A wreck of an earnest tale

Review

Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea is a curious beast. The ambitions are as big as a whale, the results are an earnest wreck. It could possibly work if you think of the movie as a metaphor for the story it’s trying to tell, but that’s a little too meta for something that should be fairly straightforward.

It’s ostensibly about the real expedition that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which Nathaniel Philbrick wrote about in his nonfiction book. But despite a promising start, something is lost in the spectacle and the framing device, which ultimately undermines its own story.

Howard uses Melville as a character (played by Ben Whishaw) and his curiosity about the mysterious circumstances of how the whaleship Essex sank as the audience’s entry into the story. He’s looking for big answers about the unknown. So, he finds Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the ship’s only remaining survivor, who’s drinking his life away. At his wife’s pleading, and Melville’s promise of generous payment for one night’s conversation, Tom starts to spill the events of 30 years ago, when he was 14 (played by Tom Holland). It’s best not to do the math.

This is the story of two men, he says: A Captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), and his first mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth). Pollard is the son of the expedition’s proprietor. He’s wealthy, arrogant, entitled and inexperienced. Chase is the real seaman — a workingclass Adonis with a classist chip on his broad shoulders. He’s also arrogant, but has the skills to back it up.

Perhaps the most striking scenes are those that deal with the process of catching a whale, from spearing to the gory disembowelling.

Hemsworth is best when he’s by himself — either barking orders or doing something physical. Of all the actors he shares scenes with, it’s Cillian Murphy as his second mate who brings out something resembling emotion.

In the Heart of the Sea tries to be about so many things — ambition, capitalism, greed and survival. In the end, it feels most interested in how Herman Melville got his classic. The pieces are there, but apparently it’s up to Moby-Dick to assemble them, not Howard.

—AP