Moby Dick

Mike Baker – 2010 – Germany 
   

Something about Moby Dick keeps drawing producers back to it every few years.  I never know why they bother with such a monumental task unless they feel especially confident about bringing Melville to the screen in a meaningful way, and if they do feel that way, it seems a little arrogant to me.  To date, only John Huston has come close to doing this with his Ray Bradbury-scripted 1956 adaptation.  This film, though a marked improvement over the 1998 version with Patrick Stewart as Ahab, is a respectable and largely faithful interpretation and does quite well as a seafaring adventure, but leaves far too many of Melville’s themes either ignored, glossed over, or ridden into the ground with little subtlety.  There is something off about the cast, first of all; William Hurt (Ahab), Charlie Cox (Ishmael) and Ethan Hawke (Starbuck) are all fine actors, but it simply feels like they were assigned their roles so haphazardly; either that or their characterizations are so flippant that it's distracting.  Hawke would’ve made a great Ishmael, for example, and another actor in the cast, Stephen McHattie (as Capt. Gardiner), would have been superb as Ahab.  As it is though, Ishmael is presented as an adventurous boy who has time for Huck Finn-like shenanigans before arriving to New Bedford, and Ahab is robbed of all his ominous presence by Hurt’s portrayal of him as gregarious and mirthful.  Ahab in the novel is a hard, solitary, laconic man who doesn’t even appear to feel the wind on his face, and Ishmael was so obsessed by the lure of the sea that he had no time for heroics on land.  Worst of all, in my opinion, is the presentation of Moby Dick himself as a prescient force of evil, seeming to stalk Ahab and the Pequod with deliberate malice.  The whole point of the novel is Ahab’s foolishness in thinking just that; because in reality the leviathan is an innocent animal who has no special awareness of Ahab at all; that, in fact, is the source of Ahab’s inexplicable rage.  These problems will probably only be so for those who are familiar with Melville, and the film is genuinely impressive in its handful of rousing whale hunt scenes.  It isn’t bad, but its most basic flaw is that it looks like it was made in 2010, whereas what Huston achieved so beautifully in his film is the muted color and texture that gave it the look of 19th century whaling prints, the craggy, weathered faces of the entire cast, down to the smallest extra, and its use of authentic period shanties, all of which transport you back to the 1830s, and doesn’t make you feel you’re watching actors playing dress-up.  All in all, unfortunately, it rather feels like a movie crafted to appeal to lazy literature teachers, giving them something to use up several class periods with after forcing their students to pretend they’re read the book.