guilt, some fear, that influences you, that causes you to seek control in ways that can often be detrimental. Maybe not to the extreme we see with Charlie. But problematic nonetheless. This can be minor like procrastinating on mundane things like laundry, texting back, being on time, going to bed, looking for a new job, etc. You get to it eventually, but not in a way that allows you to feel ahead of the curve rather than behind. Or it can be as large as neglecting responsibilities completely, abandoning relationships, hoarding, overconsumption of food and/or alcohol, etc.

We all have some kind of Moby Dick that shapes up. And we all have the boring chapters about whales that distract us and others from the problems in our lives. They are the excuses we make. The lies we tell.

There’s irony to how much Charlie keeps harping on Ellie and his students about being honest. At first, it feels like the basic sort of thing an English professor would want. Artists often talk about the need for honesty in the work. But as we learn more about Charlie, we realize how dishonest he’s been. To his students. To Ellie. To Liz. To his ex, Mary. And to himself.

While he’s the one who’s the most vocal about honesty, the theme is a major part of Thomas’s character arc. He’s not really from New Life. He’s lied to Charlie, Liz, and Ellie. But finally comes clean to Ellie about his addiction to weed, the resulting fallout with his father, going on a mission as punishment, then stealing money and running away. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s just trying to help someone, anyone, so he can tell himself everything that happened had some kind of meaning. He’s desperate for that sense of catharsis. It’s similar to Charlie saying, “I need to know that I have done one thing right with my life!” But he’s at a far later stage than Thomas.

What happens with Thomas? In his own words: “And your daughter, she took these pictures of me smoking pot, and a recording or something like that, and she found my church in Waterloo somehow, and then she sent it to them, and they sent it to my parents. And you know what they said? ‘It’s just money.’ And they forgive me. And they love me, and they want me to come home. How awful is that? I can’t tell if she was trying to help me or hurt me or…I’m going home tomorrow.”

Ellie facilitated an honest conversation between Thomas, his church, and his parents. The very thing Thomas had been avoiding. He hadn’t wanted the confrontation, the consequences. Because he feared the worst. But the reality wasn’t so bad. Honesty gave him a path back home.

We see a similar thing with Charlie and Ellie. Charlie spent years hiding from Ellie because he didn’t want to be honest with her about what he looked like now. And he didn’t want to have the inevitable confrontation about his leaving with Alan. But knowing he only had such a short time left to live, he made the effort, finally. And, yes, Ellie was mean, cruel, petty, and in some ways evil. But she was also there. And simply being there gave father and daughter an opportunity to heal. If only he had done this years earlier, what would have happened? Would Ellie be the angry person she is? The “evil” person Mary describes? And would Charlie still be so large? Would he have had the capacity to forgive himself for what happened to Alan? Would he be in a much better place?

The end of the movie seems to imply that, yes, by being honest, Charlie finally finds some form of redemption.

Why is the movie called The Whale ?

The most obvious application of the title is the size of Brendan Fraser’s character, Charlie. He is an immense man. Narratively and thematically, his obesity is a primary point of concern. Given the film is a character study, the title of The Whale seems like a poetic alternative to something more mundane like Charlie . It grounds us in the literary “what” rather than the more straightforward “who”.

But there’s more to it than that. In the film itself, references to “the whale” have nothing to do with Charlie or his size. They originate with an essay written by Ellie.

Two key takeaways from this essay, The first is the dynamic between Ahab and Moby Dick. The second is how Ellie interpreted the descriptions of whales.

Regarding Ahab and Moby Dick, notice how Ellie says Ahab’s “entire life is set around trying to kill a certain whale.” And how the whale is completely oblivious to it. When you look at the characters in the film, each of them has their own white whale that haunts them and influences their life. For Charlie and Liz, it’s the death of Alan. For Alan, it was his father’s rejection. For Ellie, it’s feeling abandoned by Charlie. For Thomas, it’s fear of judgment from his family and former church. Really, all of them are dealing with guilt. Guilt and fear.

That brings us to how the descriptions of whales equate to the author “trying to save us from his own sad story”. That description demands we reconsider what the title means. Clearly there’s more to it than Charlie’s size. Rather, it seems to refer to the stories we tell others, or even ourselves, to spare them from our feelings and emotions. In other words: our guilt and fear cause us to distance ourselves from others. Rather than letting them see us for who we are, rather than letting them in and letting them help us, we look to save them from our weaknesses.

This is exactly what we see with Charlie. He keeps his facecam off so his students don’t have to look at him. He refuses to see his daughter or ex. He doesn’t leave his house. All because he wants to protect others from seeing him. We hear the lies he tells. ONe of his first lines of dialogue is “And, yes, the camera on my laptop still doesn’t work.” It does. He’s just not being honest.

What we see between the start and end of The Whale are a bunch of characters who weren’t being honest with themselves in some way or another. And they’re dishonestly presenting themselves to others. By the end, they all start coming clean and being more true to who they are. Warts and all.

So the title The Whale refers to, I believe, not just Charlie, but these stories we tell to distract others. And the grief and fear that cause us to do so.

Confinement

99% of The Whale is spent in Charlie’s house. It’s dim, messy, and sad. There are some weak, orange-bulb lamps. Some windows. But the curtains are drawn. So the characters and viewer are crammed into this space for nearly two hours. Psychologically, it creates a sense of claustrophobia and pressure that lends itself to the viewer experiencing tension. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be the size Charlie is, but we can identify with that sense of mental and physical stagnation and confinement.

Light and space

It makes sense then that at the very end of the movie that light becomes a powerful motif. The turning point between Ellie and Charlie happens after Ellie opens the front door and fresh air and sunshine flood the room. She reads her whale essay to him and we have these close ups of them washed in this light. And when Charlie dies, a bright light blossoms around him. The last shot of the beach is also very bright and open and seems to be symbolic for either a literal afterlife or just the final sense of peace Charlie has as he passes. Either way, its a stark contrast to the house that had become so much like a jail cell.

Charlie holds the whale essay in high regard. At first, it seems like that’s just because it’s a simple, well-written, honest essay. A thing any teacher might have a soft spot for. Eventually, we find out the essay is something Ellie wrote four years earlier and Mary sent it to Charlie. So there’s the personal connection to it as well. It reminds him of Ellie. It has been, for eight years, his sole link to Ellie. When he hears it, he hears her. It also serves Charlie as a kind of compass. When Ellie returns to his life, she’s incredibly mean. Brutal. Mary even describes her as evil. Charlie rejects that. He’s convinced there’s more to Ellie. That she not only can be better but is better. That’s because of the essay. For Charlie, the essay is Ellie being honest. While everything else is performative, a consequence of the pain she doesn’t know what to do with. It’s acting out. It’s through the essay he seems to break through to her and, hopefully, change her future for the better.

Food and more

Alan starved himself. It got bad. Both Liz and Charlie watched this person they loved whither. Eventually, Alan jumped off a bridge. The entire experience changed the relationship Charlie and Liz had with food. For Charlie, he started overeating. While Liz, a caregiver, started overfeeding. Even though they knew what they were doing wasn’t good, it provided both a sense of comfort and control. So they lied to themselves about how bad it was. This mutual enablement was a coping mechanism that represents an inability to process grief, guilt, fear, and anger in a healthy way.

The facecam

Charlie has his facecam turned off when he teaches the online courses. He knows how shocking his appearance is. So he lies and says his camera is broken. In that way, he spares his class from having to look at him. The camera being off becomes the embodiment of not being honest with yourself or others. This false presentation that allows us to get through each day. Charlie turning the camera on becomes symbolic of finally getting honest with himself. It’s only by being honest that he can find peace before death. It’s just a shame he waited so long. Otherwise, he might have never been in such a dire place to begin with. That’s why he’s so adamant that Ellie and his students embrace honesty sooner rather than later.

Questions & answers about The Whale

Is ellie really evil.

I don’t think Ellie’s evil in the way that Michael Myers is evil, though Mary seems to think so. But Ellie is very cruel. Her Facebook post about Charlie is pretty mean. Her breaking the plate that has the bird food—jerk move. Her taking the video of Thomas and sending it to his church—terrible.

Thematically, though, there’s more going on. The Whale explores ideas of honesty and deceit. Especially self-deception. So even though you can perceive what Ellie’s doing as cruel, she’s often cutting through the lies we tell others and ourselves and getting at the truth of a situation. Which can hurt and create conflict. But as we see: that conflict is sometimes the thing we need the most to move beyond stagnation.

What is the opening scene?

It’s Thomas getting off the bus from Iowa and deciding to start his missionary work.

Is The Whale connected to other Aronofsky movies like The Wrestler or Black Swan ?

Narrative-wise, absolutely not. But there are similar themes. All three of those films end with the main character giving their life in some cathartic final act. It’s just The Wrestler and Black Swan focus on performance and the demands of high performance. The Whale doesn’t share that concern. With that said, all three movies deal with parent/child relationships, redemption, and self-destruction. And all end in very similar ways. So there is a conversation to be had, especially in terms of Aronofsky’s filmography. I just don’t think The Whale should be looked at as part of a thematic trilogy with Black Swan and The Wrestler .

Now it’s your turn

Have more unanswered questions about The Whale ? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!

Chris Lambert is co-founder of Colossus. He writes about complex movie endings, narrative construction, and how movies connect to the psychology of our day to day lives.

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Reader Interactions

September 30, 2023

Well said. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this synopsis.

January 4, 2024

This is a great analysis of the movie. Thanks

January 27, 2024

The boyfriend is called Alan, not Andy. That mistake ruined the entire review / analysis for me.

I feel bad. It’s fixed now. If you want to know what happened. In 2022, we were doing this thing were each section about a movie had its own page. So we had 5 different articles about The Whale. I’d write a draft for each article in Google Docs, copy it to WordPress, make final edits, then post. For some reason, when writing about the themes, I switched from writing Alan to Andy. It wasn’t something I caught until I was about to post. So I fixed it in WordPress but not the Google Doc. In 2023, we switched from the sectional style back to a singular page. It was easier to build out the single page from the Google Docs than from the WordPress pages so I went back to the original drafts. But completely forgot to update the mistake in the Theme section. That’s why you probably noticed that I used “Alan” in the beginning of the article then suddenly and abruptly switched to “Andy”.

It’s all fixed now. Thank you for the heads up. I feel bad that thousands of people have read this article with the wrong name.

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'The Whale' Ending Explained: What Happens in Brendan Fraser’s Comeback?

No surprise from Aronofsky, but we have some questions!

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for The Whale Darren Aronofsky ’s The Whale has already proven to be one of the most controversial films of the year, which isn’t all that surprising considering Aronofsky’s history of making divisive projects. While Brendan Fraser has received widespread acclaim for his powerful performance as the overweight professor Charlie, the film has been perceived as “fatphobic” by some critics. It will be interesting to see where The Whale ends up landing this awards season; some view it as emotionally devastating, while others consider it to be manipulative and overtly cruel.

What Is 'The Whale' About?

The Whale is based on a play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter , and Aronofsky’s adaptation does a good job of reflecting the intimacy of a stage performance. The film takes place entirely within Charlie’s apartment as his friend Liz ( Hong Chau ) comes to care for him. Charlie has managed to isolate himself from the world; he communicates with his students via Zoom but does not ever show his face. Charlie decides to reconnect with his daughter, Ellie ( Sadie Sink ), who has no interest in him. Charlie agrees to help write her English papers if she will spend time with him and write personal essays from her heart.

Towards the end of the film, Charlie’s world begins to crumble. After making a series of inflammatory messages to his students, he’s fired from his job. His ex-wife, Mary ( Samantha Morton ), confronts him about his relationship with Ellie and criticizes him for his failures in their marriage. After being alerted that he has congestive heart failure, Charlie goes on an eating binge and consumes pizza until he vomits. It’s an emotionally overwhelming experience, especially toward the very final moments of the story.

Why Does Mary Not Want Charlie to See Ellie?

As Charlie reveals early on, he is openly gay and was in a relationship with one of his former students, Alan. Following Alan’s death, Charlie began compulsively eating, prompting Alan’s sister Liz to come and take care of him. As part of their arrangement, Mary forbids Charlie from contacting Ellie; she reacts with rage when she realizes he’s asked her to visit him. While Charlie is apologetic for his failure as a father, he does not apologize for his sexuality. In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, Charlie stands up to the missionary boy Thomas ( Ty Simpkins ), whose religion preaches homophobic messaging.

What Happened to Thomas?

