“I really hate you for putting me through this again, you know that?”

Putting a play on film is always a risky proposition because the vast majority of plays are written to take place in one location, with scripts often having to tell because the medium doesn’t allow them to show. It’s a similarly dicey proposition to have the author of the play write the screenplay for the film adaptation, because they are often too close to the work itself as it exists on stage to ever really consider doing something drastically different with their own material.

Bearing all of this in mind, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, based on the play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter, has two strikes against it before even stepping up to the plate. The director only leans in to all of this by using the Academy ratio of 1.33:1, forcing film audiences into a claustrophobic space that shares the worldview of its cloistered protagonist Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a 600 pound shut-in living in squalor in bumfuck Idaho, teaching English courses online, and nearly dying while masturbating to gay porn within the first five minutes of meeting him.

His life is saved, not coincidentally, by a missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who views saving Charlie’s soul as the key to his own path to spiritual enlightenment. However, Charlie’s nurse friend Liz (Hong Chau), a former member of the vague cult-like church Thomas is affiliated with, wants him out. With Charlie sensing his own end is near, he is desperate to reconnect with his teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he abandoned a decade earlier.

The film’s script has a theatrical flair to it that indicates melodrama and would likely play well on a stage, but the clunky way characters deliver overwritten exposition makes the whole thing feel stilted as a film. Aronofsky, meanwhile, couldn’t care less about all of that because he seems to be constantly concocting new ways to humiliate Charlie visually in every frame of the film. It’s the kind of movie where the director gleefully uses a meatball sub as Chekov’s gun.

Aronofsky also half-heartedly attempts to tie the events of the film to the looming election of Donald Trump in 2016, never really justifying his inclusion of these bits of information. The play the film is based on was first performed in 2013, so it was a deliberate decision on the filmmakers’ part, but it never really connects those dots. It’s all the more odd when connecting dots is something this script is eager to do throughout. For example, while the film does have plenty of allusions to Moby Dick, the title is unmistakably referring to Brendan Fraser’s Charlie.

Charlie’s pleas with everyone for honesty—from his students, his daughter, and even his ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton)—only ring more hollow in light of Charlie’s inability to be honest with himself. It’s obvious that’s the point the film is attempting to convey, but the film is so blatantly dishonest itself that it plays not unlike a cigarette commercial in the middle of a film about a guy dying from lung cancer. The film is all too happy to have a laugh at Charlie’s expense when it’s convenient for the story, but it’s a low blow to turn around and shame the audience for having the gaul to have laughed in the first place.

Perhaps the major problem with The Whale as a Darren Aronofsky film is that he’s basically already made this movie. 2008’s The Wrestler is the tale of a lovable perennial fuck-up trying desperately to reconnect with a daughter that hates him all while failing to heed plain evidence that his death is imminent. What does The Whale add to that conversation? Not a whole lot, to be honest, outside of making the protagonist even more grotesque.

Supporting actress Hong Chau now has the distinction of being the best thing about two condescendingly cloying films by once great auteurs, following her similarly outstanding turn in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. Her performance here is brutally honest and real despite having to deliver some overwrought dialogue, garnering plenty of empathy as a nurse and enabler with a deeply sad connection to Charlie.

Despite the film’s countless flaws, however, the narrative around Brendan Fraser the human being makes his performance here all the more poignant. He is better than this wretched, judgmental, self-important story and film deserve, and the promise of a career renaissance for this dedicated and deserving actor is far more uplifting than any of this film’s attempts to achieve the same.

Darren Aronofsky’s career is full of wild swings, some of which turn out incredibly well (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) while others don’t fully work (The Fountain, Noah, mother!), but he’s at his best when he’s going for something. He’s not going for anything with The Whale, thinking that the script can do all the heavy lifting while he lovingly films folds of fake Fraser flesh in search of a deeper meaning he figures the audience will glean. Basically, he’s not doing the hard work, he’s relying on others to do it or to have already done it, so he ends up not servicing the work everyone’s doing.

The Whale is a mess of a movie, with a script that has all the phony depth of an undergrad playwriting class and a director so far up his own ass he can no longer see daylight. It’s a shame because there are a couple of great performances here in search of a movie that cares to have them. It’s a bigger shame that The Whale wasn’t that movie.