This thing was rough. Setting aside the implausibility, Brian Duffield’s (Underwater, No One Will Save You) Whalefall still doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before. The imperfect father-son relationship. The conversations we had, and the ones we didn’t. The anger. The wishing we had one more day together. The regret. The guilt. Duffield uses an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale that swallows his lead character whole as the vessel for his story of life, loss, and redemption.
One year after his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin – The Dog Stars, Sicario), a deep sea diving legend turned cancer-ridden sufferer, commits suicide by sinking himself with weights attached to his body in an ocean bay, Jay (Austin Abrams – Resident Evil, The Starling Girl) makes the decision to gear up with his scuba suit and search the floor of where his father sank, hoping to find his father’s bone or some other remnant that can give closure for him, his mother Zara (Elizabeth Shue – Leaving Las Vegas, Hollow Man), and his two sisters who haven’t successfully reconciled with the fact that the tomb they visit at the graveyard is empty. Great premise…
In my review of 
Silver Linings Playbook was a great movie I would have seen if I had done more research ahead of time. I have known for months now that Jennifer Lawrence is a candidate, if not the favorite, for this year’s Best Actress Academy Award and that Bradley Cooper could snag one of the five nominations in the Best Actor category. The movie might land a spot in the Best Picture category, though it would have little chance of winning. So the Oscar buzz was one reason that got me to the theater. The other was that the movie centered on mental illnesses and broken relationships. Those movies often, but not always, engross me. I saw drama and comedy as words associated with this movie. Perhaps naively, I did not see a romantic comedy. While there was a bit of drama and some attempts at comedy (which I found to be weak), this slowly but surely turned into a romance. By the movie’s conclusion, I was very, very okay with that. Though flawed at times, it came together nicely and felt reasonably original to me. If ten movies are nominated for Best Picture this year, Silver Linings Playbook will and should be one of them.