In the Heart of the Sea dir. by Ron Howard (review)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) famously opens with a title card that reads: “Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true.” In the Heart of the Sea would, in a more perfect world, open with one that reads: “Not that it matters, but most of what follows is made up.” It is based on a true story—the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex by an enraged sperm whale, and the ill-prepared crew’s long, harrowing struggle for survival—but only in the loosest sense. There is a ship, a whale, and twenty-one men whose names (mostly) match those who went to sea aboard the Essex. The rest is a mish-mash of plot tropes, stock characters, and images, plundered from a half-dozen better cinematic sea stories with the same casual indifference that the title (and little else) was lifted from Nathaniel Philbrick’s gripping book about the Essex disaster.

The saga of the Essex begins and ends on Nantucket: a windswept island of sandy soil and stunted trees twenty-five miles off the coast of Massachusetts that was, improbably, one of the industrial centers of early nineteenth-century America. The industry was whaling, and its unique demands shaped Nantucket as pervasively and inescapably as coal mining shaped Appalachia and cotton farming shaped the Deep South. Boys too young to go to sea played at being harpooners (the most glamorous, dangerous job on a whaling ship), and parents seeking suitable matches for their daughters eyed young ship’s officers for signs of success. Ship owners, and the captains who took their vessels to the far corners of the world, were the island’s social and economic elite. Men with the right combination of talent, ambition, and luck could achieve command by age 25 and retire—wealthy and successful—at 40. They could also, however, be killed or maimed in a dozen different ways as they hunted 70-foot, 65-ton leviathans from open boats with handheld spears, thousands of miles from the nearest land.

The Essex left Nantucket in August 1819, under the command of Captain George Pollard, Jr. It was 1500 miles west of the Galapagos Islands when, on November 20, 1820, an 85-foot bull sperm whale rammed the ship—deliberately and with great force—with its massive head. Hull timbers cracked and seams sprung open, the Essex began to sink, forcing the crew to abandon ship and attempt to reach safety in their whaleboats. Captain Pollard argued that they should make for the Marquesas Islands, 1200 miles further to the west, but first mate Owen Chase and the remainder of the crew—alarmed by rumors that the natives of the island were cannibals—urged that they head for South America, a voyage of 4,000 miles. Pollard acquiesced, and from that moment forward almost nothing went right. Food ran out, and as one man after another succumbed to starvation and exposure, the survivors resorted to eating the flesh of their dead shipmates to stay alive. The four survivors in Pollard’s boat, having exhausted even that grisly resource, drew lots to decide who would be sacrificed to provide food for the others. Owen Coffin—Pollard’s seventeen-year-old cousin, who he had sworn to protect—received the death sentence, and his young friend Charles Ramsdell drew the role of executioner. Pollard and Ramsdell (the fourth man having died in the meantime) were rescued three weeks later by another Nantucket whaler: half-starved, deep in shock, and reduced to gouging the marrow from the bones of the dead for nourishment. Ninety-three days had passed since the Essex sank, and they were nearly within sight of the South American mainland.

The story of the Essex is intensely dramatic but, from the standpoint of commercial filmmaking, awkwardly shaped. The spectacular action set pieces—a storm off the coast of...