December 16: In the Heart of the Sea (2015 -- Ron Howard)

★★★★

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.

But flaws aside, In the Heart of the Sea is ambitious, deeply engaging and thought-provoking.  It lingers in the memory and makes us think about how we see the world, even here on land.