As Mary reveals to Charlie, Ellie has been bullying people online through a private Facebook page. Mary feels that she has raised a cruel child and despite how Charlie has hurt the family, Ellie is the true “monster” in their family. In addition to posting pictures of her father, Ellie sends photos of Thomas (a former addict) to his church and family. Despite the seemingly cruel action, Thomas tells Charlie that he has newfound faith in people, as his parents have reached out to forgive him and welcome him home. Thomas also finds a picture of Charlie with Alan and realizes that he only put on the weight as a means of coping with his partner’s suicide.

RELATED: ‘The Whale’ Review: May the “Brenaissance” Continue Beyond Darren Aronofsky's Film

What Happened to Ellie?

Even though her father has been ghostwriting her essays so she can graduate, Ellie lashes out at Charlie when she realizes that he sent in an essay that she wrote when she was younger. Charlie feels that the essay is “honest” in a way that he appreciates, as he’s irritated by his students’ generic responses to his questions and prompts. He’s kept the essay for years and uses it to comfort himself. He tells Ellie how beautiful and talented she is, and for the first time, Ellie believes it. Even though Ellie spends the majority of the story mocking other people, she is in denial of her own talents and insecurities.

What Was Going on With the Pizza Delivery Boy?

Throughout the film, Charlie orders pizza online and has the delivery boy, Dan ( Sathya Sridharan ), leave it outside his door. While Dan tries to spark a conversation with him because he visits Charlie’s apartment so often, Charlie refuses to step outside and show his face. However, Dan decides to wait on the porch when Charlie comes to pick up the pizza and finally sees him for the first time. His immediate response is to look at Charlie in disgust.

What is Charlie Trying to Do at the End?

Charlie’s ultimate goal is to be completely honest with everyone around him. He refuses to apologize for his homosexuality to Thomas, and chastises him for thinking of him as “disgusting.” He realizes that even though Ellie appears to be cynical, she is really just seeking approval. He even shows his face to his students, and compliments some of the responses that they left in the last message board post that he felt were more honest than their previous work.

What Is Happening to Charlie in the Film’s Final Moments?

Charlie is dying at the very end and refuses to go to the hospital. As he bonds with Ellie, he attempts to stand. Between the effort of moving and his overall mental state, Charlie dies and ascends into an idealized version of heaven. It’s not the first time that Aronofsky has tackled religious imagery within his films. Both Noah and The Fountain directly deal with faith, spirituality, the afterlife, and the stories of the Bible-inspired mother! While Charlie meets his fate, he’s able to feel accomplished and unashamed.

What are the Differences Between the Play and the Film?

While both the original stage production and the film are very similar, Hunter made some changes to the script when translating it to a feature. Certain elements of the story, such as the Zoom calls and personal photographs, are detailed in a way that wasn’t possible on stage. While the play was released in 2012, the film takes place amidst the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, as news footage can be seen in the background. The endings are the same, but the film is slightly more hopeful, as Charlie feels that he has accomplished something greater.

Screen Rant

Brendan fraser shares his interpretation of the whale’s final scene.

Actor Brendan Fraser finally explains his interpretation of The Whale's final scene, which is rather ambiguous, and what it means about Charlie.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Whale. Brendan Fraser breaks down his interpretation of The Whale 's ending after it concludes on an ambiguous note. The Whale premiered on December 9 and is an emotional psychological drama starring Fraser. It has been touted as Fraser's comeback film after he disappeared from the Hollywood scene for many years. The Whale follows Charlie (Fraser), a morbidly obese man who tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink). The film has received mixed-to-positive reviews so far, with critics being nearly unanimous in their praise of Fraser's performance. However, the film has received some criticism for director Darren Aronofsky's melodramatic adaption of Samuel D. Hunter's 2012 play of the same name.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly , Fraser and Hunter (who also wrote the film's screenplay) shed some light on the ambiguous ending of The Whale . For many viewers, the scene may seem tragic and to others, the religious undertones may evade their understanding. Hence, Fraser and Hunter discuss how they interpreted the ending and how it was a hero's ending for Charlie, one in which he found liberation. Check out their statements below:

Fraser: It's important because it's a Herculean effort that he makes to even get to his feet. For him to finally break through to her, humble himself before her, and let her know that he made a mistake and is sorry for it. While his life has not physically ended in that moment, I think that he knows he doesn't need to live any longer, which is why he takes off his breather, he's got her reading the essay, and he does take to his feet like three Olympic dead-lifters, takes his baby steps to his baby, and in that beautiful two-shot, a great white light appears, and they look skyward. Depending on your belief system, spiritually or otherwise, we see that Charlie — with a touch of magic realism — finally does fly. Hunter: He's struggling this entire film to put a mirror up to his daughter to say, 'This is who you are,' and in those final moments, that mirror is this essay, when she looks at it, she can't deny turning it in and getting a D, but then, here's her father, all these years later, being like, 'This is the best essay I've ever read.' At long last, he's the only person who sees her, and she knows it.

Related: The Whale Confirms Sadie Sink Is Stranger Things' True Breakout Star

What Happens In The Whale's Ending

Fraser and Hunter's explanation of the ending will be welcomed by some, as The Whale 's final scene is a bit difficult to understand on paper. Before the ending can fully be explained, Fraser reveals that viewers needed to understand an earlier scene in the film. That particular Whale scene was one in which Ellie and Charlie first begin spending time together after Charlie agrees to help her write an essay for school. Ellie, still hurt at being abandoned by her father, tries to hurt him back by challenging him to walk. Unfortunately, at that point in The Whale , he can't stand or walk, and is therefore unable to prove himself to her.

In the final scene of The Whale , Ellie confronts Charlie about switching out her essay with an essay on Moby Dick she wrote in 8th grade. Charlie switched out the essays because he finally saw her and understood that the latter essay was an expression of herself. Though Ellie is defensive at first, the two end up attempting to connect one last time. To do so, Charlie asks Ellie to read the essay to him. As she does so, despite his health failing him, Charlie manages to stand and walk toward her. He is finally able to prove himself to her. However, the effort of walking is more than Charlie can withstand, and he dies as Ellie reads the essay. In the end, a bright light seemingly shines down, which could be interpreted literally as Charlie ascending to heaven or figuratively to prove that he has been redeemed.

Ultimately, The Whale 's ending has many layers to it, and it is tragic in some sense. However, Fraser and Hunter point out that the underlying theme is redemption and liberation. In the end, Charlie is willing to accept his death because he has accomplished the one goal that he had, which was to prove to his daughter that she is seen and understood. It is also an extremely touching portrayal of the relationship between a parent and a child. Even though Charlie failed Ellie in many ways, he proved that his parental instinct and love for his daughter never faded as he was able to see the value and the piece of his daughter within a years-old 8th grade essay. According to Fraser and Hunter, The Whale 's ending isn't ambiguous or tragic but hopeful for all the parents out there seeking redemption.

Next: Why The Whale Is Controversial, Despite Brendan Fraser's Comeback

The Whale Ending Explained: Step Into The Light

"The Whale," is a controversial and devastating film that seems to be going in an obvious direction, but a growing undercurrent of hope leaves viewers guessing about where exactly our protagonist will end up. Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is an online schoolteacher whose binge eating has cost him his mobility, his health, the possibility of regular human interaction, and any semblance of normalcy. When he finally starts suffering from congestive heart failure and refuses to go to the hospital, he is given a prognosis of just a few remaining days. Charlie doesn't change his ways or seek proper medical attention, but he does finally reach out to his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink).

At their first meeting in years, the callous teenager challenges her father to walk toward her without the assistance of his walker. He fails at first, but in the final moments of the movie, he actually succeeds. As he makes his way to her, she reads him an analytical essay about Moby Dick that she wrote as a child. She does so at Charlie's request — he recites it to himself often throughout the film. He even has another character read it to him during his first health scare at the beginning of the movie because he wants it to be the last thing he hears before he dies.

Charlie makes his way to where his daughter stands in his doorway before levitating and disappearing into his fondest memory of his family. In this memory, he stands on the ocean shore with his feet in the water, while his young daughter plays in the sand and her mother watches on.

So what exactly does this memory mean? Why is it the last image of the Academy Award-winning film? Does Charlie really die in the end? And why is Charlie so fixated on this essay when it doesn't have any apparent relationship to his own life?

What you need to remember about the plot of The Whale

A few things remain sacred to Charlie as he slips into complete isolation and a fatal health crisis. One is Ellie, whom he hasn't seen in years before the events of the film. He remains connected to her through this essay. He is particularly fixated on a line where she says that "Moby Dick" allowed her to "think about my own life." This follows her analysis that Ahab thinks killing the whale will make his life better, but the whale is completely emotionless. This suggests that Ellie views her father as her own kind of whale — not because of his size, but because of his estrangement. She thinks that he is the cause of all the pain in her life and that he doesn't care about her at all, having not heard from him in years.

Charlie makes strides in repairing his relationship with Ellie over the course of the film, but he is scared of re-entering her life after his family fell apart when he left his wife for one of his male students. This love, which once offered solace, quickly became its own source of tragedy for Charlie when severe depression and emotional turmoil led his partner into life-threatening anorexia and suicide. Charlie avoids memories of his late partner, even the happy ones, and keeps them hidden away in a locked room or tucked into a bookshelf. But he does allow himself to ruminate on a happy memory of his family. Even though he is kept at bay by his affair, a custody battle, and eventually his weight gain, he knows they are out there living their lives still and thus allows himself to preserve a happy memory of them at the beach.

What happens at the end of The Whale?

At the end of "The Whale," Charlie makes a triumphant march to his daughter as she reads to him from the essay that he loves so much. Despite being on his deathbed (or perhaps death couch is more accurate), he manages to achieve a physical feat that he was unable to do days earlier. He rips off the tubes that aid his breathing, pushes himself to his feet, and trudges towards Ellie as she reads out the words he knows by heart. Just as he reaches her in the doorway, he ascends. His feet fly off the ground, his eyes turn to the heavens, and he is transported back to that peaceful day at the beach. In this memory, he is down to a healthier weight again. His feet are in the ocean, his young daughter plays in the sand, and his ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton) haunts the edge of the frame like a specter, watching on.

So what exactly does this mean? Where is Charlie going? And did he actually get up and walk towards Ellie at all? The answer might seem cut and dry, but there are actually a few competing theories.

Did Charlie die in the end?

The most obvious conclusion to draw from this ending is that Charlie has perished from the congestive heart failure that is slowly killing him over the course of the film. The movie catalogs his final days, beginning on a Monday when his dear friend and nurse, Liz (Hong Chau), says he will be dead by the weekend. Although we don't see Charlie's dead body or his funeral, we know he is on the brink of death and that the strain he puts on his body by walking towards his daughter will likely cause his heart to finally fail. However, the ending is slightly ambiguous.

Part of the reason why Charlie's death is questionable is because it's unclear whether he wants to die or not. There are moments where he indulges dangerously in junk food and others where he stops himself, at least momentarily. His commitment to over-eating and reluctance to seek medical attention suggests that he is suicidal, but certain things hint at an optimism or will to live. He puts out apples for a bird that comes to his windowsill every day, something Ellie notices right away. Charlie also makes a last-ditch effort to reconnect with his daughter, and in getting to know her, finds a newfound love of humanity in general, declaring that, "People are amazing!" It almost seems too cruel that this reconnection with Ellie and subsequent optimism would come too late — when his body was too far gone to be saved — and that he would die anyway. So maybe that's not what happened.

Does Charlie go to heaven?

In Charlie's final moment, he retreats again to a memory of himself and his family on the beach. This memory, which Charlie references in conversation with his ex-wife in a previous scene, was a true moment of peace and clarity of spirit for him — perhaps the last he ever felt. So, is this heaven? The answer might guide the viewer as to whether or not Charlie died or not.

It's interesting that Charlie would end up in some version of heaven because of his complicated relationship with religion. Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary from a local New Life church is a frequent guest at Charlie's house in the week leading up to his death. Charlie's late boyfriend Alan was the son of the head of the church and a devout follower. When his father found out about Alan's relationship with Charlie, he exiled him from the church, which is what sent Alan into a depressive episode that eventually led to his death. Charlie was at odds with Alan's faith when he was alive and remains at odds with it after his passing. This religion vehemently rejects homosexuality and insists that a sinner like Alan or Charlie would never get to heaven. The missionary encourages Charlie to deny his sexuality and bodily sins and ask for God's forgiveness so that he might gain salvation in the afterlife, but he refuses. How ironic would it be if Charlie ended up in a blissful eternity anyway?

