Christmas day film reviews: In The Heart Of The Sea and Daddy’s Home

In The Heart Of The Sea is very prettily shot but lacks is any real sense of darkness or impending doom

In the Heart of the Sea (Jonathan Prime/2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

In The Heart Of The Sea (12A)

***

It’s 100 feet long, it’s as white as alabaster and Ron Howard can’t quite work out what it represents. This is the sperm whale (“there she blows!”) that attacks Nantucket whaling ship, The Essex, with such devastating consequences in Howard’s new seafaring yarn.

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (which was inspired by the story of The Essex), the whale wasn't just a whale. It was a mythical creature: a symbol of Captain Ahab’s vengeful obsession. Melville’s story had the force of an Old Testament fable and its main characters had biblical names. Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, on which the film is based, was all about deconstructing the myth of Moby Dick and reconstructing the story - astonishing enough in its own right - of what really happened to the Essex and its sailors.

Howard seems caught in some no man’s land between the poetic force of Melville’s novel and the discursive academic approach of Philbrick. He can’t work out whether he is making a ripping yarn about madness, hubris and a great white whale or a sober, factually-based account of the incident that Melville so embellished. It soon turns out that Howard isn’t telling the true story of the Essex anyway. The screenplay (by Charles Leavitt) takes so many liberties with the actual events and characters described by Philbrick that you can’t help but wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just simplify matters by going back to Moby Dick in the first place.

There is a lot of narrative scaffolding here. As the movie begins, Meville (played by Ben Whishaw) is shown trying to prise information about the Essex from its last surviving crew member. It is 1850. 30 years have passed since the fateful encounter with the whale and grizzled old inn keeper Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) is loathe to reminisce about what he saw when he was a young cabin boy aboard the doomed ship. Melville offers him money, which he and his wife need, so, over one long, dark night, he agrees to unburden himself. That prompts the flashbacks to 1820. It’s a cumbersome framing device, presumably intended to induce some of the same foreboding as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The casting seems a little off-beam. Chris Hemsworth (Thor in the Marvel movies and the womanising Formula 1 star James Hunt in Howard’s recent film Rush) is a likeable, good-looking male lead but he is no sea-dog. The character he plays, First Mate Owen Chase, is a veteran mariner who knows his way around the oceans but here, even in the most extreme moments, stranded on a desert island or half scorched to death on an open raft, he looks more like a beach bum on a gap year than a Quaker sailor close to despair.

Chase has been promised command of a ship by the owners. The only reason he is denied captaincy of the Essex is that he is not from one of the blue blood whaling families. Instead, he has to serve under the well connected but very callow George Pollard (Benjamin Walker.) Pollard is the Captain Bligh to Chase’s Fletcher Christian but even the film’s treatment of their fraught relationship is on the tentative side.

In The Heart Of The Sea is very prettily shot but lacks is any real sense of darkness or impending doom. The film is dealing with starvation, cannibalism, insanity and death and yet it still has the look of a picturesque travelogue in which we are seeing a painted ship upon a painted ocean. In John Huston’s version of Moby Dick, before the sailors embarked on their voyage, they were treated to a hellfire and damnation sermon by a very gloomy preacher (played by Orson Welles.) There is no such figure to set the scene here. Nor is there the feeling that this is a voyage of the damned. Chase and Pollard both want to collect as much whale oil as possible in as short a time as possible. The former wants to rush home to his wife, the latter to prove that he can cut it as a captain.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is its documentary-like approach to the business of whaling. In one scene, when the sailors have successfully caught a whale, Nickerson (played as a teenager by Tom Holland) is forced to climb inside the creature, lowering himself through its spout into its stinking innards to scrape out a few extra buckets of oil. We are always made aware of the economics of whaling. This is a very lucrative trade and no one even begins to question the suffering inflicted on the whales.

There is something comical about the haste with which Chase, Pollard and co. decide to chase after the white whale after hearing a description of the havoc it has wrought from a Spanish captain who has lost his arm and most of his crew. “As I live and breathe, he’s mine!” Chase yells when he finally has the chance to harpoon the whale but he utters the line without a huge amount of conviction.

The whale itself looks impressive. It’s a huge creature with a barnacled white back and knack of performing devastating back flips in which it uses its tail to rip asunder boats and knock down masts. Even so, the footage of this great leviathan in action plays more like something out of a natural history documentary than a horror film. It is not some phantom creature, wreaking vengeance against the whale hunters but just unusually large sperm whale protecting itself and its young from marauding hunters.

Howard is known for making thoughtful action pictures which always pay attention to character as well as to spectacle. In The Heart Of The Sea is as meticulously crafted as all his films. It’s just a little on the torpid side - a story about obsession and madness that ends up being told in far too pallid a fashion.

Daddy’s Home (12A)

***

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg in Daddy's Home (Patti Peret/2015 Paramount Pictures)

Anchorman fans will enjoy Will Ferrell’s latest comic outing, which mines similar depths of inane humour. He is not playing news anchor Ron Burgundy this time round but his character, radio producer Brad Taggart, behaves like a slightly more mild-mannered version of of the egregious Burgundy. Brad isn’t very manly. Thanks to an incident at the dentist, he can’t have kids of his own. Nonetheless, he is married (more or less happily) to the beautiful Sarah (Cardellini) and is step-dad to her brattish children. He is desperately trying to ingratiate himself with them while holding down his job at Panda, the country’s third most popular smooth jazz radio station. Domestic harmony is turned upside down with the kids’ real dad, motorbike-driving alpha male Dusty Mayron (Mark Wahlberg) comes careering into his life.

Some of the humour here is really pretty feeble (lots of jokes about poop and flea-ridden dogs along with some very crude slapstick.) Ferrell, though, has a genuinely subversive quality as a comedian. He looks and seems bland in the extreme but his behaviour is frequently outrageous. Here, we seem to be in the world the typical cosy family sitcom but the film deals in very witty fashion with such matters as sexual jealousy, workplace insecurity, white middle-class racism and the fascistic behaviour of parent/teacher organisations. Ferrell plays Brad as another of his idiot savant types - a character so naive, child-like and unworldly that he achieves some kind of serene wisdom by default. Wahlberg is in enjoyable form as the macho dad, back in town to reclaim his family, and there’s a funny cameo from Thomas Haden Church as the Panda radio boss who can’t resist the temptation to tell long-winded stories that always seem to revolve around his own experiences being cuckolded.