Movie Reviews: In the Heart of the Sea, Daddy’s Home

Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea (12A), which is adapted from Nathan Philbrick’s award-winning book of the same name, opens in Nantucket in 1850, with the young novelist Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) interviewing retired sailor Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) about the dramatic events that befell the whale ship Essex some three decades previously.

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.