My overarching feeling here is that if you hate fat people, love to disparage people, or love to watch people be humiliated and degraded by the people they love and who ostensibly love them, you will enjoy this movie. If you don’t have those traits, you will hopefully be horrified.
Wanna see fat suit-wearing Brendan Fraser, who deserves better (I know he won the Oscar, I stand by my statement), gorge on pizza sandwiches full of ranch dressing and joke with his nurse that she can stab him as much as she wants because HIS ORGANS ARE TOO DEEP IN HIS BODY FOR IT TO MATTER? Go for it! Wanna see his estranged shitty teenage daughter PUT AMBIEN IN HIS FOOD for kicks?? Go for it! Wanna see that same shitty daughter AND the nurse AND his ex-wife (Samantha Morton, what are you doing here???) AND the weird missionary kid who keeps showing up at the house tell him to his face that he’s disgusting? Go for it! Wanna see multiple background characters literally fall silent with horror when he turns his webcam on to show his students what he looks like? Go for it! I will not be joining you.
Charlie, our main character, is a writing professor. He teaches entirely remotely, but not because of the pandemic. No no, this takes place in 2015, during the traumatizing Republican primary, so we are treated every now and then to news clips from that time, as a sort of shit cherry on top of this rotten egg sundae. He teaches remotely because he doesn’t want anyone to see what he looks like, so he tells them his camera has been broken all semester, and they roll with that because no one in Idaho is qualified to fix a webcam, I guess?
There’s a scene where he’s out on his porch and I was genuinely surprised that they decided to let this character fit through the door frame, considering how hateful the movie is to him. That said, once in his wheelchair, they do NOT allow him to fit through the frame of the room that he used to share with his boyfriend, Alan. The room has been left immaculate but lightless, a kind of shrine full of photos of Alan and Charlie before he succumbed to the Darkness of Fatism.
Darren Aronofksy has decided that everyone wants to hear the essays that Charlie’s students are writing, and also essays that his shitty teenage daughter has written. He is so excited by these essays. These essays, dear reader, are very bad. Very very bad. They are derivative and stupid. Charlie loves them, he loves their “honesty.” They are honestly crap. Charlie’s favorite shitty essay, written by his shitty daughter, is about….MOBY DICK. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, hilarious move, Aronofsky, soooooo on the nose. My eyes could not roll farther back in my head.
The cruelty exhibited here is really wild. A walker (in use) ripped away from him by his daughter, the background story of a boyfriend who starved himself nearly to death and then jumped off a bridge as a reason for Charlie’s physical decline, the aforementioned drugging, the strain of masochism that runs through the whole film (“Do you find me disgusting?”), the offer to write his daughter’s essays and buy her love and respect for $120K, every scene where he eats. We are instructed by this movie to be horrified by fatness, to see fat people as feral helpless animals. Charlie is a human being. He is a human being surrounded by demons who see him as a beast, who feed him buckets of fried chicken while simultaneously telling him he’s dying, who make beep beep reverse sounds when he’s in his wheelchair, who threaten (lovingly!) to stab him.
Sidebar: It rains for the entire movie.. Is it Seattle-like in Idaho? Who knew? Yet no one is ever wet. Charlie’s floor is never damp from all the people barging in and out of his house every day from the rain. The only dampness in this movie is Charlie because he sweats all the time. He sweats and he wheezes, and he has several near-heart attacks from things like laughing at his shitty daughter's poetry which he loves, and from orgasming. That’s how we meet Charlie, nearly dying from watching porn. It's gay porn, and the weird missionary kid sees it and he could not be happier to have found Charlie, a "disgusting" gay who needs his help to get to heaven, where he won't be fat anymore.
I’m sorry, but I must speak more about this daughter. Her name is Ellie and she is the worst. I was a teenage daughter once and Ellie takes the whole cake on the Being Shitty to Her Parents thing. I was no angel, but damn. Along with drugging her father and calling him disgusting numerous times, she blows weed smoke into his (drugged) sleeping face and threatens to accuse the weird missionary boy of rape if he refuses to smoke weed with her. So he does! Even though…he got kicked out of his house in Iowa for being…addicted to weed. I am unable.
To paraphrase Chekhov, “If you tell someone they’re dying in the first scene of a movie and then again and again over the course of the movie, they’re going to die.” Or at least something like that. So Charlie dies. He dies after the weird missionary kid assures him that dying will make him not fat anymore. He dies after his daughter suddenly decides that even though she thinks he’s disgusting and she kind of tried to kill him, he’s her dad and she wants him around. He dies, glows, and ascends. The movie ends. Praise be.
