Ron Howard maintains his reputation as a director of solidly entertaining, if not particularly challenging, cinema with his adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 book about the sinking of the whaling ship Essex in 1820 - the real-life event that inspired Herman Neville’s novel Moby Dick.
This feature acts as a framework for the film, as we open with Melville (Ben Whishaw) arriving at the house of the last survivor of the Essex, Thomas Nickerson (Brendon Gleeson), thirty years after the incident took place. Seeking inspiration for the novel, he offers a reluctant Nickerson money to recount the sinking. The story then turns to Nantucket in 1820, where Nickerson is a fourteen-year-old cabin boy aboard the whaling ship, alongside the veteran first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), an inexperienced seaman from a distinguished whaling family.
The ensuing story sees Chase and Pollard clash heads as the crew struggle to find any whales, before trying for “Offshore Grounds” in the Pacific on the advice of a drunken Spanish captain that talks of a great white whale that destroyed his ship and killed several of his men. There they encounter this whale, which subsequently destroys their ship and renders them adrift at sea, struggling to stay alive. And as we are hearing this story from Nickerson, at least one of them obviously does (all of which is in the trailer).
Upon release, almost nine months after its original scheduling in March 2015, In The Heart of the Sea received a decent critical pounding. While I don’t believe it to be as bad as its harshest critics, it does have a lot of problems. Principally, it looks like a solid film that has been butchered in the edit; a running time of almost exactly two hours is laughable for a story of this magnitude, and results in a fragmented, rushed feel to the final film. A movie about Herman Melville quickly turns into a story of a clash between two whalers from different backgrounds, which then becomes the story of the White Whale, which then turns to Castaway, before ending up in a kind of courtroom drama. There’s no cohesion joining these episodes together, and as a result it’s hard to develop an emotional attachment to any one focal point.
Ron Howard is commendably old-fashioned in his story telling, with films like Cinderella Man, Apollo 13 or A Beautiful Mind never going to be top of the list of high brow cinema, but entertaining and engaging enough due to his skillful use of technology, as seen with the fight scenes in Cinderella Man (in which he utilised a camera inside a tire that served as a punching bag) or the thrilling race scenes in Rush. On paper, In The Heart of the Sea belongs in that category, but in execution, the old-fashioned nature of the narrative clashes with his unnecessarily gimmicky cinematography. Each scene is a microcosm representing the main problem with the film itself: strangled and chopped, trying far too hard to be kinetic. It seems part of a larger problem with filmmaking in general, where directors are afraid to let scenes play out naturally (or as natural as it can be with an 80ft CGI whale). Audiences are rarely trusted to sit through three hours of something other than sci-fi or fantasy, and are seemingly unable to last more than a few seconds without a cut.
The performances are all commendable; particularly lead Chris Hemsworth and an under-used Cillian Murphy. Brendon Gleeson too is as reliable as ever, gruff and weather-beaten, glugging whiskey and rapping his fingers on an oak desk as he retells the story.
You can’t help but feel that there is a good film in here somewhere, but we’ve just not been shown it yet. Howard’s films only ever really range from a 4/10 to 7/10 anyway, but perhaps a director’s cut in the future could push In The Heart of the Sea towards the upper echelons of that bracket.
In the Heart of the Sea is on general release now.
In the Heart of the Sea official website
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