At the Venice Film Festival last month, Brendan Fraser got up from his seat after the screening of “The Whale,” Darren Aronofsky’s new drama in which the 53-year-old actor plays an overweight gay teacher who tries desperately. Reunited with your lost teenage daughter – and relaxed, watery-eyed in a six-minute standing ovation.
For an actor whose position in the industry has come dangerously close to territory, this was an extraordinary moment. Suddenly, the former “Mommy” star vanished from the big screen in the past decade (her most recent role was a small part as a prison guard in a handful of episodes of “The Affair” in 2017). ), became the first-place winner in this year’s Best Actor race. Even critics, who had never been particularly influential on Fraser before, praised him (“an impressive achievement”, TheWrap’s Ben Kroll described his performance).
For a brief fleeting moment, it looked like Fraser was about to make Hollywood’s most spectacular comeback as “Pulp Fiction” shocked John Travolta’s near-dead career.
Poor Brendan, it was good while it lasted.
A month later, Fraser’s performance – for which he put himself in a bunch of prosthetics to reach 600 pounds girth – is now at the center of a casting controversy, which threatens to drown, or at least ding. Not only the chances of him at the Oscars, but also those of Aronofsky.
“I love Brendan Fraser, but why? Why go out and wear a big dress to play [600]-Book a strange man? Daniel Franzis – the self-proclaimed “big queer” actor who played Damien in 2004’s “Mean Girls” – complained to People Magazine that “actors like me and my colleagues” [would] Jump. “Advocates of body positivity also threw harpoons at” The Whale, “though they probably wouldn’t be happier even if Franz had been cast as Fraser. They claim that the film itself, its sadly overweight central character, comes with trigger For people with an obesity problem.
Of course, we’ve seen this movie before, but with a slightly different, if not less heavy-handed storyline. Scarlett Johansson was fired in 2018 for playing a character originally conceived as Asian in the live-action adaptation of “Ghost in the Shell”. Emma Stone earned some success for playing a native Hawaiian in 2015’s “Aloha.” Eddie Redmayne’s role as a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” was so controversial that Redmayne later announced that he should never have playing the role (although 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 could go on. ‘infinite. Yet.
But is Brendan Fraser in hot water now? Wearing a fat non-jockey suit? How far has this pendulum reached these days?
To be clear, there are good intentions behind many of these explosive castings. Hollywood has a long and grim history of being largely excluded from public on-screen representation and flaunting or humiliating it when it has been allowed to appear. No one can blame gay or trans, or people of color, for wanting to see themselves more in movies and TV shows, played by actors who are actually gay, trans or people of color. Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days when Mickey Rooney slipped a toothed bucket denture into his mouth to play Audrey Hepburn’s ever-angry Asian neighbor, Mr. Uniyoshi, in the derogatory stereotypical “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Which probably irritated a lot of people as well. Already in 1961.
Recently, however, controversies about who should be allowed to gamble have centered – and increasingly absurdly – in concentric circles of ethnicity and identity. Last year, Lin-Manuel Miranda was forced to apologize because the Afro-Latinos he played in “In the Heights” weren’t dark enough. Steven Spielberg drew some casting criticism for his 2021 reboot of “West Side Story” – not so much because Tony, the white actor he hired to play Ansel Elgort, later turned on a 17-year-old (who has denied) 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, nicknamed by Marnie Nixon). The song was not mandatory).
And it’s no longer just actors who are being drawn into the new rules of identity politics in Hollywood. Operators are also in the sights. and also document Director Meg Smacker’s “Jihad Rehab,” a film about Guantanamo inmates, caused a stir at Sundance earlier this year, captivating critics with its subtle, humane portrayals of the four accused terrorists. “It’s a film for smart people who want to challenge their preconceptions,” Gush said. Guardian,
But Smacker, who lived in Yemen for five years where she learned Arabic before spending 16 months filming her documentary in a Saudi rehabilitation center, has been criticized by many. Muslim and Arab critics, Suddenly, her film was radioactive. Other festivals have withdrawn it from screenings. Even some of the film’s supporters and producers have begun to delete their names from her credits (including Abigail Disney, the niece of Walt Disney’s brother, who at one point called the Doctor “brilliantly brilliant”).
Among Smacker’s alleged crimes? She is a white American who makes a movie about Arab men.
Look, it can’t be said once again that fairer representation in Hollywood is something everyone should strive for. Of course, it’s extremely important not to leave any groups off the conversation or screen. But that doesn’t mean that straight people can’t make powerful movies about gay people (for example, “Brokeback Mountain” or “Mr. Ripley’s Talent”) or that movies featuring gay characters with gay actors can’t. never fail. (er, “bros”) or the stories that were once created with white characters in mind, in a new, more inclusive era (Disney’s new live-action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid”) can no longer be imagined.
Or, for that matter, that a drama about a 600-pound person basically requires a 600-pound actor to play.
The pendulum seems to swing too far in the direction of Mad City right now. But that will certainly change in the future. One can only hope that one day, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., filmmakers will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the characters in their film.
