At the Venice Film Festival last month, Brendan Fraser stood up from his seat after a screening of “The Whale” — Darren Aronofsky’s new slice of life drama in which the 53-year-old actor plays a gay, overweight teacher trying desperately. Are you reunited with your lost teenage daughter – and bask, teary eyesIn a standing ovation of six minutes.
For an actor whose position in the industry has reached dangerously close to territory, it was an extraordinary moment. Suddenly, the one-time “Mommy” star, who has disappeared from the big screen over the past decade (her most notable recent role was a small role as a prison guard in a handful of episodes of “The Affair” in 2017). ), became the front runner in this year’s Best Actor race. Even critics, who had never been particularly influential on Fraser before, were showering him with praise (“an impressive feat,” TheWrap’s own Ben Kroll described his performance).
For a brief, fleeting moment, it looked like Fraser was set to make the most dramatic return to Hollywood as “Pulp Fiction” defibrilled John Travolta’s near-dead career.
Poor Brendan, it was good as long as it lasted.
A month later, Fraser’s performance—for which he packed himself into a mound of prosthetics to achieve the 600-pound-looking girth—is now at the center of a casting controversy, threatening to drown, or at least ding. Not only does his Oscar chances, but Aronofsky’s too.
“I love Brendan Fraser, but why? Why go out there and wear a fat suit to play [600]-pound queer man?” Daniel Franzis—the self-described “big queer” actor who played the heavy-handed Damien in 2004’s “Mean Girls”— Complained to People MagazineSaying that “actors like me and my colleagues” [would] Jump” role. Advocates of body positivity have been throwing harpoons at “The Whale” as well, though they probably wouldn’t be happier even if Franz was cast instead of Fraser. They claim that the film itself, Its unfortunately overweight central character is accompanied by trigger For people with obesity problem.
Of course, we’ve seen this movie before, albeit with a slightly different, if not less weighty, plot line. Scarlett Johansson was trashed in 2018 to play a character originally envisioned as Asian in the live-action adaptation of “Ghost in the Shell.” Emma Stone took a few hits for portraying a native Hawaiian in 2015’s “Aloha.” Eddie Redmayne’s turn as a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” was so divisive that Redmayne later announced that he should never have taken the part (even though it earned him an Oscar nomination). Jared Leto as a trans character in “Dallas Buyers Club”, Johnny Depp as Tonto in “The Lone Ranger”, Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in “Nina” – the list of casting crimes goes on and on.
But is Brendan Fraser in hot water now? To wear a non-jockey fat suit? How far has this pendulum gone these days?
To be clear, there are good intentions behind many of these casting blow-ups. Hollywood has a long, sinister history of being largely excluded from onscreen representation of audiences—and of displaying or humiliating them when they have been allowed to appear. No one can blame gay or trans people, or people of color, for wanting to see more of themselves in movies and TV shows, played by actors who are actually gay or trans or people of color. No one wants to go back to the bad old days when Mickey Rooney stuffed bucket-tooth dentures into his mouth to play Mr. Uniyoshi, Audrey Hepburn’s always angry Asian neighbor, in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” a derogatory stereotype. Which undoubtedly angered a lot of people too. Back in 1961.
Recently, however, arguments over who should be allowed to play have become increasingly concentrated – and increasingly absurd – in concentric circles of ethnicity and identity. Last year, Lin-Manuel Miranda was forced to apologize Because the African-Latinos he cast in “In the Heights” weren’t dark enough. Steven Spielberg drew some criticism For the casting of his “West Side Story” reboot in 2021—not so much because Tony, the white actor he hired to play Ansel Elgort, later turned on a 17-year-old (which he denied) Alleged sexual assault, but because the actress chosen to play Maria, Rachel Ziegler, was Colombian and not entirely Puerto Rican (at least Ziegler, unlike Natalie Wood, dubbed her by Marnie Nixon). The song was not required).
And it’s not just actors anymore who are getting embroiled in the new rules of identity politics in Hollywood. Operators are also being targeted. and also document Director Meg Smacker’s “Jihad Rehab,” a film about Guantanamo detainees, made a big splash at Sundance earlier this year, captivating critics with its subtle and human portraits of the four accused terrorists. “This is a film for intelligent people who want to challenge their preconceived notions,” Gush said. Guardian,
But then Smacker, who lived for five years in Yemen where she learned Arabic before spending 16 months shooting her documentary inside a Saudi rehabilitation center, faced criticism from many. Muslim and Arab critics, Suddenly, his film was radioactive. Other festivals pulled it from screenings. Even some of the film’s supporters and producers began to remove their names from its credits (including Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Walt Disney’s brother, who at one point called the Doctor a “brilliantly brilliant”).
Among Smacker’s alleged crimes? She is a white, white American woman making a film about Arab men.
Look, it can’t be repeated that more equitable representation in Hollywood is a goal that everyone should strive for. It’s obviously critically important not to leave any one group out of conversation, or screen. But that doesn’t mean straight guys can’t make powerful movies about gay people (e.g., “Brokeback Mountain” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley”) or that movies featuring gay characters with gay actors never misfire. (um, “bros”) or stories that were once conceived with straight white characters in mind, for a more inclusive era (Disney’s new live-action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid”) cannot be imagined again.
Or, for that matter, that a play about a 600-pound person essentially requires a 600-pound actor to act.
The pendulum seems to be swinging too much in the direction of Mad City at the moment. But this will definitely change in the future. One can only hope that someday, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., filmmakers will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the characters in their material.
