THE HEART OF THE SEA

BEFORE MOBY DICK

In the Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard.

            Ron Howard’s latest movie displays a rather unusual layering of sources, originating as a book by Nathaniel Philbrick about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, itself based on the actual contemporary account of the incident, which in part inspired Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick.  The movie shows Melville (Ben Wishaw) visiting Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who served as a young boy on the ship, to find out the truth behind the event and the subsequent survival of some of the crew.  At first reluctant, apparently laboring under a burden of guilt from the past, Nickerson recounts his memory of the voyage and the attack of the whale that sank the Essex.  His story then comes to life in the extended flashback that constitutes the major portion of the movie.

  Howard shows the fascinating details of loading the ship’s supplies, the implements and tools the crew need to ply the profitable and extremely dangerous trade of whaling, and examines a few of the personalities involved in the voyage.  He essentially invents a conflict between the chief character, first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and the captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), both of them actual people who sailed on the doomed voyage, providing a perhaps unnecessary context that ultimately distracts from the central story.  When in the course of the voyage—a three-year journey—the crew meets another ship’s crew in South America, they hear the story of a white whale that sank their ship; the captain refuses to believe what he regards as a fantasy and sails for the area where the sinking allegedly occurred.  When they encounter a whole herd of whales, the crew launches their boats, but one of the whales (not really white, by the way, but mottled), turns and swims furiously toward the Essex, ramming and sinking it.  The rest of the film turns into a survival story, with Owen Chase and Captain Pollard sailing their little boats across thousands of miles of open ocean before finding land and eventually, rescue.

The author of the book shows that the survivors accomplished an amazing feat of seamanship in their long journey, superior even to the epic feat of Captain Bligh of the Bounty.  The director chooses to deal mostly with the Tom Nickerson’s remorse, the result of the cannibalism that the survivors practiced, actually an accepted practice in such desperate circumstances, a kind of law of the sea, well known among the inhabitants of the great whaling port of Nantucket Island.  That focus makes the presence of Herman Melville a kind of footnote to the story, perhaps to remind the audience of the basis of the novel.  Although colorful and certainly authentic in its details, the film sacrifices the real dangers and real courage of whaling for the melodrama of guilt and the personal stories of Owen Chase and George Pollard.  Although it shows some of the actual work of whaling, In the Heart of the Sea could benefit from more of that historical accuracy and less emotional invention.