In the Heart of the Sea

You would expect In the Heart of the Sea to be a rollicking adventure and survival story, but the movie feels oddly muted in just about every way possible.  The look of the film is murky and dark, with some scenes looking like they were shot with a dirty rag placed over the camera lens.  Even the sight of the massive ocean doesn't leave much of an impression.  But most of all, the movie is just a gloomy, depressing and unpleasant experience.

The movie wants to tell the true story that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.  In one of the many uninspired choices that director Ron Howard makes, he decides to make Melville a character in the film (played here by Ben Whishaw).  The movie opens with Melville investigating the mysterious sinking of the whaling ship Essex, in the hopes that it can help him with a story that he feels he is compelled to write.  He tracks down the sole surviving member of the crew, Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), and offers him everything he has for one night's lodging, and to tell him the story of what really happened to the Essex 30 years ago, when Tom was just 14-years-old, and played by Tom Holland in the flashbacks.  This framing device (which pops up throughout the film, interrupting the main story throughout) feels completely needless and unnecessary.  We learn nothing about Herman Melville, or his desire and interest behind the story, other than he thinks he can use it to write a fiction story. 

In the central storyline, we're introduced to the two main men behind that fateful and disastrous whaling voyage, Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and his First Mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth, looking appropriately rugged).  Pollard is an arrogant and spoiled young man who is only the Captain of the vessel because his wealthy father is backing the expedition.  Owen is a confident and cocky man of the sea who was initially supposed to the Captain of the crew, and has a pregnant wife waiting for him back home.  Early on, the movie emphasizes the clashing egos between these two men, and their individual influence on the rest of the crew.  There is a definite struggle between the two men over who should lead and who has the most authority.  This promises to be interesting, until the film bizarrely drops the whole idea almost altogether.  Instead of following the early angle of the rivalry between the two men, the movie becomes a survival story once the Essex ship encounters a monstrous whale that destroys the entire boat, and kills some of the crew.  From that point on, the movie follows the men as they drift at sea for over 90 days, with the whale seemingly following them, wanting to finish what it started.

In the Heart of the Sea could have easily been thrilling, but the approach that screenwriter Charles Leavitt (Seventh Son) takes is a meandering and dull one.  It doesn't help that we learn absolutely nothing about these people who are lost at sea and slowly dying and/or slipping into madness, so it's next to impossible for the audience to feel anything about what they're looking at.  But when you throw in the fact that the movie doesn't even really tell or show us what these men did to survive (we just seem them drifting lost at sea for almost an interminable hour of the film's two hour running time), you start to wonder why you're even watching this.  The movie tells us nothing about these men, what they did to survive, or how they kept their spirits up during those endless days when there was no land in sight.  This is when the film's framing device could have come in handy, with the older Tom telling Melville the details of what was going through the minds of these people.  But the movie never comes close to giving us an answer, and we end up becoming just as impatient for the sight of land as the characters seem to be, so the movie can just be over with.

So, because the movie tells us nothing about the people in this dire situation, and because it tells us nothing about what they did to survive, it doesn't take long for it to resemble a very long slog that's going nowhere.  Of course, we feel sorry for these people as they bake in the sun and slowly die of starvation, but there's nothing behind these images other than just basic misery.  Who would want to sit through something like this?  Give us something we can be attached to, or give us someone we can feel for.  There are a couple moments that seem to be leaning in this direction, but because the movie never really goes into these people or who they are (I don't even remember if some of these people had names in the film), these moments don't work as they should.  This is one of those movies where you can tell why someone would think this story would make a fascinating movie, but the script betrays the basic idea, and simply feels like an endless bout with depression, guilt and death with no substance beneath it.

In the Heart of the Sea tells us that a lot of people suffered, and Herman Melville got to write his famous book.  Is that it?  There must be more to the story than that, but that's all this movie wants to tell us.  Ron Howard is usually a very sympathetic and personal filmmaker, which makes it all the more mystifying how impersonal and dreary this movie is.  Despite some promise early on, it ends up being not very compelling, and kind of an endless and sad experience.

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