The religious themes of the movie suggest that Charlie did in fact die and go to heaven in the end, but they may have just alluded to a kind of spiritual peace or death of ego that does not necessarily imply a physical death.

What has the cast and crew of The Whale said about the ending?

Brendan Fraser, who plays Charlie in "The Whale," has a theory about the film's ending that might surprise you. He described the ending to Entertainment Weekly and, in doing so, revealed that he does not think his character perishes in the final moments of the film:

"[I]t's a Herculean effort that he makes to even get to his feet. For him to finally break through to [Ellie], humble himself before her, and let her know that he made a mistake and is sorry for it. While his life has not physically ended in that moment, I think that he knows he doesn't need to live any longer, which is why he takes off his breather, he's got her reading the essay, and he does take to his feet like three Olympic dead-lifters, takes his baby steps to his baby, and in that beautiful two-shot, a great white light appears, and they look skyward. Depending on your belief system, spiritually or otherwise, we see that Charlie — with a touch of magic realism — finally does fly."

The white light and skyward look, along with the state of Charlie's health, definitely suggest that this is the moment his life "physically" ends, despite Fraser's interpretation. However, Charlie's march toward his daughter could be interpreted as a purely symbolic moment in itself.

"I think it's an apotheosis — you can take it how you want it," added playwright Samuel D. Hunter, who also adapted the work for the screen. "In the play, the way I wrote it is that you hear a sound of waves and they slowly intensify through that scene, so, there's a way to read it both ways. It wants to be miraculous, either literally or figuratively, and I think you can watch it either way."

The play had a surprising alternate ending

As it turns out, the choice to end the film with Charlie standing on the beach was entirely the idea of director Darren Aronofsky. The production of the play makes reference to Charlie's aforementioned memory through the sound of waves, but it ends abruptly, mid-sentence, with Charlie making his way to Ellie. Hunter gave his candid thoughts on Aronofsky's take on the ending in an interview with Digital Spy :

"The way the play ends is, Ellie has the last line of the essay: 'It made me feel glad for my ...' And she's cut off by the stage direction — 'a sharp intake of breath'. 'Charlie looks up, and has a sharp intake of breath. End of play.' I actually didn't know about the beach scenes until I saw a rough cut. It was just kind of an incredible surprise. I had no idea until I saw the rough cut, and I was so intensely moved by it. I was just like, 'Oh my God, that's perfect.' [...] In the play, it's the one moment that I script as he's giving that monologue about the Oregon coast that the sound of waves comes in. In the play, it's heightened, and expands a little bit. I think Darren [Aronofsky] took that idea, and kind of ran with it, in this gorgeous way."

Even though the movie ends in a slightly less ambiguous place than the stageplay, there is clearly still room for interpretation. Just like in the original piece from which it is adapted, the film dissolves its realism in this final scene and moves to a place of symbolism or magical realism. No matter how you interpret the ending of "The Whale," it certainly feels like a conclusive end to Charlie's story.

"The Whale" is currently available to stream on Showtime through Paramount Plus, and for rent on all the major streaming platforms.

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‘The Whale’ Review: Brendan Fraser Is Sly and Moving as a Morbidly Obese Man, but Darren Aronofsky’s Film Is Hampered by Its Contrivances

The director seamlessly adapts Samuel D. Hunter's play but can't transcend the play's problems.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“The Whale” is based on a stageplay by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the script, and the entire film takes place in Charlie’s apartment, most of it unfolding in that seedy bookish living room. Aronofsky doesn’t necessarily “open up” the play, but working with the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique he doesn’t need to. Shot without flourishes, the movie has a plainspoken visual flow to it. And given what a sympathetic and fascinating character Fraser makes Charlie, we’re eager to settle in with him in that depressive lair, and to get to the bottom of the film’s inevitable two dramatic questions: How did Charlie get this way? And can he be saved?

In case there is any doubt he needs saving, “The Whale” quickly establishes that he’s an addict living a life of isolated misery and self-disgust, scarfing away his despair (at various points we see him going at a bucket of fried chicken, a drawer full of candy, and voluminous take-out pizzas from Gambino’s, all of which is rather sad to behold). Charlie teaches an expository writing seminar at an online college, doing it on Zoom, which looks very today (though the film, for no good reason, is set during the presidential primary season of 2016), with video images of the students surrounding a small black square at the center of the screen. That’s where Charlie should be; he tells the students his laptop camera isn’t working, which is his way of hiding his body and the shame he feels about it. But he’s a canny teacher who knows what good writing is, even if his lessons about structure and topic sentences fall on apathetic ears.

Charlie has a friend of sorts, Liz (Hong Chau), who happens to be a nurse, and when she comes over and learns that his blood pressure is in the 240/130 range, she declares it an emergency situation. He has congestive heart failure; with that kind of blood pressure, he’ll be dead in a week. But Charlie refuses to go the hospital, and will continue to do so. He’s got a handy excuse. With no health insurance, if he seeks medical care he’ll run up tens of thousands of dollars in bills. As Liz points out, it’s better to be in debt than dead. But Charlie’s resistance to healing himself bespeaks a deeper crisis. He doesn’t want help. If he dies (and that’s the film’s basic suspense), it will essentially be a suicide.

It’s hard not to notice that Liz, given how much she’s taking care of Charlie, has a spiky and rather abrasive personality. We think: Okay, that’s who she is. But a couple of other characters enter the movie — and when Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie’s 17-year-old daughter, shows up, we notice that she has a really spiky and abrasive personality. Does Charlie just happen to be surrounded by hellcats and cranks? Or is there something in Hunter’s dialogue that is simply, reflexively over-the-top in its theatrical hostility?

And what a rage it is! Sadie Sink, from “Stranger Things,” acts with a fire and directness that recalls the young Lindsay Lohan, but the volatile spitfire she’s playing is bitter — at her father, and at the world — in an absolutist way that rings absolutely false. Lots of teenagers are angry and alienated, but they’re not just angry and alienated. There are shades of vulnerability that come with being that age. We keep waiting for Ellie to show another side, to reflect the fact that the father she resents is still, on some level … her father.

“The Whale,” while it has a captivating character at its center, turns out to be equal parts sincerity and hokum. The movie carries us along, tethering the audience to Fraser’s intensely lived-in and touching performance, yet the more it goes on the more its drama is interlaced with nagging contrivances, like the whole issue of why this father and daughter were ever so separated from each other. We learn that after Charlie and Ellie’s mother, Mary (Samantha Morton), were divorced, Mary got full custody and cut Charlie off from Ellie. But they never stopped living in the same small town, and even single parents who don’t have custody are legally entitled to see their children. Charlie, we’re told, was eager to have kids; he lived with Ellie and her mother until the girl was eight. So why would he have just … let her go?

There’s one other major character, a lost young missionary for the New Life Church named Thomas, and though Ty Simpkins plays him appealingly, the way this cult-like church plays into the movie feels like one hard-to-swallow conceit too many. This matters a lot, because if we can’t totally buy what’s happening, we won’t be as moved by Charlie’s road to redemption. Near the end, there’s a very moving moment. It’s when Charlie is discussing the essay on “Moby Dick” he’s been reading pieces of throughout the film, and we learn where the essay comes from and why it means so much to him. If only the rest of the movie were that convincing! But most of “The Whale” simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival, Sept. 4, 2022. Running time: 117 MIN.

Production: An A24 release of a Protozoa Pictures production. Producers: Darren Aronofsky, Jeremy Dawson, Art Handel. Executive producers: Scott Franklin, Tyson Bidner.
Crew: Director: Darren Aronofsky. Screenplay: Samuel D. Hunter. Camera: Matthew Libatique. Editor: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Rob Simonsen.
With: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan.

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‘the whale’ review: brendan fraser is heart-wrenching in darren aronofsky’s portrait of regret and deliverance.

Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins and Samantha Morton also appear in this chamber drama adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his play about grief and salvation.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The Whale (2022) Movie Explained: Ending & Themes Analyzed

The Whale (2022) Movie Explained: Ending & Themes Analyzed : Aronofsky’s latest tormenting creation has the innate sense of a murmuring, refractory observation than a purposive nudge towards contemplation. All we see of the magnificent Brandon Fraser’s agonized lead is all he sees of himself in every perversive moment of self-reflection. There is seldom a lot going on behind those bulging eyes of the morbidly obese man that isn’t intently limpid to us at all times. In every harrowing second of The Whale’s duration, Charlie’s self-devastating passage and the unrelenting need for mending the only thing that isn’t hopelessly wrecked yet, are synchronous with everything we are to grotesquely perceive as intrusive guests in his dreary home

The director’s auteurist extravagance stays steady on top of every bit of unsettling indulgences of Charlie that we are made to endure in a brazen exhibition. Yet, there’s always something that is invariably true of Darren Aronofsky’s almost scarring psychosomatic enterprises. The maximalist surveillance of his dejected leads doesn’t take anything away from the lingering dread we’re supposed to feel for their plight. Samuel D. Hunter’s thespian script denudes throbbing memories from the playwright’s life. The Whale emerges as a strikingly aggravating tale that will not be forgotten anytime soon, bearing aching experiences spasming with the induced pain that Charlie’s character has been sanctioned.

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The Whale (2022) Plot Summary and Movie Synopsis

There’s an unfaltering sense of guilt as the perspective turns from a laptop screen with the blithe faces of Charlie’s students to his face that he would rather hide with an excuse of a faulty camera. From his dimly lit room that reeks of a persistent state of misery, Charlie teaches an online course on writing. Existing in a morbidly obese physique, Charlie is practically immobile without a walking aid. This airlessly desolated life of his hauls the somber memories of Charlie severing ties with his wife Mary and granting his eight years old daughter Ellie the trauma of being abandoned by her father.

It’s been nine tumultuous years since Charlie has done the thing that he regrets every waking moment of his forlorn existence. The time in between has bedecked Charlie’s life with an elusive experience of love, the cost of which he mournfully pays to this day by eating his way to death.

The First Discernible Sign Of An Impending Death

A foreseen heart attack during a languid moment of self-pleasure places the intrusive Christian missionary Thomas in charge of ensuring Charlie’s survival. Being barred from calling 911, panicky Thomas follows the wheezing man’s request and mumbles the lines from an essay on Moby Dick. We aren’t yet allowed to know the identity of whoever wrote the essay. What we do know is that Charlie is soothed by the thoughts of originality protruding from the lines that found Melville’s novel’s long-drawn passages describing the whale to be tedious. This is the originality that Charlie implores his students to tap into in their essays.

A Slowburn Suicide

Thomas is relieved of his duty when Charlie’s sole caregiver Liz takes over. Ailed with a heart that is ready to be laid to eternal rest, Charlie has chosen a slow death for himself. Liz alerts him of his dangerously high blood pressure that needs immediate medical attention, but as she glumly cedes a bucket of fried chicken to Charlie, she is aware that he doesn’t wish to be saved.

The gnarly imagery of his unsightly eating disorder , however disturbing and true of the wounded man, isn’t all that Charlie is. A man warm with every word of comfort he speaks–steadfast with his demand of originality from his students–is also a man afflicted to his very core with an unfixable, suicidal addiction to food. It is something that he has chosen to muffle his agony with. It is also something that he is bound to punish himself with to the extent of an untimely death.

The Whale (2022) Themes Analyzed

Love in the absence of hope.

From the alarming get-go, Liz is shown to be gifted with the soothing attributes of patience and care. She is also a cutthroat truth-teller who doesn’t shy away from telling off Thomas, who waves his pathetic New Life pamphlets in the face of the miserable man who he wishes to save with the words of a forgiving God. Without an exhaustive understanding of their past, Liz’s repetitive submissions to Charlie’s self-destructive urge to stuff his face baffles our puzzled minds.

How achingly she cares about Charlie is also undeniably evident from her gasping manner of performing Heimlich on him as he chokes on the meatball sub she has just given him. Liz accepts the severe truth that she can’t save Charlie from the thorny path that he will soon be walking for the last time in his aggrieved life. She repeatedly reminds him that he will die soon and buries her urge to grab him by his shoulders and scream, “stop killing yourself.” In her scornful leer at the fundamentalist church’s flagbearer Thomas, we see a viciously wounded Liz who couldn’t save her brother.

Liz had stopped kneeling to God when she was 12. At the same time, her brother Alan fell even deeper into the insatiable, bottomless well of faith that commanded a complete rejection of his very reality. He was kept from coming back home from his missionary duties in South America by a fanatical Christian father who arranged his marriage with a girl from New Life. Even when he did come back, lived his truth, and commenced a life of love and warmth with his partner Charlie, his father turned his back on him. Being shunned from all that he had weaved his life around was agonizing for Alan to withstand.

