Brendan Fraser

Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an out-of-work American actor living in Tokyo. He accepts employment with an agency that gets performers to play roles in real people’s lives. You may need a friend, for example, or a mourner should you fear your funeral will be sparse. (Tell me about it.) Fraser won an Oscar for a dark performance in The Whale but in this he’s back as a lovable, good-hearted everyman. (Is there anyone who does that better, aside from Tom Hanks?) Fraser plays Phillip, who arrived in Tokyo seven years before to star in a toothpaste commercial and has never left. Presumably, there is nothing, and no one, calling him home. He lives alone in a tiny, dimly lit apartment. His displacement and isolation are firmly established visually.

Auteur director Darren Aronofsky has never made the same film twice. From the grainy mathematical horror of Pi to the romantic fantasy-drama of The Fountain to the sprawling biblical vistas of Noah, each of his films sharply diverges in style and subject matter from the one before it, pressing forward into strange new genres. That said, his movies certainly share some common motifs — particularly a piercing sense of longing for transcendence, for the eternal. Every single film he’s ever directed has this quest at its center. Almost as ubiquitous across his work, though, are ferocious depictions of the body in pain, pressed to its limits and beyond in pursuit of the infinite’s perfection.

The screen begins on black; a slow reverse zoom reveals that we're looking at a laptop screen during a Zoom meeting. We think we’re watching a film reflecting the realities of Covid. But it’s 2016, and the black screen in the middle (reading “instructor” in the lower right-hand corner) belongs to our protagonist, Charlie (Brendan Fraser). He’s teaching an online English class, going through the motions of a job that means very little to him. His world is dark and painful; he doesn’t want to let anyone in. After he logs off, we see his enormous body masturbating to gay porn. His orgasm triggers a heart attack that feels like the punchline to a cruel joke, but it plays as anything but that.

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, it was widely agreed that the best male performance was given by none other than Brendan Fraser in the new Darren Aronofsky film, The Whale. Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter — who also wrote the screenplay — it has nothing to do with Moby-Dick or any other watery protagonist. The title instead refers to Fraser’s character Charlie, a 600-pound middle-aged man who is determinedly eating himself to death, even as his family and friends attempt to break through the walls of pain that he has meticulously constructed for himself. The film itself has received mixed reviews, with some critics praising it and others describing it as manipulative and cheap.

Although it’s not exactly my cinematic bag, I understand why people were looking forward to Batgirl. It is a superhero film (as so many are these days), but with a potentially interesting female lead, namely Barbara Gordon, aka "Batgirl," the daughter of Commissioner Gordon, Batman’s ally. The film attracted a starry cast, including J.K. Simmons as Gordon, Brendan Fraser as the sociopathic antagonist Ted Carson, aka "Firefly," and Michael Keaton gamely reprising his Batman role. It cost $90 million, was directed by the filmmakers responsible for the surprisingly entertaining Bad Boys For Life, and might have been expected to be a modest box office hit: at the very least, it should have provided a couple hours of undemanding entertainment.