In The Heart Of The Sea (3D)

Synopsis: The story of a tragedy in 1820 in which a Nantucket whaling ship was destroyed  by a giant  sperm whale, the incident  that was the inspiration for Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”.

Films about adventure on the high seas typically have huge storms, a desert island shipwreck and, most importantly, a conflict between a vain and arrogant captain and a level-headed and heroic first mate.  In the Heart of the Sea gives us all these but tends to put too much of its energy into the first two aspects and not enough into the third.

The film opens with a over-CGi’d recreation of mid-nineteenth century Nantucket and insistent camerawork designed to maximize the  value of the 3D visuals.  DOP Anthony Dod Mantle shoots through mullioned windows, ranks of rigging and ship’s paraphernalia with characters pointedly positioned between fore and background.  Then in short order come a sudden storm, the pursuit and capture of a whale and the first encounter with the Leviathan.  As all this is pretty much film-making technology it is both impressive as spectacle and unengaging as drama.  Which is curious when we know that all the best instances of the sea-faring genre are so not because of technical prowess but because of the conflict between its main characters. Hence the 1935 version of Mutiny On The Bounty with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable remains the best of the three versions of the story to date, technical advances notwithstanding.

Oh, that director Ron Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt had spent more time in developing the characters and less in giving work to a horde of computer gnomes, given us more clashes between Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and First Mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and less of people yelling over crashing seas and the crashing score by Roque Baños. Hemsworth’s role cries out for Russell Crowe, for, growling basso voice aside, the young Australian actor cannot make up in physical presence what the script has failed to give him in terms of opportunities for self-assertion.  And Walker is incongruously measured for a supposed seaboard tyrant, even less well served by the script which gives him only a couple of scenes to establish the wilfulness of his character.

The second half of the film, in which the ship is destroyed by the justly enraged whale and the crew face the probability of their demise is a good deal more involving, partly because it is simpler in form, partly because it addresses themes of powerful immediacy.  Even here, however, the failure to properly establish the Pollard-Chase dynamic leaves the two drifting alongside each other rather than coupled together by their individual and shared fixations

What the film does well is to contrast the relationship between the factual events related by Brendan Gleeson’s sole survivor to Ben Wishaw’s Herman Melville and the latter’s fictional transformation of it into one of the classic texts of 19th century Western literature.  This, however, is hardly enough, particularly for audiences not familiar with the book or at least one of its many filmic variants.

In The Heart Of The Sea is, as you would expect from Ron Howard, a top drawer production, but one which is dramatically underwhelming.

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