Liz helplessly saw her brother wither away from a voluntary withdrawal from food and water. Nothing she said, not one of her pleadings, could leave a mark on the battered heart of the man who soon walked into the ocean and became one with eternal oblivion. Liz has been mourning that shattering loss with the only other man who the same relentless march of grief has trampled. She has seen the will to endure slip away rapidly from Charlie’s hands. She can’t be an effective roadblock in his self-destructive path. All Liz can do is love Charlie and be there for him, if only to be paralyzed in her inability to save him and watch him perish.

The Scars Of Abandonment

It would be immaterial for Charlie and us alike to hope that the daughter he left behind when she was a child would not strike down his very late attempt at reaching out. Ellie is understandably hateful towards a father who left her to be with his student, and it is eruptive hate that everything around her gets subjected to. It is only when Charlie can practically see the grim reaper standing in the corner of his room, waiting to smite him with his scythe, that he tries to do one thing right before his time comes.

Mary has kept him from Ellie. It was a decision that didn’t emanate from her anger towards her ex-husband, who left to be with a man. It was, as Mary herself admits, her way of keeping Charlie from seeing the “evil” that Ellie is growing up to be. But evil isn’t what Charlie sees in 17-year-old Ellie. Even when she ruthlessly wounds him with her brutish words, all Charlie sees in Ellie is a wonderful daughter he is lucky to have spawned.

Even when Ellie bullies him into standing on his crumbling knees to walk to her, making him fall over the coffee table and wheeze to keep his heart going, Charlie thinks of her as a girl luminous inside and out. He promises her the fortune he has been saving up and even offers to ghostwrite her school essays to keep her from falling behind. All that, with a side of gasping pleadings, to make her keep coming back, for it’s his last chance to ascertain that he didn’t completely fail as a person.

Ellie’s vicious demeanor surpasses that of the usual angst of a teenager. She wears a spiky facade to fend off the world and hurt it before it can hurt her. The spiteful Ellie doesn’t mind asking a dying man to die already and even slipping him a couple of sleeping pills, knowing fully well the risks it can pose. And yet, Ellie keeps coming back. Granted, she does so when she is promised a load of money and help with her school work. But the girl with a photographic memory lingers on just a bit too long for someone who claims to be disgusted by her father. She bears the stinging words of approval that she is receiving a bit too late in her life.

The Blemishes In Heavenly Forgiveness

Screenwriter Hunter has written Charlie with all the tenderness derived from his own life as a closeted gay man in the bleak halls of an Idaho Christian missionary school. The rudimentary teachings of a faltering notion of God’s love have been given diligent treatment by Aronofsky, who is known not to be coy about anarchic explorations of faith in his films. The amusing and often bewilderingly obnoxious medium of the same in The Whale is the character of Thomas.

From the moment he laid eyes on Charlie’s haphazard state, he had set his mind on saving the poor guy. Nothing, not even repeated scoffs from Liz, keeps the obstinate missionary from repeatedly showing up with “literature” from his church. Thomas has made his life all about securing a “God’s child’s” journey to heaven. Only when Ellie gets the feeble soldier of God high on the pot does he bares his questionable relationship with faith.

The self-proclaimed bringer of salvation had stolen some petty cash from his church in Iowa. And he has been on the run ever since from the church and the family that is disappointed in him. Disturbingly reflective of the false face of tolerance that the people of the church are known to put up, Thomas strives not to openly gag at the thought of Charlie sharing his bed with a man.

Not only does he abuse the privileges of having access to Charlie’s home and gets his hand on Alan’s Bible, but he proceeds to do the unthinkable and reads aloud a highlighted passage to open Charlie’s eyes to the light of God with a blingy “homosexuality is a sin” lecture. Thomas’ painfully persistent drive to rid Charlie of his “sin” and “save” his tainted soul from his “blasphemous” body is a crippling reminder of the criminally catastrophic religious doctrine and the questionable “love” of God.

The Whale (2022): Ending Explained

How does charlie make it up to ellie.

The Whale’s revelatory catalyst is Mary’s appearance in Charlie’s life. She isn’t necessarily fond of Charlie’s annoying tendency to put a positive spin on the direst of situations. At the same time, Mary misses how his irksome positivity is used to balance out her characteristic cynicism. When Liz shows up and is taken aback by the sudden sight of Mary, the latter doesn’t feel the need to cut back on her candor. Mary rightfully disapproves of Charlie’s decision to bequeath a massive sum to a disturbed teenager. This is also the first time Liz learns of the kind of money that Charlie has been saving. His only plaintive plea for the same is that the least he could do to make up for not being in Ellie’s life for nine years was to give her everything he possibly could.

Our minds swiftly turn back to the first scene when Charlie blames his barren bank account for not seeking medical help. We earnestly empathize with Liz, who is having a hard time coming to terms with the wretched truth that Charlie has been killing himself in more ways than one. Amongst the several absolutely irrefutable transgressions that Charlie has committed in his unforgiving life, being dishonest to Liz, the one friend who tirelessly deteriorated her physical and mental health to take care of him, must be an inexcusable one.

In The Whale, what we’ve essentially been taking a dreadful walkthrough is the last week in Charlie’s life. The closer he gets to acknowledging that his death, as foretold by Liz, is imminent, the less inclined Charlie is to hide himself from the world. When his crude message on the wall imploring students to write from their hearts gets him fired, he concludes his last session after finally showing his face to his students. His insistence on originality did strike a chord with a student who wrote, “I think I need to accept that my life isn’t going to be very exciting,” which also is an endearing remembrance of something one of Hunter’s students once wrote.

When Ellie comes back furious to have failed her test after submitting the essay that her father wrote, Charlie asks her to take a look at the essay. Looking through it, Ellie recognizes it as the essay on Moby Dick she wrote as a child. It is Ellie’s authentic words that Charlie holds on to in his worst moments, suffocated with agony.

What he believes of Ellie is what he, at the end of the day, wishes for her to be. Looking at her as she is about to walk out of the door, Charlie takes his last steps up from the couch. Lifting the behemoth burden of his many misdeeds, Charlie stands tall for his little daughter while completely aware that his heart will give out. He keeps muttering words of approval and affection that he wishes to inscribe in Ellie’s wounded heart. With tears in her eyes, Ellie looks at her father and watches his abused heart surrender.

Aronofsky’s peculiarly elysian delineation of Charlie’s ascension to heaven is the surreal stream of light that heaves a smiling Charlie from the earth. It wasn’t Thomas’ parochial God who could save him. It was only through making his amends to his daughter that Charlie could achieve redemption. And his heaven is the memory of the beach trip that he once took with Ellie. That was the last time he took a swim. That was also the last time he saw his daughter smile.

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The Ending Of The Whale Explained

Darren Aronofsky , the director of "Black Swan" and "Requiem for a Dream," returns with "The Whale," a new film that sees actor Brendan Fraser make the comeback performance of a lifetime in an emotional story of compassion. The film, based on the 2012 play of the same name , follows Charlie (Fraser), a reclusive 600-pound man looking to reconnect with his distant daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), while dealing with a resurgence of past mistakes. As Charlie, Fraser shows a range of emotions not seen in his past performances and leads a focused tale full of triumph and heartache.

From the realization of his worsening health to the constant conflicts stemming from Charlie's past mistakes bleeding into the present, "The Whale" has a strong emotional pull that carries through to its tear-jerking ending. There's nothing as cathartic as watching "The Whale's" final act, which sees Charlie confronting himself and making better efforts to reconnect with Ellie. There are also unexpected revelations, burning themes, and closing arcs that all come so suddenly that the impact of some things could've slipped by. Looper is here to clear things up and dissect everything that happened during "The Whale's" finale

The truth behind Thomas' visits

When we first meet Thomas (Ty Simpkins), we learn that he's a missionary who goes door to door spreading the word of the cult-like religious group he's a part of that believes the world is ending. While Charlie can accept him since he does help him at the start of the film, his nurse and friend, Liz (Hong Chau), outwardly criticizes Thomas, as both she and Charlie have a bad past with his group. However, Ellie is much more inquisitive about Thomas and is eventually able to get him to open up about himself, which leads to quite a revelation.

It turns out that Thomas actually isn't a part of that group at all. He's just a runaway who left his home because of his frustration with the religious practices of his church and stole money from them to finance his trip. This reveal makes sense since he constantly said he was "new" to the group and didn't know the name of Liz's father, who leads the group. This also adds to Thomas' belief that he's ordained by God to help Charlie since he became frustrated by his old church's ability to spread its word and sees Charlie as an opportunity for self-fulfillment. It's an unexpected reveal that makes Thomas less of an innocent follower.

Ellie's picture collection

From her first appearance, it's tough to get a read on Ellie because of how closed off she is, and you can't help but question her real intentions. One thing that stands out as strange is how she takes pictures of Charlie and Thomas at different points in the film. Ellie takes pictures of Charlie struggling to use his walker and Thomas when he's smoking weed. Although it just seems like nothing at first, Ellie uses these photos for disturbing projects.

Ellie uses the photo she takes of Charlie to ridicule him on social media, making fun of his weight and telling him to burn in hell. As for Thomas, she sends the photos of him smoking to his family after hearing his story, and it ultimately results in him reconnecting with his family. Although Ellie's photography might seem harmless at first, it has big implications for those in the photos, and it doesn't always yield positive results.

The loss of Charlie's lover

After the death of his lover, Alan, Charlie develops an eating disorder that leads him to become incredibly overweight and suffer dangerous health issues. Although Charlie is generally unwilling to talk about Alan's death, Liz finds a moment to talk to Thomas about it. Alan's death also impacted her because he was her brother. According to Liz, her father, who leads the religious group that Thomas is supposedly a part of, was very hard on Alan after he came back from a mission and decided to not engage in the arranged marriage that he set up for him.

Instead, Alan decided to pursue a relationship with Charlie, leading to his father kicking him out of the group and the family. However, Alan still couldn't shake the impact of his upbringing and spiraled into a bout of depression that ended in him taking his own life. This would have a devastating effect on both Charlie and Liz and explains why they're so close. Liz is shown to be protective of Charlie from the start, and the story of Alan's death establishes why. That Charlie, too, could soon die is likely a gut-wrenching feeling for Liz.

If you need help with an eating disorder or know someone who is, help is available. Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by callin g 1 -800-273-TALK (8255).

Charlie's massive money

To get Ellie to spend more time with him, Charlie makes an offer that he'll pay her for the time she spends with him. It's a hefty amount. His offer of around $120,000 is unsurprisingly too good for Ellie to pass up, and it remains a big motivator for her throughout the film — along with Charlie rewriting her essays to help her graduate from school. However, given his conversations with Liz about not being able to afford better living conditions or a hospital visit, it's tough to believe that he has that money.

In a conversation with Mary (Samantha Morton), it is revealed that Charlie does have that money, and it leads to some other realizations and conflicts. Liz is frustrated by Charlie since he could've used that money to help himself and get the medical assistance he needs. Liz's belief that Charlie was broke played a role in some of the sacrifices she's made for him, leaving her feeling like she's been taken advantage of. However, Charlie would've likely never given up any of the money anyway since he always planned for Ellie to have it all.

A tumultuous reunion

It's no secret that Charlie's marriage to his ex-wife, Mary, ended in shambles. He left her and Ellie to pursue a relationship with Alan, leading Mary to cut ties with him completely. However, when Mary arrives at Charlie's after learning that Ellie is there, we get a clearer glimpse into their fractured relationship and Mary as a character. In their time alone for the first time in a long time, we see these two more open and honest than ever before, and it's a strong example of their complicated relationship.

Although the two end up fighting over what happened between them, Mary is shown to be much more compassionate than previously suggested. She not only shows sorrow for Charlie for his current condition but even tells him a story about helping Alan before he died. This doesn't mend their relationship, and Mary still leaves in a fury over these resurfaced feelings, yet this scene shows the genuine care that remains in their relationship and how Charlie's decision to leave still causes ripples in their family.

A secret room

About halfway through "The Whale," Charlie tries to retrieve a key sitting atop a closed door – only for it to fall into a place he can't reach. Luckily, he gets Thomas to grab the key for him, and he opens a room that looks untouched and pristine compared to the rest of his house. At first, it's tough to figure out what this spare bedroom exactly is, but it eventually becomes pretty clear.

