Movie Reviews: In the Heart of the Sea, Daddy’s Home
Fifteen months into its voyage out of Nantucket, when Nickerson was still a youthful sailor, the Essex was deliberately rammed by a bull sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, an attack that occurred whilst Essex crew members were away from the ship harpooning whales: when the ship sank, the crew found itself stranded in three tiny boats, 3,000 miles west of the coast of South America.
It’s an epic tale that Herman Melville would later mythologise into the Great American Novel with Moby Dick (Melville never actually interviewed Nickerson, but the conceit does provide a neat narrative frame), and Ron Howard does full justice to both the human tragedy and the Boy’s Own adventure aspects of the story.
Charles Leavitt’s script takes liberties with historical truth for the sake of dramatic conflict, as it pits ambitious but lowly-born First Mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) against callow Captain Pollard (Benjamin Walker).
Pollard is a scion of one of Nantucket’s wealthiest families, and Leavitt colours the historical events by alluding to Melville’s later fictional account of the Essex’s sinking in order to maximise the horror of the unknown (the sperm whale which sunk the Essex did its lethal work and disappeared, whereas here the whale reappears throughout the movie, persecuting the survivors much in the same way as Melville’s Captain Ahab is haunted by his great white nemesis).
Overall, though, Howard’s vision is a spectacular and absorbing one.
The early scenes, as the Essex sets sail from Nantucket, are elegantly done, the murk and filth of Nantucket’s harbour contrasting sharply with the vast open spaces of the ocean and the beautiful clean lines of a ship under full sail.
The action sequences are superbly executed, Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography putting us at the heart of the hunt as the flimsy boats pursue the leviathans, and there are moments of heart-stopping beauty as Mantle offers us impressionistic images of the ocean that are as affecting as any of Turner’s seascapes.
The performances, perhaps unsurprisingly, are dwarfed by the epic nature of the story, the gargantuan whales and the vast emptiness of the Pacific, but there’s a touching element to the evolving relationship between Captain Pollard and First Mate Chase, and Walker and Hemsworth get strong support from their shipmates Cillian Murphy and Joseph Mawle.
All told, then, it’s not quite the adrenaline-fuelled Nantucket sleigh-ride it might have been, but In the Heart of the Sea is a powerful tale of man’s capacity for resourceful endurance when tasked with the most impossible of challenges.
(15A) is a rather different tale of male masculinity, which stars Will Ferrell as mild-mannered radio executive Brad, husband to Sarah (Linda Cardellini) and step-father to Megan (Scarlett Estevez) and Dylan (Owen Vaccaro).
Brad has never really been accepted by Megan and Dylan, despite being a caring, thoughtful father figure, and his precarious position in the household is challenged when Linda’s ex-husband, Dusty (Mark Wahlberg), roars into town on his high-powered motor-cycle and immediately sets about undermining Brad’s relationship with Linda and the kids.
It’s a straightforward set-up, and director Sean Anders isn’t particularly interested in subtleties — Brad wears a flowery apron, Dusty wears a battered black leather jacket - but the bickering between the pair is enjoyable to begin with, largely because the big-hearted, childlike Brad refuses to think ill of anyone, and can’t believe that Dusty is scheming to destroy his life.
Once the story becomes a game of one-upmanship, however, the tone segues into the comedy of humiliation and the story loses much of its initial charm to become something of a grinding war of attrition.
The script gives Wahlberg and Ferrell very little to play with — it might have been more interesting if the dialogue were a little sharper and the two male leads not so stereotypical in their approach to parenting — and much of the humour is provided by the supporting cast, with Brad’s boss Leo (Thomas Haden Church) and handyman Griff (Hannibal Buress) nabbing most of the best lines as they observe and snipe from the sidelines.
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