Brendan Fraser sheds tears for a standing ovation at the premiere of his :: Dancehall Reggae :: Forums

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Posted September 5, 2022 11:49 AM

Actor Brendan Fraser received a six-minute standing ovation Sunday night at the Venice Film Festival, after making a comeback to the profession following personal struggles.

Fraser was attending the world premiere of The Whale, a movie in which he plays the lead character Charlie, an English teacher reconnecting with his teenage daughter.

Fraser was preparing to exit the stage when audience members and people onstage alongside him began a round of applause. He appeared to be in tears at the response.

Fraser had breakout roles in George of the Jungle (1997) and The Mummy (1999). He continued to star in sequels The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008).

The Mummy movies took a great physical toll on him, and he received multiple surgeries as a result of stunt work he did for the franchise. He underwent a laminectomy (a procedure to remove vertebrae from the spine), a partial knee replacement and vocal cord repair, he told GQ in 2018.

Fraser also said he wondered if he had been blacklisted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that hosts the Golden Globes, after he alleged that a former HFPA president had groped him in 2003.

As video of the standing ovation circulated, Fraser received an outpouring of support online.

"Man this makes me so happy to see this beautiful ovation for Brendan," Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson tweeted. "He supported me coming into his Mummy Returns franchise for my first ever role, which kicked off my Hollywood career."

"I wish him to be *showered* with praise, and I've a feeling he won't take it for granted for an instant," another tweeter said. "Welcome back Brendan Fraser. We've missed you."

"He deserves all the love in the world. Dude had a super unfair shake in Hollywood, but now it's (hopefully) coming around and he's going to get his due," one user said.

Fraser has several upcoming roles, including a role alongside Glenn Close and Peter Dinklage in Brothers; in the Martin Scorsese-directed Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio; and Behind the Curtain of Night, according to IMDB.

The Whale Misses the Mark

Director Darren Aronofsky and his star, Brendan Fraser, aim for empathy but come up short.

Darren Aronofsky has a thing for bodies in distress: agonized addicts in Requiem for a Dream, the strain and crack of Black Swan, mother!’s fraught pregnancy. And now there is The Whale, a lugubrious chamber drama that premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday. Adapted from Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play, The Whale is a story of a morbidly obese man, Charlie (Brendan Fraser), living out what might be his last days as his heart falters and his mind is lost to regret.

It’s tough stuff that unfolds pretty much in one room. Which doesn’t give Aronofsky much space for his usual visual panache. So, nearly all of that overeager energy is channeled through The Whale’s depiction of Charlie’s body, a prosthetic creation that Fraser wears like a cross on his shoulder. This is a mighty act of becoming, the film seems to insist—and also one of empathy. But what’s expressed instead is a kind of leering horror, a portrait of a man gone to catastrophic ruin so that we, in the audience, may tap into our nobler, higher minds and see the worthy human being beneath the frightful exterior.

That doesn’t feel anything like empathy. I trust that that intention was there, on both Aronofsky and Fraser’s parts, but their execution is turgid and ghastly. Nearly every time Charlie goes to take a bite of food, Aronofsky’s cues up Rob Simonsen’s unrelentingly bombastic score, plaintive and sinister strings indicating that something very, very bad—and scary—is happening. What might have been a somber and carefully considered study of a lonely man grappling with his past becomes a posturing labor.

Charlie lives alone in an apartment somewhere in Idaho. He’s a shut-in who earns a living teaching writing classes online, his camera turned off to shield himself from his students. (Or is it to shield them from him?) There is at least one caring friend in his life, Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who tends to Charlie’s failing health with resigned concern. Charlie and Liz have a particularly close, sorrowful connection that is revealed later in the film, once Charlie and Liz’s fading little life together is interrupted by outsiders.

One is an Evangelical missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who bursts into Charlie’s world at an inopportune moment: Charlie has just finished masturbating to gay porn, with the video still playing on the laptop when he seizes up with chest pain. (Again, I see little empathy in the way this scene is framed and choreographed.) Thomas, seeing this heaving totem of misery, wants to save the dying Charlie’s soul, a witless effort toward a man who feels he’s past redemption—spiritually, morally, physically.

But maybe Charlie can at least patch things up with his teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), though the two have grown entirely estranged since Charlie walked out on his marriage (to Mary, played by Samantha Morton) to pursue a great love affair with a male student. That man, Alan, is now dead, which has become the defining tragedy of Charlie’s life—well, that and his tattered relationship with Ellie. As his end looms, Charlie tries desperately, sadly to reestablish a bond with Ellie, with an offer to set her up financially for the future.

Aronofsky can’t find a way to make all these character entrances and exits cinematic. He and Hunter, an often terrific playwright doing his own adapting here, won’t let go of the tricks and forms that work in live theater but are stilted and too presentational on camera. There is some easy naturalism in the film’s opening stretches, conversation that sounds familiar and credible. But the film works itself up into a self-conscious lather as it goes, building and building until people are just loudly declaring motivations at one another. With that overheated score blaring away, it’s almost as if Aronofsky is making a parody of hyper-serious fall-movie dramas, complete with a physical transformation at the center.

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