Even before Thomas grabs a Bible with Alan's name on it from the room, it's obvious that this room is Charlie and Alan's old bedroom. After Alan's death, Charlie was unable to enter the room again and has never let anyone inside. He probably only unlocked it recently because Alan has been brought up in conversation again. He now sees it as solace as he heads towards a tragic end. There are no flashbacks that give us a real look at Charlie and Alan's relationship, but seeing Charlie's face when he looks into the room shows the real love he has for him still.

Charlie's final hope

Throughout "The Whale," Charlie is shown to be incredibly desperate in wanting to reconnect with Ellie. He's not only willing to pay a bunch of money to get her to keep him company but even offers to rewrite her essays to help her graduate. Even when Ellie is immensely cold towards Charlie, he still yearns for her love, and that makes you wonder what Charlie exactly wants from reconnecting with her.

However, when talking with Mary, Charlie opens up about his desire to reconnect with his daughter, saying that he simply wants her to have the best life possible to create a sense of redemption within himself. He simply sees helping Ellie as the last thing he can do before dying to leave things on a better note and feel like he did something right. It's the wish that any parent would have for their child, and Charlie doesn't want Ellie to feel like she can't accomplish things because of how their family has fractured.

Charlie's sense of positivity

Even when the worst things are happening to him, Charlie generally has a positive outlook on life and those around him. When Thomas is chastised by Liz or Ellie does something that even her mother views as evil, Charlie always shows compassion to those around him. For Charlie, though, this positivity is both a gift and a curse. While it is nice that he tries to find the good in things, it can lead to him ignoring real problems in his life and not being able to confront things.

For instance, while it's nice that he makes an effort to remind Ellie that he thinks she's amazing, it doesn't heal the hurt she's suffered from their estrangement. This overt sense of positivity is also what leads to Charlie losing his faith and desiring to see only harsh truths that make "The Whale's" final act really tear at your heart. However, even when Charlie hits his lowest point, he is able to find the good in things again, leading to an emotional final sequence between him and Ellie. Charlie's journey throughout "The Whale" is about finding and understanding the truth about yourself without losing that sense of compassion that makes us care for one another as well as ourselves.

A final revelation

As shown in the opening shots, Charlie keeps his webcam off when talking to his class because he doesn't want them to see what he looks like. However, after sending them an assignment that asks them to simply be honest, Charlie makes the bold choice to turn his camera on for the first time. With the assignment (or more so the wording of it) getting Charlie fired from his position and his students' submissions inspiring him, he decides to show them who their professor really is.

In most other movies, this would be played like a truly inspirational moment. Yet, with Darren Aronofsky helming, it feels like a dark slice of reality, as some of Charlie's students can be seen reacting in shock around his square in the chatroom. It's a gut-wrenching affirmation of the truth that Charlie has been trying to hide from for quite some time, and the way it ends, with him throwing his laptop across the room, is legitimately painful. It's a moment you knew was coming, but still feels like a brutal punch to the gut.

The essay's author

When we're first introduced to Thomas, as he helps Charlie during a painful incident of heart failure, we also learn about an essay on "Moby Dick" that Charlie loves. For most of the film, we're left unsure who the author of this essay is. We just know that it acts as sort of a calming mantra for Charlie that reminds him of something he loves. In the final moments of "The Whale," we discover that Ellie is the author of the essay and that it's been a pivotal part of Charlie's connection to her.

Any time Charlie is in pain or on the verge of death, he either repeats part of the essay to himself or gets someone to read it to him. With the knowledge that Ellie is the author, hearing her essay acts as a reminder for Charlie of his final wish to make sure that she is in a good place before dies. It's a reveal that kicks off a deeply emotional final sequence between Charlie and Ellie that is undoubtedly one of the most emotionally charged moments in the film.

Charlie and Ellie's final reckoning

The final moments of "The Whale" are full of rich emotion – largely because of the final reckoning that Charlie and Ellie have before Charlie succumbs to his poor health. Although it seems like Ellie will rush out the door before she and her father can have one last moment together, she stops and fulfills Charlie's request to hear her read her essay. This moment also leads to Charlie getting up to walk towards Ellie, something she requests he does earlier in the film. It's a climactic, full-circle moment bursting with emotion.

There's something truly powerful about watching Charlie find the strength to get up and walk on his own in those final moments. However, this last act of strength doesn't mean that Charlie avoids death, as he's drawn up into a heavenly light. Darren Aronofsky ends the film on a fantastical vision of Charlie on the beach with Mary and Ellie. The choice to end the film on this flashback to a beloved memory likely signifies Charlie is at peace with how he left things and acts as a harmonious and fulfilling ending to his journey. Although Charlie and Ellie's relationship has been complicated, it's legitimately compelling to watch them come together in this final moment.

Is this the start of Brendan Fraser's comeback?

Although Brendan Fraser was once a notable mainstream star leading franchises like "The Mummy," it's no secret that his career has taken a downturn as he's dealt with personal issues and opened up more about being sexually assaulted . Recently, Fraser has started to work more in front of the camera again with his role as Cliff Steele/Robotman in "Doom Patrol" and appearances in films such as "No Sudden Move" and "Line of Descent." He was even set to appear in DC's now-canceled "Batgirl" movie as the villain Firefly. With all the acclaim he's receiving for his performance in "The Whale," does this role signal a true comeback for Fraser? Absolutely.

Fraser is set to be one of this year's top awards contenders and has already received a best actor nomination at the upcoming Golden Globes with many more likely to come. Ever since he got some big social media buzz for the lengthy standing ovation he received at "The Whale's" premiere at the Venice Film Festival, it seems that audiences have rallied around him. Fraser's performance in "The Whale" and the acclaim he continues to receive for it could easily lead up to a strong resurgence for the actor that fans would be thrilled to see. Who knows? Maybe "The Mummy" franchise could return with him.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

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An Essay on Moby Dick – The Whale Review

An Essay on Moby Dick - The Whale Review

Everyone loves a good comeback story, and that is especially true when we are talking about Brendan Fraser’s. The actor’s unexpected return has been all over the internet for a while now, but with The Whale premiering in most European countries in February, we finally get to see what all this fuss has been about.

Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” revolves around Charlie , the reclusive, dangerously obese English teacher ( Brendan Fraser ). Charlie has lost someone close to him in the past, resulting in his massive weight gain and alienation from society. Holding his classes from home, he needs constant supervision and care, provided by his best friend and nurse, Liz ( Hong Chau ). As Charlie ’s condition is getting worse, so much that he might not make it to next week, he tries to spend as much time as he can with his daughter Ellie ( Sadie Sink ), who he has abandoned 8 years ago in the search of his newfound love and sexuality.

the whale, breandan fraser, darren aronofsky, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, drama, oscars

Aronofsky has always been known for his deep and dark dramas, but the director seems to have really hit the spot with “The Whale” , as he not only managed to revive Brendan Fraser ’s semi-forgotten career with it, but also earned 3 Oscar nominations, next to the many awards the movie won already since last year. Oh, and he also directed one of the best pictures of the decade.

“The Whale” , presented in a tight 4:3 aspect ratio, encapsulates the viewer in an almost 2 hours long journey into loss, love and religion, packed into beautiful literary themes and sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes utterly grotesque situations. Its characters and story both have, creating a sense of perfectly balanced duality that everyone experiences in life at some capacity. We barely leave Charlie ’s porch in the film, making us feel this entrapment that Fraser ’s obese character lives through every day. Over a week, we meet the most important characters of Charlie ’s life, each time experiencing an interaction different in tone and meaning, constantly putting their relations to Charlie and each other in new perspectives.

Since the film was adapted from a screenplay, there are some noticeable pacing issues in the first half of the movie, but watching the actors perform quickly captures our attention. Leaving his macho adventure flick characters behind, Brendan Fraser gives a performance of a lifetime, exploring an unbelievable range of emotions, making sure there are no dry eyes in the house by the end of the film. The four key characters Charlie interacts with have also been delivered exceptionally well by the rest of the cast.

The carefully crafted atmosphere of The Whale can be uncomfortably disgusting and downright beautiful at times, aided by wonderful cinematography, detailed set design, and of course, Rob Simonsen’s incredible score. Surprisingly, humor is not missing of this dark mixture of cinema either, but some might find it hard to laugh while experiencing this vast array of feelings at the same time.

“The Whale” is a textbook answer to the question of why we are still going to the movies. To experience joy, horror and devastating emptiness at the same time, crying our eyes out, and still coming out with a smile on our face from the screening, like the devastating story of an obese teacher was the best thing ever. Maybe The Whale won’t be that for some people, but it is certainly one of the best films of the past few years, and definitely an Oscar win for Brendan Fraser .

“The Whale”; Director : Darren Aronofsky;

Actors: Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins ;

American Drama, 117 minutes, 2022

The Whale is a textbook answer to the question of why we are still going to the movies. To experience joy, horror and devastating emptiness at the same time, crying our eyes out, and still coming out with a smile on our face from the screening, like the devastating story of an obese teacher was the best thing ever. Maybe The Whale won’t be that for some people, but it is certainly one of the best films of the past few years, and definitely an Oscar win for Brendan Fraser.

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‘The Whale’ ending explained: what happened to Charlie?

Spoilers ahead

Brendan Fraser has swept awards season with his critically acclaimed performance in The Whale , which has a particularly emotional climax.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the film follows morbidly obese literature teacher Charlie (Fraser) as he attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), who is torn up after Charlie left her and her mother to start a relationship with a man years earlier.

READ MORE: Brendan Fraser: “I can’t get rid of the feeling that I’m a fraud”

Alongside Fraser and Sink, the film stars Hong Chau as Charlie’s best friend and nurse Liz, Ty Simpkins as Christian missionary Thomas and Samantha Morton as Ellie’s mother Mary.

What happens at the end of The Whale ?

As Charlie nears death in his home, Ellie confronts him after receiving a low grade for an essay he’d rewritten. Charlie explains that he replaced her rewritten essay with the Moby Dick essay Ellie had previously written when she was in eighth grade – deeming it the most honest piece of writing he’d ever read.

Charlie asks Ellie to read the Moby Dick essay to him one last time. She initially refuses and goes to leave, but stops at the door in tears and proceeds to read it. As she reads, Charlie stands up and attempts to walk towards her, which he had failed to do when Ellie first visited.

As Ellie completes the reading, Charlie starts to ascend to the heavens as he looks up towards a white light in the sky.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly , Fraser gave his interpretation on the ending. “It’s important because it’s a Herculean effort that he makes to even get to his feet. For him to finally break through to her, humble himself before her, and let her know that he made a mistake and is sorry for it.

“While his life has not physically ended in that moment, I think that he knows he doesn’t need to live any longer, which is why he takes off his breather, he’s got her reading the essay, and he does take to his feet like three Olympic dead-lifters, takes his baby steps to his baby, and in that beautiful two-shot, a great white light appears, and they look skyward. Depending on your belief system, spiritually or otherwise, we see that Charlie – with a touch of magic realism – finally does fly.”

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Writer Samuel D. Hunter digs deep to let loose his truth for ‘The Whale’

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I didn’t set out to write a film. At first, I wasn’t even sure I was writing a play.

Maybe it was something I needed to write for myself, a quiet purgation that I’d keep in the cold, dark storage of my laptop’s hard drive forever.

Maybe keeping it to myself would allow me to put some personal stuff on the line that I’d previously been too scared or too embarrassed to access in my plays. The stuff that made me feel unworthy of being an erudite New York playwright. All that stuff I had pushed way down about growing up gay in Idaho, attending a fundamentalist Christian school, battling depression and subsequently self-medicating with food in my late teens and early 20s.

Maybe I should just write something honest.

This was 13 years ago. My then-boyfriend-now-husband and I were living in an illegal sublet in Hell’s Kitchen and teaching essay writing at a public university in New Jersey to dozens of disaffected college freshmen. I was teaching a kind of writing that felt anathema to my work as a playwright — I was asking students to depersonalize their writing, to stamp out any trace of emotion or personality in service of cold, hard objectivity. But it was better than a 9-to-5. At least it was adjacent to my seemingly unreachable goal of being a working playwright in New York City. (If there’s even such a thing anymore.)

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Deep into the semester, I cracked. I couldn’t take another perfunctory analysis of whatever Malcolm Gladwell essay I had assigned them. My students were just giving me what they thought I wanted so they could take their B-minus and move on with their lives. So I pleaded with them, “Just write something honest. Don’t worry about making it a good essay. Just tell me what you truly think. Let’s start there.”

