Movie and Lunch Club - In the Heart of the Sea

For this month’s outing, my Movie and Lunch club picked In the Heart of the Sea, a Ron Howard film based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s nonfiction book about the real-life incident that inspired Herman Melville to write his classic Moby Dick. The film even incorporates Melville’s interview with the last living survivor of the Essex whaling ship and it cuts to that interview from time to time during the movie. His book, you might remember if you ever had to read it for a class, was 752 pages. Phibrick’s was 144 pages and that got translated into 122 minutes of onscreen time. The movie swung from an action-packed adventure involving a vengeful whale in the first half to an agonizing survival story as a handful of men in lifeboats drifted at sea for 90 days. Spoiler Alert: I shouldn’t but I’ll give you a hint on how some of the whalers managed to stay alive: Donner Pass.

I read several reviews before seeing the movie. RogerEbert.com only gave it two stars and wrote a long, negative tirade of how they thought the story coulda’, shoulda’ been told differently. IMDb gave the film four and a half stars. Their description of the storyline? Short and sweet: “A recounting of a whaling ship's sinking by a giant whale in 1820 that would inspire the great novel, Moby Dick.” (It never fails to impress me how they can sum up a complicated story in one sentence like that.) Another reviewer warns people who are “squeamish about the thinning whale populations” that they won’t like the film’s gory depiction of whaling practices. It was historically accurate for a period in history when they depended on sperm whale oil in the same way we depend on Mid-East oil today, so I wasn’t shocked. (Side note: I have a small and much loved collection of whale oil lamps.)

All five of the reviews I read criticized Howard’s framing in the movie---RogerEbert.com called it “chunky”---and I had no idea what that meant, so I googled it. At the ‘For Dummies’ website they explained framing this way: “In film making, shot compositions, sizes, and angles enhance how you tell your story. You may want a close-up when two actors are talking if the conversation is an intimate one. A wide, or ‘establishing’ film shot may be appropriate if you want to show that the actors are surrounded by a barren wasteland.” Okay, framing might be something industry insides might get picky about but I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn't read the reviews. I would have thought Howard was just trying to be artsy-fartsy when he showed a tad too many ultra-close-ups. The burr in Ebert’s nickers, I think, was caused by them forgetting that this film was not the retelling of Melville’s book, Moby Dick, but rather the story of how fiction and non-fiction married up to tell a historically accurate story. It didn’t pretend to be knee-deep in symbolism, of good vs. evil and all the other rich sub-texts in Melville’s novel---how could you even do that in 122 minutes? The bottom line is that all seventeen of the ladies in My Movie and Lunch Club thought the movie was great and we’d recommend it with thirty-four thumbs up. 

The theater where we saw the movie had just hosted a Star Wars Marathon the night before, showing all seven Star Wars movies back-to-back on twenty screens ending in the morning just before the start of In the Heart of the Sea. I can’t imagine sitting through 1,050 minutes of Star Wars but from the looks on the faces of the mostly guys leaving the theater I'd say they had no regrets. Our local theater was one of only a handful of places world-wide to get Disney’s permission to run a pre-opening day marathon like that. A true sign of the times, though, the theater had assigned seating and didn’t let anyone into the marathon who was wearing a face mask (with their costume) unless you were under eight and you couldn’t bring in a toy weapon no matter what your age. 

I love my Movie and Lunch Club. It gets me out of the house once a month to see first-run movies and to go to the newest restaurants around town. It gets me some chit-chat time with widows from the senior hall. It also gives me something to research and think about, to share on my Facebook page and write about here. All that for roughly twenty-two bucks. Not a bad deal. ©