Many of the most powerful and enduring stories ever told have been “based on a true story,” which is usually a kind way of saying “eh, we got the gist of it.” Liberties will be taken, events will be rewritten and characters will be dramatically changed, because life is very often interesting but it takes artists, more often than not, to actually make it make sense.
So taking the true story of a giant, albino sperm whale that once wrecked a ship full of sailors and stranded the few survivors at sea and turning that into a powerful drama about the perils of asserting human dominance over nature is a great idea. That’s why Herman Melville already did it in his 1851 novel Moby Dick, which has since earned its place as one of the great triumphs of American literature (or any other kind for that matter).
And so it takes balls of pure ambergris to make a film like In the Heart of the Sea, which now tells the “based on a true” story that inspired the “based on a true” story Moby Dick. It’s one thing to piece the original events together for historical posterity and another thing to do exactly what Herman Melville did in the first place. Ron Howard has essentially thrown a gauntlet back in time and said, “Mr. Melville, I can do better.”
Needless to say, he has not done better; not one jot, not one tittle. In the Heart of the Sea is an impressive production – so impeccably designed you can practically taste the seawater – but it’s a stuffy and poorly paced narrative that never follows through on its early potential. If Howard had dedicated himself towards actually adapting Moby Dick this film might have been a classic, but instead his cast is adrift in perfunctory dialogue and dreary plots and a message that couldn’t have been more obvious if the last lines of dialogue had spelled it out for us like we were children. And that happens anyway.
Ben Whishaw is Herman Melville, who pays an absurd amount of money for the whale tale of a drunkard named Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who survived the original, legendary attack. But Nickerson decides not to tell his own story, for some reason, and instead takes us deep into the life of the ship’s first mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), recounting a series of important events that Nickerson, as a lowly whaling novice, was not always there to experience, and doesn’t always learn about over the course of the film.
It’s enough to make one wonder whether this old man, telling tales half a century old and boozed up within an inch of his life, is even a trustworthy narrator. Not that In the Heart of the Sea ever explores that territory. Instead we are treated to the straightforward tale of Chase, whose interpersonal conflict with the ship’s inexperienced but well-to-do captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), sets their vessel on a collision course with the leviathan that, in the film’s most impressive sequence, completely annihilates everyone and everything in sight.
Say what you will about the story – since heaven knows I already am – but Ron Howard is clearly committed to making In the Heart of the Sea look impressive. The editing is often choppy, making it unnecessarily difficult to follow everything going on in the film’s more complicated set pieces, but it’s nevertheless easy to fall into the world he has recreated. At one point, young Nickerson has to venture inside the skull of a recently harpooned whale, and it is vile and repulsive and shocking and captivating, because it’s not something the majority of us have ever seen before.
The rest of In the Heart of the Sea is, however, something we’ve all seen before, and not just because we’ve read Moby Dick or seen its other adaptations. It’s a ho-hum drama about clashing machismo, punctuated by one exciting catastrophe, and then followed by a sunstroked (and damn near interminable) second half in which all the surviving sailors are marooned at sea. In the end, all we really get out of it is the reminder that, hey, this is kind of like the contemporary oil trade isn’t it?
And yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been more interesting. There’s a reason why Herman Melville fictionalized this story into Moby Dick, and it wasn’t to protect the identity of an old drunk. It was because these events were more interesting when they were filtered through the mind of an artist with fascinating characters to explore, and meaningful things to say. In the Heart of the Sea may have nifty production design, but that’s hardly a substitute.
Photos: Warner Bros.
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