During a NJ Transit ride back home one night, I read one student’s heartbreaking truth, a line that ended up staying in the play and the screenplay throughout mountains of drafts: “I think I need to accept that my life isn’t going to be very exciting.”

That single line was a turning point in my artistic life. Because right after I read it, I had the thought: “Should I write a play about an expository writing teacher who is begging his students to write something honest? Is anyone going to want to watch that? More frightening than that, is this play a version of this exercise I had just given my students?”

I wrote the first draft in about six weeks, taking a break from grading freshmen essays every Sunday to generate 20 or so new pages of a nascent draft. Early on, I realized that not only was the character trying to connect with his students but he was also using those teaching sessions as a dry run to figure out how to connect with his estranged daughter. It felt entirely different than my previous plays. It was at once easier to write and more difficult, familiar but scarily vulnerable.

Several weeks and several drafts later, I made the decision to share it with my agent. Several months after that, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts produced a reading of it, and the following year, the center mounted a full production. Then — miracle of miracles — Playwrights Horizons, one of my favorite off-Broadway theaters, produced the play in its smaller, 125-seat theater. I had scaled the mountain.

Next came the truly unbelievable plot twist, a scene so grossly overwritten that it can be only real life — “Darren Aronofsky saw the play, and he wants to meet with you.”

It took another decade for the film adaptation to come to fruition. During those 10 years, I steadily worked on adapting the play to a screenplay, and the characters and story grew and sharpened in fundamental ways. The character of Thomas, originally a Mormon missionary (perhaps to slightly shield myself from my own past), now attends a fundamentalist church more similar to the one I was involved with as a teen. More important, my husband and I are now dads to a 5-year-old girl. So the story of a father and a daughter has become far less theoretical.

And during that decade when I was developing the screenplay, I wrote a little over a dozen plays, each of which shares the primary concern of “The Whale”: the tragedy of isolation and the redeeming value of human connection. In many ways, “The Whale” has been the clothesline upon which I’ve hung my entire body of work.

Thirteen years later, I’m glad I made the decision to take this story off my hard drive. Even though I have some distance from it now, at age 41, in certain ways it feels no less vulnerable and personal to me than when I first wrote it. But more than that, it’s been a constant reminder that I came into my own as a writer only truly when I finally took my own advice: Forget what other people want and just write something honest.

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‘The Whale’ – Film Review and Analysis

“‘The Whale’, directed by director Darren Aronofsky shows us how low someone can go when things go wrong in life but also how our lowest lows can also bring out the best of us when it is most important.”

2022 may be over but I am still thinking about the most emotionally impactful movie of the past year, which deserves its own review and analysis. Likely to be nominated for a few Academy Awards at the least an Oscar for Best Actor nomination for Brendan Fraser, ‘The Whale’ is a powerful film about a man’s desire to try to right past wrongs in some way before it is too late. ‘The Whale’, directed by director Darren Aronofsky shows us how low someone can go when things go wrong in life but also how our lowest lows can also bring out the best of us when it is most important.

Aronofsky’s filmography from ‘Requiem for a Dream’ to ‘The Wrestler’ to ‘Black Swan’ to ‘The Foundation’ to now ‘The Whale’ all deal with flawed characters looking to right past wrongs or to find redemption in the most meaningful way(s) before they are past the point of no return. Aronofsky so brilliantly can capture psychological drama and tension in each sense in his movies that by the end, you’re so emotionally affected by it all that it can be hard to wrap your head around what you just watched. As a director, he is excellent at painting a picture of a person or people in distress and how while they may have had good intentions, they are almost too far gone to seek redemption or a new start.

Different from Aronofsky’s past films, ‘The Whale’ is adapted from a play of the same name dating back to 2012 so the screenplay that is written and the way the film is set up is exactly how a play would be seen on the big screen. There are few characters, the plot does not get too murky or complicated, and the setting remains the same largely throughout the whole film.

Film critics today may dismiss this film as lacking scale and scope in its ambition, but I was drawn to how beautifully it portrays what could be real people living real lives. ‘The Whale’ may be a film and fiction but it likely portrays real situations and real tragedies that some people unfortunately come to pass in their life. The film deals with multiple real world issues affecting people from obesity to alcoholism to lost loves to broken up families that most people in life can see how that can throw someone’s life off a cliff and make it almost impossible to recover.

‘The Whale’, as the title makes clear is about a severely obese man named Charlie who weighs around 600 pounds and suffers from multiple health issues because of his weight issue. He is estranged from his teenage daughter, separated from his alcoholic wife, and unable to turn the video screen as an online English professor because of his weight condition that may affect how his students see him. His only interaction is with his friend, Liz, who is also a nurse who comes to take care of Charlie especially with his multiple health issues causing him to be near death and at risk of heart failure.

Charlie has become a tragic figure in that he only has Liz left in his life after suffering the loss of the man who he fell in love with. Because of that love, he sacrificed his marriage with his previous wife and his relationship with his daughter for. After the affair he had with his student, Alan, who is also the brother of Liz, for whom she was adopted by a family and her father who was a pastor in the New Life Church. Liz was able to escape the church’s cultish tendencies but Alan’s possible guilt from being disowned by the Church and perhaps his family as well for his homosexuality and relationship with Charlie caused him to end his own life.

This terrible series of events punished Charlie and his eating condition after the death of Alan exacerbated his obesity and caused him major depression and an inability to form relationships with others beyond his caretaker and friend, Liz. Charlie is not looking for any pardoning of ‘sins’ from God or the Church that disowned Alan but rather the sole forgiveness of his daughter for whom he last saw when she was eight years old. Ellie is not a child anymore but is a rebellious and sullen teenager who misses her father and lashes out at her mother, who deals with her problems by downing a bottle of liquor, rather than raising her daughter to be better. Charlie is no saint in the matter in that he did commit adultery with Alan and led him to neglect his daughter, Ellie, and to push his wife away as well.

He never made amends for having caused them both grief and pain with his impulsive decision. His love for Alan eclipsed his love for his daughter, which he struggles in the film to get back. When the New Life Church’s doctrine and his family’s discontent with Alan’s sexuality, Alan’s suicide caused Charlie to spiral further to eat uncontrollably and to negate his relationships even more by becoming a total recluse who cannot even leave the house because of his body weight and inability to walk or drive a car.

‘The Whale’ also highlights how Charlie is not looking for pity from others or for forgiveness. He knows how much his life has gotten out of hand, but he is hoping to do ‘one thing in his life’ right before it’s too late for him. He believes that while his daughter acts out and despises what he has done, that there is still hope for her and that can she achieve her potential but to more importantly to ‘be a good person.’ It may be too late for Charlie to turn it around in life much to Liz’s, his wife’s, and even Ellie’s disappointment, but Charlie knows that redemption is possible for each of them and that even if he is not there, he will try to leave money for his daughter to have a future, or to tell his wife that he is regretful for him leaving them for his affair, and that he apologizes to Liz for what he has done to himself with the loss of her adopted brother that has strained their friendship in the aftermath.

Charlie does not want to be saved by God or religion or from himself but he wants to know that his life through the birth of his daughter is one thing that he got right in life and that while he wasn’t there for her before when she needed him, he can try to make amends before he leaves the world, and to encourage her to be better than he was, to be better off in life, and to be kind to others. He may have lost hope for himself, but he has never lost hope for his daughter.

Similar to how Charlie encourages his English students to be honest with their written essays, he tries to be honest with Ellie in why he did what he did, how he could have been a better husband to his wife, Mary, and how he let Liz down after the tragic death of Alan. Not everyone can be this honest, but Charlie has nothing left to lose, nothing much to gain, and with not a lot of life ahead of him except imminent death due to his body’s condition.

Despite all the concurring factors, Charlie is trying to regain his humanity and his family back as much as he can recoup after it had been lost even if he has become ‘The Whale’. While he may be misunderstood and loathed like the whale in the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville, he is not beyond redeeming himself in the eyes of others and providing some closure for himself in a life that had gone so far astray yet for which he had also been able to give something out of love back to the world to live on in the form of his daughter, Ellie.

Author: Ben W.

Hello, I am an Entrepreneur in Online Education focusing on English as a Second Language Studies. I offer online courses and eBooks on English grammar, Business English, and English writing. I also recently released my first personal development guide. You can find all of these offerings below and please sign-up for updates to come! Thanks. View all posts by Ben W.

The Whale writer didn't know about the ending change from the play

"I had no idea until I saw the rough cut."

In an interview with Digital Spy , the writer talked about the original ending and how the different ending was perfect for the film.

"The way the play ends is, Ellie has the last line of the essay: 'It made me feel glad for my…' And she's cut off by the stage direction – 'a sharp intake of breath'. 'Charlie looks up, and has a sharp intake of breath. End of play.' I actually didn't know about the beach scenes until I saw a rough cut. It was just kind of an incredible surprise," he said.

preview for The Whale | Official Trailer | (A24)

Related: The Whale ending explained

"I had no idea until I saw the rough cut, and I was so intensely moved by it. I was just like, 'Oh my God, that's perfect.' Because of the play, when there's that first flashback in the Mary scene, when you see him on the… Right? Is that the Mary scene?

"In the play, it's the one moment that I script as he’s giving that monologue about the Oregon coast that the sound of waves comes in. In the play, it’s heightened, and expands a little bit. I think Darren [Aronofsky, director] took that idea, and kind of ran with it, in this gorgeous way," he said.

The film’s star, Brendan Fraser, who scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal, recently opened up about how he wasn’t scared to take on the role.

Related: Brendan Fraser on not being scared of The Whale role

"I didn't feel scared. I felt – I don't know – energised. I felt enthusiastic. I felt like: 'That's going to be a good challenge. That's new. I haven't seen that before.' I felt really inspired," he explained.

"I also felt like it was something I wanted to do so bad, I could feel it in my bones. And the feeling of also having had that many times before in my life – in my career – and seeing that ship sail enough times," he added.

The Whale is out now in UK cinemas.

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Shivani Dubey is a freelance writer covering entertainment, culture, social trends and lifestyle. She has been published in Vice, Vogue India, Refinery29, Mashable, i-D, Little White Lies, HuffPost and The Daily Beast among other titles. You can find her on Twitter .

Freelance film & TV writer, Digital Spy Critic and writer Jo Berry has been writing about TV and movies since she began her career at Time Out aged 18. A regular on BBC Radio, Jo has written for titles including Empire, Maxim, Radio Times , OK! , The Guardian and Grazia , is the author of books including Chick Flicks and The Parents’ Guide to Kids’ Movies .

She is also the editor of website Movies4Kids . In her career, Jo has interviewed well-known names including Beyonce, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kiefer Sutherland, Tom Cruise and all the Avengers, spent many an hour crushed in the press areas of award show red carpets. Jo is also a self-proclaimed expert on Outlander and Brassic , and completely agrees that Die Hard is a Christmas movie .

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Synecdoche in Poetry

This essay about synecdoche explores its role as a literary device, showcasing how it succinctly represents larger concepts through the use of smaller elements. It discusses how synecdoche enhances imagery, character development, and thematic exploration in literature, offering examples from poetry, prose, and classic texts like “Moby Dick.” The essay emphasizes synecdoche’s ability to convey complex ideas concisely and its enduring significance in contemporary literature as a versatile and powerful tool for writers.

How it works

Synecdoche, an eloquent rhetorical device, epitomizes a nuanced interplay wherein a part signifies the whole or conversely. This literary trope, far from being a mere embellishment, imbues prose with novelty, impact, and brevity. Synecdoche, beyond its ornamental function, serves to amplify imagery, streamline intricate descriptions, and foster a visceral connection to the subject matter. This discourse undertakes an exploration of the essence, application, and import of synecdoche in literary realms.

At its nucleus, synecdoche heralds a streamlined and poignant articulation of ideas.

To illustrate, designating a car as “wheels” constitutes synecdoche, employing a component (wheels) to represent the entirety (car). Similarly, terming the film industry as “Hollywood” employs the entirety (the locale of Hollywood) to symbolize a fragment (the film industry situated therein). These linguistic shortcuts not only facilitate efficient communication but also imbue language with imagery and connotation, encapsulating a broader concept within a solitary term.

Synecdoche finds ubiquitous application across diverse literary genres, each yielding distinct effects. In poetry, synecdoche intensifies emotional resonance by zeroing in on a facet of the subject that emblemizes the entire emotion or scenario. For instance, in Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out—”, the whirring saw serves as synecdoche for the inevitable perils and stark realities of existence and toil. The saw, emblematic of these broader themes, assumes pivotal significance in comprehending the poem’s poignant meditation on life’s frailty.

