By Preston Wilder
Is it a man’s world? Not exactly, for all the talk of gender imbalance; not in real life, not in movies either. There’s only a couple of genres where women are invisible – or, more accurately, irrelevant – like they were in the old days: the war movie (though women are making incursions there, too), the prison drama, and of course the old-fashioned seafaring adventure, from Mutiny on the Bounty to The Perfect Storm. Women have no place on board a 19th-century whale ship scouring the South Pacific (though they are briefly glimpsed being worried and pregnant before the ship sets sail); you can’t climb a mainmast, or clamber on the rigging, in skirts and crinolines.
In the Heart of the Sea might’ve been more interesting if the sailors of the good ship Essex had referred to whales as ‘she’, as seamen do with their vessels – a perfect metaphor for men opportunistically hunting from the safety of their all-male enclave – but alas, the whales are called by the masculine pronoun (to be fair, they’re mostly sperm whales). “He’s been following us!” says a shocked sailor, ‘he’ being a very special whale, alabaster-white and – unlike all the other, placid whales – ready to fight back against the hunters. In the Heart of the Sea could’ve been more interesting in lots of ways – but this would-be ripping yarn ends up misfiring badly, losing focus and momentum even as the macho men in uniform keep barking out commands like “Smartly, lads!” and “There she blows!”.
The aforementioned white whale (the one that fights back, and has the temerity to follow the whalers) is the obvious model for Moby Dick, title character of the Herman Melville classic – and Melville (Ben Whishaw) appears in a sub-plot, extracting the story of the Essex from its last survivor, Tom Nickerson, played as an adult by the surely too-old Brendan Gleeson (Michelle Fairley has the only substantial female role as Mrs. Nickerson). Nickerson has a secret festering in his soul, the secret of what really happened to the men of the Essex – and the story, he explains, is really a story of the conflict between two men, captain Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), old Nantucket scion and upstart “landsman” respectively.
So far, so good, with obvious shades of Mutiny on the Bounty: patrician, tyrannical Bligh vs. blunt, beloved Fletcher Christian (except that Pollard isn’t much of a seaman, so it’s more like the set-up for The Caine Mutiny). Yet in fact Nickerson is mistaken, because the film isn’t the story of these two men – indeed their relationship becomes increasingly sketchy and superfluous, especially in the second half as we start to hear of “that demon”, the white whale. The film turns into a monster movie, which is silly enough – but then it gets even sillier, echoing last year’s Unbroken, one of those perfunctory dramas where disasters follow each other and our heroes keep getting hurled from the frying pan into the fire.
I won’t enumerate the disasters – though the ‘festering’ secret may be guessed once you know that the Essex gets abandoned at one point, forcing the men on a small boat in the vast expanse of ocean. The final act makes a bid for serious-movie status (the film is being released during Oscar season), with Pollard and Chase debating the ethics of whaling. Our “arrogance and greed” are what’s led to our downfall, says the first mate; we are superior creatures and must “bend Nature to our will,” counters the captain. Implicitly, the white whale is a kind of divine retribution, a monster sent to punish the whalers for their hubris. Like the rest of the film, it’s potentially interesting. Like the rest of the film, it’s too half-baked to make any impact.
Waggish critics will quip that In the Heart of the Sea is ‘dead in the water’. That’s not entirely true. The film starts off strong, and has all the right elements for a gripping sea shanty despite the relative inadequacy of Hemsworth and Walker (it needed the Russell Crowe/Paul Bettany teaming from Master and Commander, though of course they had excellent dialogue too). Even later on, when the plot is floundering and the film has officially gone from flawed to tedious, there’s a certain romance to this genre, with its claustrophobia and echoes of Conrad and Melville rubbing up against raucous machismo – the massive sails, the sheer physical scale of the thing, the pitiless sea, the faces sprayed with whale’s blood, the agile sailors shouting “Take the helm!” and “Step on the spanker!”. It’s a bad film, but still quite evocative. From a time when men were men, and whales were nervous.
DIRECTED BY Ron Howard
STARRING Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy
US 2015 121 mins
