Movie Review—In the Heart of the Sea

In the Heart of the Sea

by Peter J. O'Connell

In the Heart of the Sea. Released: Dec. 2015. Runtime: 122 mins. Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence, and thematic material. 

In the Heart of the Sea begins on a dark and stormy night in 1850 when novelist Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) arrives in Nantucket to interview Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the last survivor of the whaleship Essex incident in 1820 (an actual occurrence). Melville wants the full details of the sinking of the Essex by an attacking whale and of the events that followed, details that Nickerson has not hitherto revealed. Nickerson tells Melville, and his account becomes the film—interrupted from time to time by cuts back to the conversation between Nickerson and Melville.

The voyage of the Essex was marked by tension from the beginning. Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) expected to be named captain, but the post went instead to George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), scion of a prominent family. As first mate, Chase shows much more skill than the captain in getting the ship through storms and in hunting whales. For his part, young Nickerson becomes immersed in the bloody business of whaling, including literally in a striking scene when he has to go inside the head of a whale and scoop oil out of it. 

Eventually, however, the Essex encounters a “demon whale,” one huge and mottled gray and white. The creature stoves in the hull of the Essex, forcing the crew to abandon ship and attempt to sail in small boats 1,200 miles across the Pacific to the mainland. The men have to contend with storms, starvation and even the eventual return of the “demon.” The horrific measures that the men have to take to survive remain untold publicly until Melville's interview with Nickerson.

Director Ron Howard's handling of the movie's scenes of whale hunting and storms is impressive and reminiscent of great 19th-century maritime paintings. The Nantucket scenes, however, have a somewhat odd, drab quality. The acting is less than striking. Chris Hemsworth is filmed like Errol Flynn or Tyrone power or some other hero from Hollywood's Golden Age but lacks their charisma. Benjamin Walker is bland. Whishaw and Gleeson are good, but the cuts to their conversation tend to deflate the excitement of the main story. And Howard's treatment of the whole second half of the tale, the ordeals of the men in the small boats, is rather indirect and lacks the intensity of the first half. 

The real Herman Melville never actually interviewed the real Tom Nickerson, but he did, as the movie puts it, “add some facts, and leave out others” from the story of the Essex in his great Moby-Dick (1851). In the Heart of the Sea is, we might say, a “great fish story,” but unlike Melville's novel, it is not a “whale of a tale.”

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) Moby Dick (1956) is a movie version of Melville's tale impressively directed by John Huston and starring an impressive cast of Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn and Orson Welles. Although made in the era before computer-generated imagery (such as that used in Howard's Heart), the scenes of whale hunting and, especially, the climactic sequence of the sinking of the Pequod are both spectacular and realistic. (2) Some filmmaker, both intelligent and imaginative, should consider doing a biopic of Herman Melville, whose life encompassed adventure and fame, tragedy and obscurity.