Review: ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ could use more whale, fewer earnest lessons

The whale is wondrous but the drama not so much in “In the Heart of the Sea,” director Ron Howard’s ripping yarn about men and the sea that’s based on the true events that in part inspired Herman Melville’s classic “Moby-Dick.”

Given the Melville connection (the author has even snared a key role in the film) and the fact that Charles Leavitt’s script was based on the award-winning nonfiction book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it’s a bit of a surprise that the dramatic elements don’t weigh more heavily in the equation here.

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On the other hand, when you’ve got computer-generated imagers (visual-effects supervisor Jody Johnson and visual-effects producer Leslie Lerman and their team) able to realistically create an 80-ton animal nearly 100 feet long, “the largest beast that ever breathed on this Earth” as one character says, that is certainly going to hold one’s interest.

Especially if this particular animal was, in Philbrick’s fine phrase, “a whale with the vindictiveness and guile of a man,” a sea beast with the ways and means to ram the whaler Essex and head-butt it into oblivion on a calm November day in 1820, leaving the shipwrecked crew to fend for itself in an unforgiving ocean.

“In the Heart of the Sea” has numerous other Boys’ Own Adventure elements, including stirring shots of the Essex under full sail (Anthony Dod Mantle is the cinematographer), hectic moments when it’s hit by a mean squall and scenes of agile seamen clambering up rigging and yelling “Thar she blows” at appropriate moments. The film even stars brawny Chris Hemsworth as Owen Chase, the hunkiest first mate to stare down a yardarm.

But “In The Heart of the Sea” has loftier goals in mind than pleasing the 14-year-old in us all, and in these it is largely disappointed.

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Howard and Leavitt (who also has story credit along with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) see this as a story of personalities in conflict, individuals pushed to the limits of endurance, life lessons learned. It’s all there, it’s just not involving enough to capture our attention or emotion the way that whale does.

The story of what happened in 1820 is told through a venerable framing device set 30 years later, when a young Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) pays a late-night visit to Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the last surviving member of the Essex’s crew, and none too eager to talk about the dreadful things that happened on the high seas.

But Melville is a persuasive man (these authors have their ways) and back we go to Nantucket in 1819, when Nickerson was a young cabin boy (Tom Holland, the latest Spider-Man) embarking on his first voyage.

Nickerson tells us about the two contrasting personalities, “like an ill-married couple,” whose clash will influence what happens on board the Essex.

Owen Chase (who wrote an account of the Essex events that was first published in 1821) is portrayed by Hemsworth as a happily married man with a bit of a temper who nevertheless has all the tools necessary for harpooning whales much sought after at the time for oil used to burn in lamps all over the world.

But in the closed, hierarchical world of Nantucket, Chase is still considered a “landsman,” the son of farming stock, and thus not ideal material to captain a ship.

So he ends up as no more than first mate on the Essex, captained by the effete, inexperienced but well-born George Pollard (Benjamain Walker, a long way from “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”)

These two have a predictable battle of wills but everything changes for the men when that celebrated whale, more mottled than the “white as alabaster” witnesses claim, tees off on the Essex.

Though in theory the depredations the men endure on the high seas after the attack are dramatically involving, in practice, as was the case with “Unbroken,” a little of this stuff goes a long way. When Nickerson says to the author at the end of a long night of soul-searching, “You certainly got your money’s worth, Mr. Melville,” it’s not clear that audiences will feel the same way.

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‘In the Heart of the Sea’

MPAA rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence and thematic material

Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Playing: In general release