Ron Howard’s latest cinematic venture, In The Heart of the Sea, tells the true story of the prolific whaling ship The Essex, and the fateful whale attack that later inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and damn is it ever good. The film opens with Melville interviewing the last surviving crew member of the Essex, Thomas Nickerson, who at the time of the incident was only 14 years of age. The remainder of the film is a faithful, albeit sanitized, account of what really happened in the days both before and after this near mythological event, as seen through Nickerson’s green-horn eyes, though most of the events utilize Owen Chase as the film’s moral centerpiece. This makes sense, given that Chase is such a legendary figure in whaling history, and focusing specifically on Nickerson because he recounts the events would have been a foolish narrative choice, especially given that Chase and the boat’s one-time Captain, George Pollard, have always been the main focus of the human side of the accounts told.
In The Heart of the Sea is the first seafaring adventure I have seen committed to film in years that is not of the Pirates of the Caribbean canon, and is a welcomed addition to the barren genre. I think the popular criticism that the film fails to achieve epic qualities that it supposedly strives desperately toward is a miscalculated notion. The events depicted easily could have been exaggerated to mythological heights, which would have been a step forward in the wrong direction, given that the vast majority of the real events themselves were actually quite intimate and personal in comparison to the commonly exaggerated tale most associated with the event.
I really enjoyed the performances, in particular Chris Hemsworth, and Cillian Murphy as Chase and Joy, respectively, and the visual flourishes. Howard’s now typical use of amber, emerald, and blue hues within the visuals of his most recent works did not exactly meld with Rush, but here actually serves In The Heart of the Sea extraordinarily well, used to near perfection in the night sequences, adding a brooding aura to the nightly events. My only major issue lied within the over abundance of unnecessary CGI over practical effects that would have better sold the near epic quality of the notorious whale.
As a whole, the film works, and oh so very well, but in order for it to work properly, one must set aside bias and arrogance in pursuit of some pure masterpiece, and instead embrace something different for a change. Here is a film that embraces with effortlessness the intimate nature of the real event, cautiously avoiding the kind of overblown blockbuster qualities so many seemed to expect from this film. It is not an epic tale of bravery and courage by macho men in the face of a relentless monster, some epic sprawling adventure with a hero standing stoic and mighty at the end, but rather a cautionary story of remarkable survival filled with desperation, brutality, and an overwhelming bleak atmosphere. The arrogance of Mankind has been the assumption that nature is something controllable by our hand, and not the other way around. The Essex crew embodies our inherent arrogance, savagery, and ignorance while the whale itself takes on the other side; the uncontrollable, the untameable, the wild and free. In The Heart of the Sea marks a high point for seafaring adventure films, and is most definitely far better than some sour souls are making it out to be. Give it a chance, you just might be surprised.
My vote for most dynamic poster of the 2015 film season.
Podcasting Them Softly 