The whale in Moby-Dick is not only one of the biggest living creatures on the planet, but also one of the biggest metaphors in all of literature. So it’s easy to forget the genuine horror we might feel if we ever actually encountered such a beast.
“In the Heart of the Sea,” a new film from director Ron Howard, strips away the myth from Herman Melville’s classic novel, instead focusing on the real-life whaling voyage that inspired it. As a tale of adventure and survival, the film is plausible and compelling. The screenplay, however, uses a clunky framing device for the narrative, creating an unfortunate distance from the action.
Before Howard’s film gets to the Essex, the whaling ship that saw several near-disasters after setting out from Nantucket in 1819, he and screenwriter Charles Leavitt imagine a fictional encounter between Melville (Ben Whishaw) and Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who served on the Essex as a cabin boy as a teenager. Now a drunk, Nickerson is still haunted by that journey, and the writer offers his life savings to hear the story, which is then told in flashback.
The cinematography in “In the Heart of the Sea” is terrific, with some images clearly inspired by 19th-century maritime paintings. Although he’s only first mate, the natural leader of the Essex crew is Owen Chase, played by a dashing Chris Hemsworth. Chase does not have the madness of Melville’s Ahab; instead, his main adversary is George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), the ship’s novice captain.
The journey begins badly. Pollard tests his crew by sailing into a squall that almost capsizes the ship. But Chase persuades Pollard to journey onward by appealing to his greed.
This leads to a series of whale encounters that define the story. We never get a close look at any whale, which is treated as an otherworldly creature. Tellingly, one minor character refers to a whale as a “demon.”
An 1820 encounter with a whale in the Pacific Ocean sinks the Essex, leaving the second half of the film to tell the story of how Chase, Pollard and the other 19 crewmen struggled to survive, notoriously resorting to cannibalism as food ran low. Although Howard has no problem showing whale blood, he squeamishly cuts away from those grim realities.
Gleeson and Whishaw appear with greater frequency in the second half. Yet while they are both good actors, “In the Heart of Sea” can’t seem to stick to the part of the story that really matters. Perhaps the Essex’s tale is too brutal for conventional entertainment.
Based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s National Book Award-winning 2000 book, “In the Heart of the Sea” uses the accounts of Chase and Nickerson as its primary source material. A more straightforward adaptation of Philbrick’s work could have been in the tradition of such red-blooded adventure films as “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” and “Mountains of the Moon.” Instead, Howard’s meta-narrative resembles the recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which imagined Nick Carraway writing the Fitzgerald novel.
No stranger to stories about survival and male ego, Howard has made several recent films about visceral experience and how it changes people. Unfortunately, the lure of this “Sea” feels secondhand, like listening to someone tell a good story. It’s a tentative, half-realized tale that ultimately suffers from a significant identity crisis.
