Oscar Hopefuls: Babylon & The Whale

It's that time of the year when all the Oscar movies are out in earnest and the awards chatter is at fever pitch. So over Christmas break, I took a gander at two high-profile pieces of Oscar bait and...oof. 

Babylon: Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, this movie is a quintessential ode to Hollywood, a love letter to the movies that is meant to tug at the heartstrings of sympathetic Oscar voters who love nothing more than to fete their own profession. As soon I saw this film was three hours long, I knew that I might be in for a rough ride and I was sad to discover I was right.

The movie follows a bunch of characters involved in the movies from the height of silent cinema to the birth of the talkies. The first half is the best part of this movie - that's when you simply get a frenetic, chaotic, music video-esque introduction to the world of Hollywood and its gaudy hedonistic excesses. There's a massive scene set at a party/bacchanal at a producer's mansion, and the technical wizardry and choreography required to stage those shots are truly staggering. And then there is an extended scene once the switch to talkies is imminent, where we get a bunch of filmmakers trying to deal with how to make a talking picture. I burst out laughing at one point and couldn't stop giggling for a minute as an increasingly irate director lost his mind about all the various technicalities that kept screwing up his shot. 

If that last scene sounds a bit like Singin' in the Rain to you, you're not wrong. I was very happy when I thought that maybe this movie would just be an R-rated version of that picture. However, the second half quickly fell apart and took more of an interest in the rise and fall of its various characters, who weren't all that interesting. The cast is spectacular, with the likes of Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Jean Smart swanning about, doing their best old-timey Hollywood acts. But gosh, this script is over-the-top and ridiculous and completely swallows its own tail by the end.

Babylon is such a self-aggrandizing movie that is so besotted with itself - and perhaps that's a meta commentary on the lavish insanity of the self-involved people it is depicting. But no. I don't think it's that clever. This is a movie that wants to hammer home the message that movies are great, but ironically, it is terrible. Go for the production design, costumes, thumping score, and impeccable cinematography by Linus Sandgren. But if you're expecting a rousing and uplifting story, you're out of luck.

The Whale: Yes, Brendan Fraser does some fantastic acting in this movie and deserves an award. But I did not like this movie. The tone is icky and feels like it is trying to shame a person for being morbidly obese and turn it into a personal failing rather than a broader public health and societal failure. And I didn't realize the script by Samuel D. Hunter was based on his play, but it did then make sense why this movie is so claustrophobic and contained, where we sit in Charlie's apartment and watch people come in and out of his life and offer up snippets of his personal life to sort of explain why he is the way that he is, but never going very deep.

The movie tells the story of Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a morbidly obese man who is homebound and dependent on his friend, Liz (the wonderful Hong Chau), who is a nurse, to drop by and check in on him. She is extremely frustrated because he refuses to get health insurance and go to the hospital, but they are best friends and she cannot abandon him. When his angry teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink, who is having quite the year after her turn in Stranger Things) starts to visit him, that prompts more discussion of his past and what has now led him to his current state.

I simply couldn't get into this script or the dialogue. Everything felt so clunky and forced, and there was too much talk about how Charlie was "disgusting" and not fit for public consumption. Hollywood traditionally has such a phobia of fat people, and this movie feels like it's piling on to that narrative. Every time Charlie eats, it is sloppy and messy - that's unnecessary! Why must you show him wiping his hands on his clothes or smearing his face with grease? A person can be obese and still know how to chew their food and eat it neatly. If this movie had focused solely on an examination of Charlie's psyche and his emotions and the reasons he became the man he was, I could get behind it. But it became too much about "look at the fat guy." 

Fraser does a fantastic job of portraying the physicality of this role, and the strain and toll that all this excess weight does to a person's daily functioning. And then he also successfully gives this man a rich emotional inner life, grieving about his ex-partner, trying to foster a fragile connection with his child, joking around with his best friend. But director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let those moments live and breathe, always bringing us back to this fat suit and how gross this fat man is. I've had obese patients before and I know what barriers to care they face from health care providers who want them to take all the blame for their situation. Movies like this only further that narrative and make obesity seem like sort of carnival sideshow attraction. Fraser's performance is integral to ensuring that this man feels like a human being and not an animal (or...a whale, sigh), but with this script and direction, that's an uphill battle.