Josh Brolin: "Whalefall"

 I once knew a "child of suicide." This young man had not yet finished high school; however, his father had opted to jump ship. When we talk about suicide, we're not supposed to choose verbs that imply a sense of agency. Not "commit" suicide. Instead: "die by suicide." The idea is that you're in a burning room at the top of a skyscraper--and the options are sealing themselves off--and so, at a certain point, it would seem insane *not* to plunge to your death.

In "Whalefall," Josh Brolin is troubled. One critic says the Brolin character suffers from "toxic masculinity," but there is nothing notably masculine about the Brolin character. It might be better to say that he is just toxic. Austin Abrams, Brolin's son, tries not to upset the sleeping dragon. But battles are inevitable. In one scene I like, Brolin has issued a sloppy half-invitation, and Abrams has replied with a sloppy half-deferral. The problem of non-communication comes to a head when Abrams's friend arrives to take him to Sea World. This is such a low-stakes scene, but Brolin's woundedness and narcissism create a major eruption. The character reminded me of an English teacher, someone from my past, who routinely arrived without a lesson plan, and who repackaged his self-loathing as sadism. He separated the "good" kids from the "bad" kids, and he tasked the good kids with assigning grades to the bad kids based on class participation. When you are a teenager, you are limited in your defenses; you are asked to trust that adults know what they are doing, even in the face of compelling "disqualifying evidence." The world asks a great deal of teenagers.

One cliche about fiction is the following: Your job, as a writer, is to chase your character up a tree, then throw rocks at that character. Abrams--reeling from the death of his father--finds himself in the belly of a whale. That's literally what happens. He spends most of the movie inside of a whale. This leads to some inspired storytelling. One passage has Abrams chatting with a jellyfish--we are held in suspense as we try to decide whether the jellyfish is a trickster or an ally. Another (my favorite) has Abrams negotiating with a dirty sock. This is clearly a "quotation"--a reference to Tom Hanks with his beach ball in "Castaway."

Everything is slightly contrived--and there is surely a smarter, thornier movie buried within an early draft of "Whalefall." Oh, well. I appreciate risk-taking. I didn't mind spending time with this script and with this cast.