In prose, synecdoche confers depth upon character delineations or locales sans protracted exposition. Charles Dickens adeptly employs synecdoche in numerous works to swiftly convey intricate social dynamics. For instance, in “Hard Times”, he employs the term “hands” to delineate factory laborers, encapsulating their reduction to mere components in the industrial apparatus orchestrated by their employers and societal mores. This utilization of synecdoche critiques the dehumanizing ethos inherent in industrial capitalism, augmenting the reader’s insight into the characters’ societal and personal tribulations.

Furthermore, synecdoche serves as a conduit between the literal and the metaphorical, facilitating the transmission of deeper significations and themes. It prompts readers to transcend textual confines, to decipher and extrapolate broader implications from minuscule details. This interpretative engagement renders synecdoche a potent instrument for layering meaning within a narrative. For instance, in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, the eponymous white whale is frequently alluded to in terms of various anatomical components – his hump, his mandible, his fluke. Each portrayal not only accentuates the whale’s formidable physical presence but also elevates him to a mythical stature, symbolizing larger, elusive quandaries of human existence such as fixation, fate, and the divine.

In contemporary literary spheres, synecdoche endures as a favored device owing to its conciseness and efficacy. It manifests in innovative permutations across novel genres and mediums, attesting to its adaptability and enduring allure. Writers persist in harnessing synecdoche to succinctly convey intricate verities and enrich narrative texture, rendering it an indispensable facet of the literary arsenal.

In summation, synecdoche emerges as a multifaceted literary device that assumes a pivotal role in enriching textual tapestries by enabling succinct yet profound articulations. Its capacity to encapsulate expansive themes within minutiae empowers writers to fashion dense, evocative imagery and deepen thematic inquiries. As both a rhetorical instrument and a vehicle of artistic expression, synecdoche encapsulates the essence of the whole through the potency of the part, enmeshing readers in a profound, introspective dialogue with the text. Its enduring prevalence in literature underscores its efficacy and artistic merit, rendering it an indispensable constituent of the writer’s craft.

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Paul Auster, author who explored New York and life’s riddles, dies at 77

Over more than 30 books, Mr. Auster often used New York as a backdrop for stories of characters struggling to make sense of life’s random chaos

Paul Auster, a celebrated American novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who used New York — and in particular his beloved Brooklyn — as a canvas for tales populated with characters groping for meaning amid the randomness of chance and life-altering events, died April 30 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 77.

His death, of complications from lung cancer, was announced by his family.

Mr. Auster began as a poet and retained his affinity for evocative language and mood as one of the emerging stars of the New York literary scene in the 1980s. Other writers looked to the bacchanal of Manhattan during a boom time of fast money and Wall Street excesses. Mr. Auster found his voice within darker corners of the city and the soul, most notably with his “The New York Trilogy,” three novels from the 1980s later combined into a single volume.

Reviewers often portrayed Mr. Auster as a transatlantic hybrid during a career that included more than 30 books as well as essays, poetry and screenplays. He was fully American in his sense of place and dialogue. To many, though, his books were also infused with French literary traditions, including existential musings and surrender to fate, from his years living in Paris as an aspiring author.

Mr. Auster acknowledged an intellectual debt to France. Yet one of the most recurring themes of his work — how a single, chance moment can change everything — came from an incident at summer camp when he was 14.

A lightning bolt killed one of the boys in his group as they scrambled to find an open field during a sudden storm. “I’ve always been haunted by what happened, the utter randomness of it,” Mr. Auster recalled . “I think it was the most important day of my life.”

More than two decades later, the vagaries of chance led him to his first novel , “City of Glass” in 1985. He was at home in Brooklyn, dabbling with story ideas and worrying about his growing debts, when the phone rang. The caller asked if he had reached the number for the storied Pinkerton detective agency. Auster said no. The same man, still looking for Pinkerton, misdialed Mr. Auster’s number the next day, too.

Mr. Auster then imagined: What if he had pretended to be a Pinkerton private eye and took a case. In the novel, a writer named Quinn poses as a detective. The story unfolds in classic noir style of hard-boiled dialogue and deepening intrigue, but the case also uncovers clues that lead to meditations on language and the lines between reality, illusion and madness.

“Kafka goes gumshoe” was how one of Mr. Auster’s editors described “City of Glass” and the following books in the trilogy, published the next year, “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room.”

The critical success of the trilogy led Mr. Auster to often being called a writer of detective fiction. He complained that such a label was too narrow, saying that he sought to convey life’s Jenga tower of memory, events and decisions. “You could also say ‘Crime and Punishment’ is a detective story, I suppose,” he wrote in a 2017 examination of his work, “A Life in Words.”

His novels that followed the trilogy delved more into the archaeology of the mind, often layered with autobiographical, literary and historical references. “Moon Palace” (1989) unspools the odyssey of a college student at Columbia (Mr. Auster’s alma mater) who inherits 1,492 books (think Columbus voyage) from an uncle and then gradually sinks into misery as he reads, and then sells off, the collection.

In 1992’s “Leviathan,” a novelist named Benjamin Sachs is blown to bits by a bomb he was assembling. Another writer, Peter Aaron, digs into Sachs’s life. (Aaron’s wife is Iris, a backward rendering of the name of Mr. Auster’s second wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt.)

The novel takes its name from a treatise on the obligations of power by the 17th-century social philosopher Thomas Hobbes and also is an allusion to Ahab’s ill-fated obsession with the white whale in “Moby Dick,” which Mr. Auster called one of the greatest works in American literature.

“Sachs,” Mr. Auster told the New York Times, “is somebody torn between his gift — which is literary — and something in him that is constantly pushing him out into the world to make a real difference in a concrete way.” But Sachs is neither a hardcore revolutionary nor a sociopath. It’s unclear what Sachs really wants.

‘Exposing the plumbing’

Mr. Auster reveled in such ambiguities. His characters are often unreliable narrators, leaving readers to grapple with what is truth and what is not. “I’ve always been interested in turning the process inside out, exposing the plumbing so to speak, not covering up the walls,” he said.

Mr. Auster’s narratives were mostly rooted in the here and now. His writing style was not. He wrote his first drafts in notebooks, often using a fountain pen, in a minimalist apartment near his brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body,” he once said of physical act of writing in longhand, “and then you dig the words into the page.”

He then typed the pages on his Olympia typewriter, a machine that was the star of his 2002 book , “The Story of My Typewriter,” with illustrations by Sam Messer. For decades, Mr. Auster puffed away at Davidoff cigarillos, whose gray-blue smoke became as much a part of his public image as his heavy-lidded eyes and thick dark hair.

With his literary fame on the rise, Hollywood took interest. One of his first screenplays, “Smoke” (1995), was something of a love letter to his Brooklyn neighborhood. In the film, directed by Wayne Wang, a tobacco shop owner (played by Harvey Keitel) is the anchor for a group of local strivers and strugglers, including a chain-smoking writer (William Hurt) whose name is Paul Benjamin, Mr. Auster’s first and middle names.

The tobacco proprietor takes a photo of the shop every day at 8 a.m. from the same angle. He explains that each photo is subtly different depending on the weather or the angle of the seasonal light. This daily photo mission was Mr. Auster explaining his own creative method, needing to write every day even if the words are not flowing.

“[The] excitement, the struggle, is emboldening and vivifying,” he said in a 2017 interview. “I just feel more alive writing.”

New Jersey to Brooklyn

Paul Benjamin Auster was born in Newark on Feb. 3, 1947, and was raised in suburban New Jersey towns including Maplewood. His father was part of a family-run business that owned buildings in Jersey City. His mother was a homemaker.

Mr. Auster’s first memoir , “The Invention of Solitude” (1982), looked back at the emotional gulf he felt with his father. “Instead of healing me as I thought it would,” he wrote, “the act of writing has kept this wound open. … Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive.”

Two very different publications — Mad magazine and a six-volume collection of Robert Louis Stevenson — shaped his early life, Mr. Auster said. Stevenson inspired him to craft his own adventure stories. Mad’s adolescent irreverence, he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Report from the Interior,” showed him “you don’t have to swallow the dogma they were trying to sell you.”

He graduated from Columbia in 1969 with a degree in comparative literature — and also took part in antiwar demonstrations and sit-ins. He was nearly expelled when he abandoned an exchange program in Paris, upset over rules that demanded French language study instead of literature classes. (He stayed at Columbia for a master’s degree in 1970.)

He found a spot briefly on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico before moving to Paris in 1971, working on poetry and finding translation jobs. He returned to New York in 1974 and hunted for any way to make money from writing, including once agreeing to try to write a pornographic novel under the pen name Paul Quinn. He gave up after “about 20 or 30 pages,” he wrote.

He also tried his hand at theater, writing plays that included an exploration of futility called “Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven.” It was, he said, “a flop.”

A volume of original poetry, “Unearth,” was published in 1974. For nearly the next five decades, Mr. Auster produced a new book every several years, including “The Book of Illusions” (2002), about a biographer looking into the disappearance of a star from the silent-movie era; “Oracle Night” (2003), about a man who learns how much of his life was governed by chance; and “Winter Journal” (2012), an examination of aging.

He wrote and directed movies such as the comedy “Blue in the Face” (1995) and “The Inner Life of Martin Frost” (2007), about an author (David Thewlis) who becomes infatuated with a young woman at a friend’s country house.

Mr. Auster turned to nonfiction in recent years with “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (2021) and “Bloodbath Nation” (2023) about American gun violence. His final novel , “Baumgartner,” came out last year.

The book follows the eponymous lead character — in his 70s like Mr. Auster — as he deals with failing health, loneliness and looming mortality. “Anything can happen to us at any moment,” Baumgartner says in the novel. “You know that, I know that, everyone knows that — and if they don’t, well, they haven’t been paying attention.”

In April 2022, while Mr. Auster was finishing the book, his 44-year-old son Daniel Auster died following a drug overdose after being charged in the drug-related death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby. According to court records, the girl consumed a lethal amount of heroin and fentanyl while Daniel Auster was sleeping after taking drugs. Mr. Auster declined to publicly speak about incident.

Mr. Auster’s first marriage, to the writer Lydia Davis, ended in divorce. He married Hustvedt in 1981. In addition to his wife, other survivors include their daughter; a sister; and a grandson.

Mr. Auster received several French literary awards. In 2017, he was shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for the novel “4321,” which has a thunderstorm scene eerily similar to Mr. Auster’s childhood experience. In the book, a 13-year-old boy, excited by discovering books and girls and happy with life in general, is killed by a falling tree branch after a lightning strike.

“As his inert body lay on the water-soaked ground … thunder continued to crack, and from one end of the earth to the other,” he wrote, “the gods were silent.”

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Oil Companies Expand Offshore Drilling, Pointing to Energy Needs

Shell and others say they plan to drill for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico in part because doing so releases fewer greenhouse gases than drilling on land.

A ship visible in the distance. The sky is tinted orange from a sunset.

By Ivan Penn

Reporting from Shell’s Appomattox offshore platform, New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles

About 80 miles southeast of Louisiana’s coast, 100,000 metric tons of steel floats in the Gulf of Mexico, an emblem of the hopes of oil and gas companies.

This hulk of metal, a deepwater platform called Appomattox and owned by Shell, collects the oil and gas that rigs tap from reservoirs thousands of feet below the seafloor. Equipment on the platform pipes that fuel to shore.

Political and corporate leaders have pledged to reduce planet-warming emissions to net-zero by 2050. But oil companies like Shell are betting that the world will need oil and gas for decades to come. To serve that demand, they are expanding offshore oil and gas drilling into deeper and deeper waters, especially here in the Gulf of Mexico.

Offshore production, oil executives argue, is not only crucial to power cars, trucks and power plants but also better for the planet than drilling on land. That’s because such operations emit far less of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet than producing the same amount of oil and gas on land, according to industry estimates.

“The world will continue to need oil, by the way, even in 2050,” Wael Sawan, chief executive of Shell, said in a recent interview. “It will have to be lower and lower emissions.”

The greenhouse gas emissions associated with extracting a barrel of oil from the Gulf of Mexico are as much as a third lower than emissions from producing a barrel of oil from fields on U.S. soil, according to a report published last year by the National Ocean Industries Association , an industry group for offshore oil, gas and wind businesses. (Those numbers do not include the emissions created when fossil fuels are burned in engines or power plants, which are much greater than emissions from producing and refining oil and gas.)

Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico fell for several years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. But the gulf’s oil output has been rising over the last decade. The renewed interest in offshore production is part of a larger trend: The United States has recently set records for oil production, extracting more crude than any other country.

