Moby Dick tale a winner

Call me Opie. Actually, my name is Ron Howard. I’m the movie director who has made my career off of trying to depict the Great American Story on film, usually with an Oscar in mind. You remember my triumphant stories A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Apollo 13? Well, I’m back and I’m on a boat looking for one of the largest creatures that ever lived on the planet. You know the story.

Maybe you haven’t read Moby-Dick – it is 800-plus pages after all – but surely you’re familiar with the tale told of the great white leviathan with a vengeance directed toward whalers and pretty much anybody in a ship. The sperm whale was indeed a real beast from history with a fierce anger that was sure to be set in mythology. Moby Dick was itself based, perhaps loosely, on novelist Herman Melville’s own sea-faring adventures with those of other seamen thrown in too.

Most notably of those is the tragedy of the Essex, a ship borne out of Nantucket that sailed down the Atlantic around Cape Horn of South America and led 2,000 miles into the Pacific only to be relentlessly attacked. First mate Owen Chase survived the 18-month ordeal that led to the demise of so many of his shipmates, and wrote his account upon his return. Many years later, there was also the detailed story of Thomas Nickerson, a 14-year-old cabin boy on the Essex.

Nathaniel Philbrick based his non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea on this last story. The movie of the same name cobbles them all together in a way that turns it into the making of the book that was first called the Great American Story.

Melville (Ben Whishaw) visits Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) who is now in his 40s, married and a heavy drinker, at first unwilling to recount what happened because the memory still haunts him. His story focuses around Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), an industrious and capable sailor who is promised to be made captain of a whaling vessel if he agrees to be first mate under George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), the son of a wealthy Nantucket family.

Money trumps experience and Pollard proves himself to be a poor leader, taking the ship and its crew into a nasty squall before going farther astray in a desperate search for whales. That takes them west of the coast of Chile where the dramatic events unfold. Pollard’s hubris naturally evokes a nemesis in the shape of a cetacean.

The whale attacks and attacks again, leaving the Essex destroyed and the survivors left to a deserted island where they must decide to re-enter the devil’s domain or starve and perish, turning into fishmeal on the beach. This all takes place over the course of weeks and months. Going hungry for so long makes desperate men do desperate things, even abominations. Well, you can understand why Nickerson might have been reticent to speak of his journeys for so long.

While you might have expected a movie more akin to Jaws, what you’ll find is that and a fair bit more. The digital age means that the ocean and its inhabitants are largely computer generated. That’s a downside but one of the upsides is that the look of the film resembles that of the 1956 John Huston version of Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck. Honestly, it looks great but I’m still not sold on this 3-D nonsense.

Regardless, it’s a spectacle movie, a blockbuster with a human condition. It glosses over a lot of exposition. True, Melville’s book was long and ponderous in places, but there was much poetry in the details. Hemsworth, better known for portraying Thor in many a Marvel movie, holds up his part of the bargain. His Chase is steady, sturdy and decent, a moral keystone in a world where a captain makes his own laws. He’s no Peck but I have to say that I was pretty impressed. This kid is going places.

The real heart though lies within the burly chest of Gleeson, a character actor who never fails to elevate any role. He won’t win any awards for this part but maybe he’ll start to be considered, as he should.

All in all, it’s a better evening out than you might expect. In some ways, I wish this movie were longer, which is something I don’t say very often in this age of 150-minute bubblegum superhero flicks. It’s still a tale well told, and, well… it’s a whale of a tale.