★★★★
There are problems with the epic In the Heart of the
Sea. One big drawback is the way Ron
Howard uses 3D. The film is dark and
hard to see, and its CGI is often so artificial that we might expect to
see Smaug curled around a Nantucket church steeple. The story also slows overly in the middle, and
the script is occasionally too on-the-nose.
“I feel like a speck in the universe,” muses the depressed Owen Chase at
one point, for viewers who hadn’t realized that Providence isn’t running things
for the better in the world of this film.
But that’s what Moby Dick is all about, and Heart of the Sea
is very much an IMAX 3D cinematic gloss on this classic. Although Howard has ostensibly adapted a
different, 2000 book for this film, his Heart of the Sea hews closely to
Melville. Like Moby Dick, it draws
from a dark belief that God isn’t in charge of the universe, and an important
stylistic element of Howard’s film, wonder at the material objects of the time,
echoes Moby Dick’s long passages of such description. The story in the film is from 2000’s In the
Heart of the Sea, but the sensibility is Melville.
From its beginning, one of the attractions of In the Heart
of the Sea is the way it lingers on the material aspects of whaling. The camera gazes at rope and knots, while
composition and lighting highlight objects like whaler-carved vignettes in bone
and harpoon pins that carry prestige.
The dialog is rich in nautical specifics like types of sails and the
time to use them, and there is a raw physicality to whaling as we see it here. Not only do we experience the butchering and
boiling down of a whale, but at one gruesome point, the young Thomas must climb
into a whale carcass to the accompaniment of crew reactions to the smell and an
evocative soundtrack. Similarly physical, the
scenes of Chase harpooning a whale communicate the whalers’ vulnerability
better than most portrayals. Beyond this,
Howard dwells on the commercial side of the industry by giving the merchants’
board a lot of screen time and power, and he underscores the very real way
class comes into play in the enterprise, like Melville.
Elements of the cinematography also add to the visceral physicality of
the film. The movie cuts between
underwater and surface angles of the same action, and unusual angles create an
almost documentary sense of realism. For
example, when the camera speeds at the ship's water line, Heart
of the Sea can feels like 2012’s Leviathan with its pedigree from Harvard’s Sensory
Ethnography Lab. Howard’s focus on the
materiality of whaling is a cinematic echo of Melville’s verbal emphasis.
In the Heart of the Sea is also a surprisingly philosophical
film. From the beginning, its characters express a faith in
an ordered, just, moral world, but the character arc of Chase takes him to the
opposite. The merchant’s
board is show to be a group of liars, and class trumps skill when Chase is
appointed first mate to an unskilled but upper-class captain. There is no justice in this situation. And when the Essex crew confronts the great
whale, Chase sees death come randomly, to the deserving and the
undeserving. The whale stalks the
survivors as they struggle to make landfall, cruelly waiting until land is in
sight before attacking them one final time.
This whale shows brutality at
nature’s core rather than beneficence, a point pushed home even more graphically when the crew must resort
to cannibalism for survival. Yielding under the
relentless pressure of these experiences, Chase’s faith in god, order and
justice finally succumbs, so it’s no surprise when the merchants’ board commits
yet another injustice and requires him to lie about the whale attack and the consequent
events. Through the film, Chase comes to
realize that both nature and society are vicious, and he only recovers himself
by falling back on virtues that permeate American cinema – individualism, as he
maintains his personal honor by resisting the board’s pressure; and love, as he
returns to his waiting wife. Chase’s way
of seeing the world by the end of the film is similar to that so pervasive in Moby Dick.
An annoying paradox of Heart of the Sea is the way it backs away from the very message it carries.
While Moby Dick is “nature red in tooth and claw” in the novel, Howard
isn’t willing to let his whale be what the rest of the film characterizes him
as. While sometimes showing the whale as part
of vicious nature, Howard also justifies the whale’s action as defending the pod
against the whalers and fighting back after being
attacked. One especially saccharine moment
has Chase look at the eye of the whale as though the two were communicating and
decide not to throw his harpoon. These moments are contrary to the general
direction of the movie and make little sense in a film where
the whale later stalks and toys with the sailors.
It's as though Heart of the Sea can’t quite embrace the darkness it
unveils.
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