Spoiler Alert - In case you never heard of this story…
When I was in school, I remember being twice assigned to read Moby D*ck (this forum blocks the name of one of the classics of American literature...it's not a reference to male anatomy), one of the great American novels. It’s one of those books that stuck with me, but I don’t recall being taught that the quest for the great white whale was based on a true incident. The source this film was Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, In The Heart of the Sea, published in 2000. This story (well known at the time) was also adapted by Melville in Moby lord helmet. Back in 1820, whaling was a very profitable enterprise that could make ship owners, captains and crewmen a lot of money by supplying bright burning, smokeless whale oil to the lamps of Americans. It was also breathtakingly dangerous and difficult. Captains and crew members could retire at a young age, but only if they survived. The whaleship Essex was a small, fairly old ship, commanded by Captain George Pollard, an inexperienced scion of a family that had gotten rich from whaling, and his more experienced first mate Owen Chase. In the Heart of the Sea is the story of their voyage on the Essex, the sinking of the ship by an enraged sperm whale and the horrifying tale of the survival of some of the crew who resorted to cannibalism to stay alive for 3 months in small, open boats. Back in those times, cannibalism on the part of shipwrecked sailors (the “Custom of the Sea”) was a something that was well known in the trade, but NEVER discussed. The Essex crew survivors carried this with them for the rest of their lives.
For this movie, the story of the Essex is wrapped in a fictional narrative in which Herman Melville pays a visit to the cabin boy of the Essex, Thomas Nickerson, decades later. Nickerson has been traumatized all these years, has never told his entire story in public and seems to be ready to give it to Melville.
Like Moby lord helmet, much of this film is spent giving the audience a quick orientation to the work of a whaleship 200 years ago. Voyages lasting as long as two years consisted of long periods of boredom and bad food, punctuated by hours of horror killing whales, a “Nantucket Sleighride” that you survived if lucky and then days of fighting sharks for the carcass, which was boiled down for oil. It’s in one these hunts that a huge sperm whale attacks the ship, smashing the hull and forcing the crew to take refuge in the small rowboats, 2000 miles from South America. Fearful of cannibals on Pacific Islands, the crew tries to get to South America, with disastrous results. The rest is a tale of survival.
Ron Howard, who has done a lot of movies I liked over the years, took on the task of filming this and I think his success was mixed at best. This is a movie that seemed like it needed a prerequisite, like in college when you had to take History I before you took History II. In this case, a viewing of the old 1956 Moby lord helmet would have sufficed, so this movie would not have spend half of its run-time instructing a contemporary audience in just what an awful way whaling was to make a living. The real story in Heart of the Sea is not about killing and cooking whales, but just how bad it was for the crew when that all went wrong and in the dreadful story of how 8 of the 20 crew members survived. I guess that would have been just too grim for the audience to watch, hence the added plot element of Melville’s visit and the time spent on Whaling 101.
Another reservation I had about this film was the decision to make it in 3D. There really isn’t much in the movie that benefits from 3D and the usual image degradation imposed by the 3D process seemed like a detriment to film. The extensive digital processing used to recreate the stormy ocean and the whale attack also degraded the visuals. In my recollection of having seen it several times, the 1956 Moby lord helmet movie looked better with no technology. The acting in the movie is pretty standard action movie stuff, punctuated by a lot of inscrutable sailing ship slang like “lower the shivers”, “raise the spar laps”, “chock the booms”, or whatever. A glossary (presented in Whaling 101?) would have helped. Chris Hemsworth (first mate Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard) and Brendan Gleeson (the old Thomas Nickerson) are decent. Cillian Murphy (one of the crewmen) is nearly invisible under grime, blood and whale fat, and has a minor role. The rest of the cast is functional but unremarkable.
In the end, the most dramatic part of the story, the survival of the 8 crew members, and their fates after their rescue, is a relatively small part of the movie. I don’t think that an audience would have reacted well to a focus on what they had to do to survive, but the fictional elements that were added obscure the real story, what was that they survived and HOW they did it. The rest is Whaling 101 and elements added to the story in order to make the writing of Moby lord helmet seem pre-ordained. Some of that was not in the original book at all. I enjoyed the movie but often found myself confused about what was history and what was fiction added to make the history more palatable. There’s no Ahab-like character to give focus to the plot and a factual re-telling of the crew’s tale would have left little popcorn in the stomachs of the audience. The story of the Essex might have done better as a History Channel hour than a popular movie. I can give this one a 3 star rating, but no more.
