Movie Review: 'In the Heart of the Sea'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Call him Ishmael. And call me impressed.
In the Heart of the Sea is the seagoing story behind the story or, as the song says, a "whale of a tale."
The historical epic is based on the true story of a shipwreck in the nineteenth century (1820) that stranded sailors on the Pacific Ocean for three months and inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby-Dick.
Chris Hemsworth (best known as Thor in Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron), an effortlessly commanding leading man despite his inconsistent accent, plays first-mate-who-would-be-captain Owen Chase, the whaler in search of the priceless commodity of whale oil who leads the crew of the Essex, the ill-fated whaling ship in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world.
The beleaguered crew attempts to survive the elements and the lack of food in tiny lifeboats after one of the behemoths they are pursuing, a massive white bull sperm whale reputed to be – and, because seeing is believing, certainly appearing to be in an almost supernatural way -- a vengeful beast, destroys the ship, leaving the desperate men thousands of miles from home battling starvation and dehydration as they search for land a thousand miles from home, hoping to reach somewhere – anywhere -- in South America.
Brendan Gleeson plays Essex crew member Thomas Nickerson, the final survivor of the doomed voyage, who in the film's especially effective framing device recounts the flashbacking tale thirty years later to author Melville, played by Ben Wishaw.
Included in the whaling crew are Cillian Murphy as second mate Matthew Joy, Tom Holland (soon to be Spider-Man in the reboot) as cabin boy (young) Thomas Nickerson, and Benjamin Walker as captain George Pollard, Jr.
These characters will be sorely tested with regard to the lengths they are willing to go in the name of survival.
Prolific director Ron Howard (Rush, Frost/Nixon, Parenthood, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Splash, Cocoon, The Da Vinci Code), a marvelous moviemaker of mass entertainments, tells a true story for a sixth time, delivering an absorbing immersive experience by doing his usual fine job of seamlessly integrating the impressive but not showoff-y computer-generated special effects into the narrative while keeping us engrossed with the process of whaling and the fate of his characters.
Perhaps Howard lets several of the action sequences, during which the ship is throttled by either the weather or the whale, go on too long. And perhaps the editing of those sequences is a bit on the unnecessarily frenetic side. Still, we gladly stay with the story as being told.
There is an admirable and stimulating level of tension, envy, bitterness, resentment, and jealousy among the primary characters during the voyage, although the already-involving drama and its level of emotional engagement might still have benefitted from a bit more character development, which might have translated into more being at stake for the audience.
The screenplay by Charles Leavitt, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Peter Morgan, based on Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction winner of the same name, ever so politely suggests that there might be a contemporary parallel worth thinking about between the obsessive, greedy search for oil then and now.
Just sayin'...
Like Moby-Dick – and perhaps Jaws too, for that matter, for this is, in effect, Ron Howard's Jaws -- this "prequel" is a cautionary tale that explores human nature as well as humans' inability to control nature, a spirited and arresting mix of spectacle and drama.
So we'll harpoon 3½ stars out of 4 for In the Heart of the Sea, a seaworthy seafaring saga that, while it sinks their boat, just might float yours.
