“The Essex disaster is not a tale of adventure,” writes Nathaniel Philbrick in his solemn retelling of the 1820 shipwreck that led to unspeakable horrors on the high seas. “It is a tragedy that happens to be one of the greatest true stories ever told.” You wouldn’t know it by watching director Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea, a neutered take on Philbrick’s nonfiction masterwork of the same name. The film not only ignores the author’s sober warning; it actively mocks what made his well-researched account of a Nantucket whaling ship’s doomed voyage so gripping.
This Hollywood adaptation of the chilling National Book Award winner is a muddled yarn, lousy with botched narrative rewrites. It inexplicably plays fast and loose with riveting historical fact. As a result, the film rids every bit of pathos from what little remains of the truth. It instead tells a mind-numbingly bland story of towering heroes and dastardly villains, both cetacean and human. Once screenwriter Charles Leavitt, the man culpable for The Mighty and K-PAX, has his way with Philbrick’s book, its greatness is reduced to mere flotsam.
In the Heart of the Sea vaguely dramatizes the awful events that would partly inspire the climax to Moby-Dick. As if to justify its existence, the film (and its marketing team) takes great pains to underline this particular historical footnote. Yes, the sinking of the Essex captivated the mind of Herman Melville. But it also unsettled generations of Americans before the Titanic’s notoriety upstaged it. In other words, the Essex was, for good reason, a big deal apart from its small contribution to American literature. And yet, In the Heart of the Sea is framed as a direct prequel to Moby-Dick, one replete with laughable (and ahistorical) allusions to Ahab and the White Whale.
The film begins decades after the tragedy, with Melville (a tortured Ben Whishaw) desperate to interview Thomas Nickerson, the youngest survivor of the wreck (played in old age and in youth by Brendan Gleeson and Tom Holland, respectively). While it’s ostensibly through Nickerson’s eyes that we return to the start of the tale, Ron Howard hangs In the Heart of the Sea on Owen Chase, the Essex’s first mate. As portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, Chase is gallant and noble, a maritime Norse God. He stands in stark contrast and in constant opposition to Captain George Pollard, Jr. (Benjamin Walker), here an entitled incompetent. Once this central conflict between the ship’s top officers is established, the Essex sets sail, harpoons at the ready and majestic mammals in its target.
As viewers of the film’s trailer know, a gigantic sperm whale attacks and destroys the Essex, as if in retribution, two thousand miles from the western coast of South America. Howard presents this pivotal moment — the first of its kind (though not the last historically) — as an audio-visual melee. What should be a harrowing cinematic ordeal is instead executed as an incoherent mess. So the Essex goes down, and its 20 castaways are left to drift in three small whaleboats in the middle of the Pacific. I won’t spoil what happens next, but you can guess the grisly acts these men are forced to perform after months stranded at sea.
Altering history for dramatic effect is far from a mortal sin in filmmaking. Documentaries notwithstanding, there’s an understanding that minor details shouldn’t get in the way of a good story. This isn’t the case with In the Heart of the Sea, whose narrative few would mistake for anything more than barely competent (and that’s being generous). The facts it omits and modifies are vastly more interesting than what ends up in this disastrous disaster movie. For example, the real crew of the Essex most likely would have survived had they sailed west to the Marquesas, rather than east to South America. The crew voted against a much shorter journey because they (incorrectly) feared encountering vicious cannibals. The grim irony of that decision remains the most tragic aspect of the Essex’s legacy. Their wrongheaded eastward trek was engineered, and enforced, by none other than Owen Chase, the hero of Howard’s picture. Captain Pollard, its supposed villain, pleaded with the men to head west. He was outvoted. None of this is in the film.
In more capable hands, In the Heart of the Sea could have approached the quiet awe of The Martian or Life of Pi, movies of a similar genre that happened to also be fine book adaptations. If there’s a crazed Ahab here, it’s Ron Howard, and his White Whale is yet another blockbuster. In the Heart of the Sea does itself no favors by constantly invoking Melville’s masterpiece. It can’t even sink a harpoon into its source material.