Venice film festival: It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Brendan Fraser’s morbidly obese English teacher in this much anticipated but disappointing return to movies
Darren Aronofsky’s vapid, hammy and stagey movie, adapted by Samuel D Hunter from his own 2012 play, is the festival’s biggest and most surprising disappointment: the writing clunks; the narrative is contrived and unconvincing and the whole film has a strange pass-agg body language, as if it is handling its own painful subject matter with kid gloves and asking us to do the same.
Brendan Fraser is Charlie, an English teacher in charge of an online study course, run via Zoom. He claims to the group that his laptop camera isn’t working, which is why the square on the screen where his face should be is blank. But actually he doesn’t want them to see what he looks like: Charlie is morbidly obese, a giant pool of Jabba the Hutt-type flesh, hardly able to leave the couch with a walking frame to get to the lavatory, gorging delivery pizzas and fried chicken, with a stash of chocolate bars in the desk drawer. Our first view of Charlie is of him masturbating to gay porn, culminating in a heart attack that almost kills him.
But this isn’t supposed to be ironic black comedy and Charlie isn’t supposed to be greedy or lazy or selfish (although these uncaring talking points are not really aired). He is depressed after the death of his partner, a former student from an adult night-school class for whom he left his wife and young daughter; it was a desertion for which he is still guilt-stricken.
Charlie’s only friend now is his late partner’s sister Liz (Hong Chau), a tough-minded nurse exasperated at his refusal to go to hospital. His fragile, lonely life becomes more complicated still with the arrival at his door of a strange young man, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a Christian evangelist from the church of which Charlie’s partner was a member. His angry, conflicted daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), also appears to want to reconnect.
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