Booming oil and gas production in the United States has alarmed climate activists and scientists who want the energy industry to pivot more quickly to cleaner fuels and technologies like wind and solar power and electric vehicles.

“We’re not talking about stopping oil production today,” said Brettny Hardy, a senior lawyer in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization. “But no matter how you look at it, there’s a really dire need to accelerate this shift to clean energy. The things the industry is doing now is not going to help that transition.”

To many environmentalists, offshore fossil fuel production’s potential for disaster is significant. The spill caused by the Deepwater Horizon rig , which was operated by BP, resulted in significant damage to marine life, the fishing industry and the Gulf of Mexico’s beaches.

The spill helped bring attention to Rice’s whale , which lives only in the Gulf of Mexico and is classified by the federal government as an endangered species. Fewer than 100 of these whales are left because of incidents like the Deepwater Horizon spill and collisions with vessels.

“The concern and worry is there for the right reasons because we have been burned once because of Deepwater Horizon,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California who served on a National Academies committee that studied that spill.

The Biden administration had planned to scale back lease sales for oil drilling in the gulf, which environmentalists said would help protect Rice’s whales. In August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reduced the area available for leases from 73 million acres to 67 million acres.

But in November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected the administration’s plans. A month later, oil companies offered $382 million for the right to drill for more oil and gas.

Oil executives say offshore oil operations are far less dangerous now thanks to advances in technology and improvements in standards and regulations. “Offshore oil and natural gas exploration and production is the safest it’s ever been,” said Holly Hopkins, vice president of upstream policy at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group.

Energy companies favor drilling in the gulf because there is a lot of oil and gas there, especially under very deep waters. The number of deep water platforms have grown dramatically over the last three decades, while those in shallow waters have declined, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Federal government analysts estimate that oil production in the Gulf of Mexico will grow through 2027. Natural gas production in the gulf is expected to largely remain flat through the early 2030s.

Shell is the biggest oil and gas producer in the region’s waters. Its outsize presence in the gulf is on display at Appomattox, which has a displacement bigger than the world’s largest aircraft carrier, according to the company.

The platform was brought online in 2019 and can house up to 180 people. It stays in place as ships drill wells near it and connect those wells by pipe to the platform, where equipment separates oil, natural gas and water.

Shell recently launched a smaller floating platform, the Whale, which can house up to 60 people. Another unit, Sparta, is under development. In all, Shell, a London-based global energy giant, operates nine active platforms — including four with built-in drill rigs — in the Gulf of Mexico.

On a reporter’s recent visit to Appomattox, about 130 people were working on board, including oil and gas engineers, cooks, janitors, a medic and laundry facility operators who keep washers and dryers spinning 24 hours a day.

Crews live on the platform for 14 consecutive days, working 12-hour shifts. They return to homes across the world for two weeks, before coming back for another 14-day stint.

There is a sense of pride among those aboard, though they recognize that many people think their industry is destroying the planet.

“There is another side that people don’t talk about,” said Matt Flanakin, a ballast control operator on Appomattox for Shell. “We know there’s a need to reduce carbon emissions. But we still need fossil fuels.”

The platform floats on the deep blue waters with little else in sight. On occasion, a drill rig ship appears in the distance. These vessels are scouring the seafloor for sources of oil.

The platforms create artificial reefs that attract fish and dolphin pods to Appomattox, said Rich Howe, executive vice president of Shell’s global deepwater business.

Shell is not alone in expanding its operations offshore. BP, Chevron and other energy giants are also expanding or planning to expand operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

“This is the cradle of global deepwater,” Mr. Howe said. “It’s where a lot of the technologies were invented.”

The gulf has an extensive network of pipelines and equipment that helps deliver the oil and gas directly to onshore facilities with little processing through pipelines. That makes extracting oil and gas from underground reservoirs in the gulf more efficient, ultimately helping to produce less emissions.

Technology has also reduced the need for as many offshore workers, who are flown by helicopter to platforms and drill rigs. Some control room operators work remotely onshore. And the companies say they are minimizing the amount of natural gas they burn off during a process called “flaring.”

“We want it to be as secure, affordable and as low-carbon as it can be,” said Andy Krieger, a senior vice president for the Gulf of Mexico and Canada at BP, which has five platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

But plans by oil giants, especially those based in Europe, to invest in offshore production strike some climate experts as a retreat from the companies’ renewable-energy investments in recent years.

Mr. Sawan, the Shell chief executive, is clear that the company should focus on the businesses it knows best, a category that includes oil, natural gas and hydrogen. He said it should let other companies, including businesses with which Shell has financial and commercial relationships, develop renewable sources like solar power.

That doesn’t mean Shell is uninterested in newer parts of the energy sector, he added. He singled out electric vehicle charging as an area where his company plans to expand. To that end, Shell recently announced that it would close 1,000 gasoline stations, or about 2 percent of its retail presence, in 2024 and 2025 and expand its electric vehicle charging network to 200,000 public charging points globally by 2030, from about 55,000 now.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Sawan said at a recent energy conference in Houston, “the real intent here is to be able to bring that multidimensional nature of the energy transition and move this dialogue that seems to fixate on ‘Is it oil and gas, or is it solar and wind?’ It’s all, and we need them in abundance.”

Ivan Penn is a reporter based in Los Angeles and covers the energy industry. His work has included reporting on clean energy, failures in the electric grid and the economics of utility services. More about Ivan Penn

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IMAGES

‎The Whale directed by Darren Aronofsky • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd
The Whale writer shares screenplay page with Brendan Fraser
‎The Whale (2013) directed by Alrick Riley • Reviews, film + cast
'The Whale'
The Whale (2014)
Reflection On The Movie Whale Rider: [Essay Example], 525 words GradesFixer

VIDEO

The Whale, Movie Review
Short Paragraph on Whale
The Whale
The best performance in movie’s history
The Whale (2022)
Movie Review: The Whale Starring Brendan Fraser

COMMENTS

The Whale
CHARLIE takes one last step toward ELLIE, his eyes on hers the entire time. The waves reach their loudest level. For the first time, ELLIE smiles at CHARLIE. ELLIE (CONT'D) "This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my--" CHARLIE looks up. The waves cut off. 108.
The Whale Ending & Real Meaning Explained
Throughout The Whale's story, Charlie is shown reading from a Moby Dick essay which calms him and brings him solace.The Whale ending explained that the essay was written by Ellie, and he considered it the most honest piece of writing he ever read.. Charlie was constantly frustrated with the students he taught online because they would give him generic responses or write what they thought would ...
The Whale movie review & film summary (2022)
At Charlie's most desperate, panicky moments, he soothes himself by reading or reciting a student's beloved essay on Moby Dick, which—in part—gives the film its title and will take on increasing significance. He describes the elusive white whale of Herman Melville's novel as he stands up, shirtless, and lumbers across the living room, down ...
'The Whale' ending explained by the play's writer, actors, directors
The movie version of "The Whale" ends with a breath, a bright light and a beach. The last visual shows the sun shining, the tide rising and falling, and a younger, slimmer version of the lead ...
The Whale ending explained as Brendan Fraser breaks down film
The Whale. ending explained: Brendan Fraser breaks down Charlie and Ellie's final scene. Fraser explains his interpretation of what the last exchange between Charlie and Ellie (Sadie Sink) means ...
'The Whale' Ending Explained: Does Charlie Die?
The full essay is never read in the movie and always cuts off before that final line. While we never get to hear what it was that Ellie was glad for in her own life, it's clear that this is the ...
The Whale (2022)
The essay. Charlie holds the whale essay in high regard. At first, it seems like that's just because it's a simple, well-written, honest essay. A thing any teacher might have a soft spot for. Eventually, we find out the essay is something Ellie wrote four years earlier and Mary sent it to Charlie. So there's the personal connection to it ...
The Whale Ending Explained: What Happens in Brendan Fraser ...
Charlie is dying at the very end and refuses to go to the hospital. As he bonds with Ellie, he attempts to stand. Between the effort of moving and his overall mental state, Charlie dies and ...
Brendan Fraser Shares His Interpretation of The Whale's Final Scene
Brendan Fraser breaks down his interpretation of The Whale 's ending after it concludes on an ambiguous note. The Whale premiered on December 9 and is an emotional psychological drama starring Fraser. It has been touted as Fraser's comeback film after he disappeared from the Hollywood scene for many years. The Whale follows Charlie (Fraser), a ...
The Whale Ending Explained: Step Into The Light
He fails at first, but in the final moments of the movie, he actually succeeds. As he makes his way to her, she reads him an analytical essay about Moby Dick that she wrote as a child.
'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser in Darren Aronofsky's Film
And in " The Whale ," directed by Darren Aronofsky (who shepherded Rourke's return in "The Wrestler"), Fraser is a better actor — slyer, subtler, more haunting — than he has ever ...
'The Whale' Review: Brendan Fraser in Powerful Darren Aronofsky Drama
Release date: Friday, Dec. 9. Cast: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton, Sathya Sridharan. Director: Darren Aronofsky. Screenwriter: Samuel D. Hunter, based on his ...
'The Whale' Ending, Explained: Why Was Charlie Hopeful About ...
Thomas found it absurd when he asked him to read an essay that some student had written analyzing the novel by Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. We saw that as soon as Thomas started reading the lines of the analysis, which was undeniably quite bluntly written by an anonymous student, Charlie's pain started to wither away.
The Whale (2022) Movie Explained: Ending & Themes Analyzed
Lopamudra Mukherjee August 1, 2023. The Whale (2022) Movie Explained: Ending & Themes Analyzed: Aronofsky's latest tormenting creation has the innate sense of a murmuring, refractory observation than a purposive nudge towards contemplation. All we see of the magnificent Brandon Fraser's agonized lead is all he sees of himself in every ...
The Ending Of The Whale Explained
The film, based on the 2012 play of the same name, follows Charlie (Fraser), a reclusive 600-pound man looking to reconnect with his distant daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), while dealing with a ...
An Essay on Moby Dick
The Review. 90% Score. The Whale is a textbook answer to the question of why we are still going to the movies. To experience joy, horror and devastating emptiness at the same time, crying our eyes out, and still coming out with a smile on our face from the screening, like the devastating story of an obese teacher was the best thing ever.
'The Whale' ending explained: what happened to Charlie?
What happens at the end of The Whale? 'The Whale' is out in UK cinemas from February 3. CREDIT: A24. As Charlie nears death in his home, Ellie confronts him after receiving a low grade for an ...
Writer Samuel D. Hunter digs deep to let loose his truth for 'The Whale'
Writing "The Whale," says Samuel D. Hunter, "felt entirely different than my previous plays. It was at once easier to write and more difficult, familiar but scarily vulnerable.". (Dania ...
'The Whale'
2022 may be over but I am still thinking about the most emotionally impactful movie of the past year, which deserves its own review and analysis. Likely to be nominated for a few Academy Awards at the least an Oscar for Best Actor nomination for Brendan Fraser, 'The Whale' is a powerful film about a man's desire to try to right past ...
The Whale (2022 film)
The Whale is a 2022 American drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his 2012 play of the same name.The film stars Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, and Samantha Morton.The plot follows a reclusive, morbidly obese English professor who tries to restore his relationship with his teenage daughter, whom he had abandoned eight years earlier.
The Whale writer didn't know about the ending change from the play
The Whale writer Samuel D Hunter has opened up about how he had no idea that the film's ending had changed from the play. In an interview with Digital Spy, the writer talked about the original ...
The effect of 'Moby Dick' on Darren Aronofsky's 'The Whale'
Perhaps the first apparent influence of Melville's novel on Aronofsky's film is the fact that its protagonist is an absolute behemoth of a human being, representing the titular whale in Moby Dick. The 600lb Charlie 'swims' about his ruinous house, although without the grace of the extraordinary mammal. However, there is something deeper ...
Synecdoche In Poetry
This essay about synecdoche explores its role as a literary device, showcasing how it succinctly represents larger concepts through the use of smaller elements. It discusses how synecdoche enhances imagery, character development, and thematic exploration in literature, offering examples from poetry, prose, and classic texts like "Moby Dick."
Paul Auster, prolific author of 'New York Trilogy,' dies at 77
10 min. Paul Auster, a celebrated American novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who used New York — and in particular his beloved Brooklyn — as a canvas for tales populated with characters ...
Oil Companies Expand Offshore Drilling, Pointing to Energy Needs
In August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reduced the area available for leases from 73 million acres to 67 million acres. But in November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ...