Originally published December 12, 2015 on FrontRowCentral.com
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has so thoroughly ingrained itself in our culture that most people know the broad strokes without ever having read it. ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat even made that very observation earlier this week (while also mocking those people). But the funny thing about stories inspired by true events is that they are almost invariably more interesting than the true events themselves. They’re allowed to embellish details, stray from the facts, and invent more compelling narratives. That’s one of the crucial failings of Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea: In telling the story that inspired Melville, Howard’s film is a slave to the facts, many of which are excruciatingly dull.
The film tells the story of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship whose encounter with a sperm whale in 1820 ended in disaster. Chris Hemsworth plays Owen Chase, the ship’s First Mate, who is none too pleased that George Pollard, Jr. (Benjamin Walker) has been made Captain simply because of his family name. The two must settle their differences as they command the Essex around the globe in search of whales. Along for this ride are Second Mate Matthew Joy (Cillian Murphy) and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson (Tom Holland). After a grisly-looking sperm whale covered in white scarring destroys their ship in the South Pacific, the remaining crew salvage what they can and drift toward South America in three small boats.
And then the film’s second hour starts.
The back end finds the surviving crew struggling to stay alive in open water; debating over how much food to ration, arguing over whose fault it all is, and…well…mostly just baking in the sun and waiting to die. The white whale makes another appearance, like the specter of death punishing them for their crimes against whalekind, but by this point in the film whales are the last things on anyone’s mind.
In a framing story set many years after these events, we find that an older Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) is the one telling this story to Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw). At first, this device feels unnecessary, only serving to explain the plot of a ship chasing some whales to viewers who aren’t paying attention. It’s true purpose is revealed later, wringing a little extra drama from Nickerson as he reveals to Melville that they had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Initially, I would have suggested that dropping this framing device would make the film leaner and less like an exercise in cinematic spoonfeeding. Instead, these scenes illustrate just how devoid of purpose In the Heart of the Sea truly is.
Adapted from a book by Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea tries to lend equal importance to both Nickerson’s and Melville’s stories. Whishaw’s Melville is a man terrified of his own mediocrity, but we learn very little about his motivation in writing Moby Dick that he doesn’t flat out tell us. It’s a similar framing device to the one in Baz Lurhmann’s Great Gatsby, with Toby Maguire’s Nick Carraway writing what would become Fitzgerald’s novel from inside a sanitarium. It raises the question of why we’re watching this story in the first place; apparently the story itself wasn’t enough.
One of the big draws here is the film’s depiction of whaling in all it’s tragic, disgusting glory. In 1820, whaling was a thriving industry, one of the world’s primary means of producing oil. Today it’s rightly looked on as barbaric, and the film seems to agree. A key setpiece follows Chase and his men as they capture a whale. Time slows down as the men deliver the killing blow, the music takes on a dramatic, somber tone, and Chris Hemsworth looks on with a resigned sense of shame about what he’s doing. It would be a step too far to have him shed a tear, so instead a splash of whale blood drips down his face. That’s about as subtle as this film gets.
Honestly, the film never really takes a stance on whaling other than that it’s kind of unnecessary. It’s portrayed as a gruesome practice, but an insanely profitable one. Pollard is driven to command his vessel and fill her barrels with oil by hook or by crook, and while Benjamin Walker is not exactly the Ahab that Melville later suggests he’ll become, he’s still a man driven by pride and foolishness. In one of the very last scenes, Nickerson and Melville muse over the fact that a man recently discovered oil coming out of the ground, rendering the Essex and her doomed mission utterly moot.
Just as the film acknowledges the horrors of whaling and soldiers on regardless, In the Heart of the Sea seems aware of its own lack of drama and forces us to suffer through it anyway. There is an innate sense drama in this sort of shipwrecked castaway story. You need only look at The Life of Pi or Cast Away for proof of that. Ron Howard stuck a little too close to the truth for his own good with this one. The result is a film frontloaded with action that peters out long before coming around to anything resembling closure. If you find yourself nodding off shortly after the first whale attack, trust me, you are not alone.
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