DECEMBER 15, 2015
Leave it to Ron Howard to make cannibalism boring.
Welcome to “In the Heart of the Sea,” Howard’s latest epic which details the sinking of the whaling ship Essex in 1820, which became the basis of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” I first saw a trailer to the film in the fall of 2014, promising a March 2015 release. At the last minute, Warner Bros. decided to save the film’s release for awards season. They needn’t have bothered.
“In the Heart of the Sea” is book-ended with flash-forward scenes of Melville (Ben Whishaw) interviewing the lone living survivor of the Essex, Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson). The old sailor at first won’t talk, but give him a bottle of booze, and he’s singing like a songbird. A sailor who likes to drink, imagine that.
Tom’s tale focuses on the Essex’s strapping first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), who bids farewell to his wife in a typical “I’ll be back in no time” scene and sets off to hunt whales for their oil, which is needed to keep their seaside town of Nantucket illuminated. Promised a captain’s title for this voyage by his employer, Owen is angered upon hearing that the ship will be captained instead by the inexperienced George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) who got the post through family connections. Uh-oh, this is not going to end well.
Once the Essex is at sea, the film momentarily picks up, as it takes the time to demonstrate just what it takes to make a whaling ship run. I had no idea and was fascinated at the detailed work that sailors had to do at that time. These promising scenes last only a few minutes, however, because it’s time for the CGI whales to show up.
Now the sight of a gigantic white whale on the rampage is the only reason anyone would want to see “In the Heart of the Sea,” but the CGI here is so obviously artificial that any thrill of seeing a whale destroy a ship fades with every new shot. Granted, trying to create believable digital effects on the water is one of the toughest challenges for any director. The only film in recent memory to pull it off successfully was “Life of Pi” (to which this film bears a startling resemblance structurally). And despite being regarded as an icon of Hollywood, director Ron Howard is nowhere near the filmmaker that “Pi’s” Ang Lee is.
The problem with the approach taken by Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt is that the film becomes much more spectacle-driven than character-driven in the first half, so when the remainder of the film largely consists of men in lifeboats, we have no stake in their survival because we don’t know them. When one guy says something that sounds important, one’s first reaction becomes “Who’s that again?”
Hemsworth gets by on movie-star charisma — he’s handsome, we like him, and he does heroic things. That’s enough here. But good actors like Walker, Cillian Murphy as the ship’s second mate and Tom Holland as young Tom Nickerson are lost because the material simply isn’t there. By the time the crew, out of desperation, makes the huge decision to devour one of their dead colleagues in order to survive, it comes off as a big “eh.”
If you’re looking for a real movie about a great white whale, rent the 1956 John Huston film of “Moby Dick.” Or better yet, read the book.
GRADE: D+
