Review of In the Heart of the Sea
When you’re trapped in a lifeboat, a thousand kilometres at sea, the slightest miscalculation can be the difference between rescue and disaster. A similar predicament bedevils director Ron Howard, whose previous based-in-truth tales — from Apollo 13 to Rush — have all been good-to-great movies.
The latest, however, fails to make landfall. And yes, that will be my final overt oceanic metaphor. Avast! His first mistake may be in straying too far from the source material. Nathaniel Philbrick’s excellent 2000 nonfiction work provides the film’s name and should have served as more of a template for the plot. Give the book a judicious trim, an appendectomy and an endnote-ectomy, and your screenplay is almost ready to go.
Instead, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), and Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) slice and dice the tale, adding more whale, modifying motivations and wrapping the whole story up as an “as-told-to.” Ben Whishaw plays Herman Melville, visiting the former cabin boy Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson, a dead ringer for the actual man), to get the truth of the story before going off to fictionalize it as Moby Dick.
The bones of the tale stagger belief. In August of 1819, the whaleship Essex, 27-metres long and 238 tons, with a crew of 21, departed the island of Nantucket on a routine hunt for whales, once a valuable source of lighting oil. After 15 months at sea, and now in the middle of the Pacific, she was rammed by a whale and sank. Whales don’t attack ships, but no one had informed this one. The crew jerry-rigged their whaleboats into lifeboats and tried to find their way to South America. Not everyone made it.
Howard does a good job with the central event, and even better with an earlier encounter in which the Essex crew brings down a whale and strips it of its blubber and oil.
Less effective are the more personal moments. There’s needless tension as Melville visits Nickerson and tries to get him to open up. Will the old man talk? I’m guessing yes, or the movie will be quite short. And how does Nickerson, a mere cabin boy, pretend to know so many details of what went on between the squabbling captain and first mate? But I did find it ironic when the ship’s owners want the survivors to lie about the whale attack so as not to harm the industry’s fortunes. Says one man: “I will not embroider the truth ... for profit.”
Why not, when that’s what In the Heart of the Sea wants to do? And yet the tactic backfires anyway, because the fictional elements of the tale don’t do the story any service.