In the Heart of the Sea
A recounting of a New England whaling ship's sinking by a giant whale in 1820, an experience that later inspired the great novel Moby-Dick.
What is "In the Heart of the Sea" about? There are so many ways to answer that question. You could say that Ron Howard's latest feature, adapted from Nathaniel Philbrick's acclaimed nonfiction book "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex," is about the real incident that partly inspired Herman Mellville's novel "Moby-Dick"—the 1820 destruction of a whaling vessel by a murderously angry sperm whale. You could say that it's about the relationship between nonfiction and fiction, though here things get dicey: the film's story is told in a characteristically clunky framing device to the young Melville (Ben Whishaw), even though in reality Melville wrote his novel without ever visiting Nantucket. (Howard told Charlie Rose that Melville interviewed the last survivor of the wreck, though, so there may be a tether of fact here.) You could say the film is about humankind's collective, slowly dawning realization that whales are not big fish but intelligent mammals, and that the whaling industry was (and still is) engaged in interspecies genocide—a notion teased out in shots of the vengeful whale and other members of its pod floating peacefully with their calves underwater, then surfacing to stare accusingly at the humans. You could say it's a survival story, about a group of shipwreck survivors (led by an unqualified rich-boy captain, played by Benjamin Walker, and Chris Hemsworth's macho and resentful first mate) dying of hunger and thirst in lifeboats. Lastly, you could describe "The Heart of the Sea" as a story of corporate ethics: the final section shows the whaling company urging survivors to lie about what happened, for fear that insurance carriers won't cover them if they hear that a whale is capable of destroying a huge ship.
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