Commentary: For Hunter and Fraser, an emotional journey

As Brendan Fraser gently took hold of the “best actor” totem at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night, it wasn’t entirely clear he’d be able to utter his acceptance speech. Visibly shaking, he made several attempts at opening remarks, which all came out monosyllabic.

Finally, in a quavering voice, he said, “So this is what the multiverse looks like.”

From the start, Fraser proved the perfect spokesperson for Sam Hunter, the reflective, Moscow-born-and-raised playwright whose film adaptation of his 2012 play “The Whale” became such a lengthy, arduous and ultimately rewarding experience.

The film Darren Aronofsky directed with kid gloves and a huge fund of courage, drawing intimately from Hunter’s first career screenplay, claimed two Oscars that night, one for makeup and this grand one from inside the makeup and prosthetics. It was Fraser’s first Oscar, at age 54, and it came after a period of personal unsettledness that included a five-year absence from feature films.

“I started in this business 30 years ago,” said the star of “Encino Man” (1992), “The Mummy” trilogy (1999-2008) and dozens of other movies. “Things didn’t come easily for me, but there was a facility that I didn’t appreciate at the time, until it stopped.”

The facility engulfs the screen in “The Whale,” the story of a chronically obese man teaching at the University of Idaho (not explicitly noted as such), who’s trying to coax his online essay-writing students into honest observations and, more importantly, to coax his embittered teenage daughter back into his ken. Watching the film, like making it must have been, is emotionally overpowering.

Hunter, now in his early 40s, drew from aspects of his own life in writing “The Whale,” including his experience as an English instructor at Rutgers University and, earlier, a stint as a student at a Christian fundamentalist school that looked askance at his gayness. In between, he has said, came a period of morose overeating. Hence the play, and the movie.

But the film concept lay on Aronofsky’s back burner for a decade as he searched for an actor to inhabit the role. When he found Fraser, ripe for a comeback, he found the film. So did Hunter.

“I’m grateful to Darren Aronofsky for throwing me a creative lifeline and hauling me aboard the good ship ‘The Whale,’ ” Fraser said in his tearful acceptance speech. “It was written by Samuel D. Hunter, who is our lighthouse.”

A television camera then briefly found Hunter, two seats away from Aronofsky, delivering to Fraser a look of incalculable, perhaps puzzled import.

Hunter had delivered such emotional honesty to the play and the film. Now Fraser, in a three-minute acceptance speech before the world, seemed to be reflecting it back to him.

Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2290.