Opie's Others

One of my all-time favorite movies is Apollo 13, directed by Ron Howard. I remember seeing it for the first time in the theater. I won’t give away too much in case you haven’t seen it, but the end of the movie was the first time I had experienced a collective audience response in a theater. I cried, fairly openly (I would’ve been around 14, I think). I still tear up when Jim Lovell’s mother (played by Ron Howard’s real mother), in a rare moment of lucidity, comforts her frightened granddaughter with the line “If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.”

I’ve also been a fan of (the early black and white episodes of) The Andy Griffith Show, in which Ron (then Ronny) Howard played Andy’s son Opie, for most of my life. My dad still calls Ron Howard Opie most of the time, even when referring to his directorial work. Opie has directed some really good movies, like A Beautiful Mind, Willow, Splash. Even The Da Vinci Code was pretty good. Sure, there have been some duds, like the other Robert Langdon movies, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and I won’t even get into the problem of Hillbilly Elegy. But I like Ron Howard and I like a lot of his movies.

This post is about two of his movies that I have avoided for quite a while. Rush (2013) and In the Heart of the Sea (2015). Both star Chris Hemsworth, who I love as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (mostly because he plays a caricature of the classic Norse hero, rather than playing him straight.)

I’ve avoided these movies because I just don’t really like the subject matter of either of them. I think racing cars is at best, stupid, and at worst, absurdly dangerous. And for some reason I don’t fully understand, I just don’t like movies set on old wooden ships (or any movie where people are stranded out the ocean.) The whole idea just bothers me. Maybe it’s because I was forced to spend a night on the “Pilgrim” in San Diego harbor when I was in 4th grade, under the guise of experiential education. It was terrible and I’m still mad about it.

Needless to say, I went into watching both of these films with some trepidation. I started with Rush. Despite my lack of interest, the film was fairly well-received by critics and did reasonably well at the box office. Even through the first half-hour or so, I was still pretty convinced I wasn’t going to like it. I hated Hemsworth’s character, race car driver James Hunt. He was brash, irresponsible, borderline abusive. It felt like the movie was just going to glamorize everything I dislike about racing. But as the film went on, it gradually shifted focus to Daniel Bruhle’s (another MCU alum, by the way) character, Niki Lauda.

Hunt and Lauda’s rivalry is a true story. In 1976 it came to a head when Hunt goaded the other drivers into racing on a dangerous course in terrible weather. Lauda had an accident and was severely burned. While recovering in the hospital, he watched Hunt rack up wins toward an annual championship (I don’t know the ins and outs of the rules of racing, and I don’t care to learn them for this post). Lauda recovered enough to race in the final race of the series, with a shot to hold on to the championship. He raced a few laps and realized it still wasn’t safe, and quit the race, allowing Hunt to take the championship.

There was some attempt to show some growth and redemption for Hunt, but the film ultimately showed that Hunt never really raced again after winning the championship and died young after living fast and hard. Lauda, on the other hand, lived a steadier life, taking calculated risks on the race course and always returning home safely to his wife.

It’s hard to say the marketing team made a mistake, since the film did well, but if they had wanted me to see this movie earlier, they should have focused more on Lauda’s story in the ads and trailers. Understandably, Chris Hemsworth’s face is all over the marketing for this film, but the real story, and the far more relatable and interesting story is Lauda’s. I still basically think this kind of high-speed racing is far too dangerous to be legal, but I can appreciate the character story that Ron Howard is telling here. I can also appreciate the level of detail and immersion the film goes into to take viewer into the world of racing. It’s just a world I don’t like.

Which leads me to another world I don’t like – 19th Century whaling. In the Heart of the Sea is also based on a true story – one that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. Hemsworth plays Owen Chase, the first mate on the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket. His captain, George Pollard, played by Benjamin Walker, is a first-time captain from an established whaling family in Nantucket. The cast is rounded out by Tom Holland and Brendan Gleeson, playing young and old versions of a cabin boy on the Essex. Cillian Murphy also has a small part. Nearly all of these actors had to try to affect this odd Massachusetts accent and I’m afraid the only one that wasn’t distracting was Gleeson. I hate to say it, but Hemsworth’s accent was downright laughable at times.

Accent aside, as with most Ron Howard movies, the character work is the best part of the movie. Tom Holland, the MCU’s Spider-man of course, plays the innocence of the first-time cabin boy to perfection. One of the highlights of the film is when he is sent down into the blowhole of a whale with a mouthful of herbs to counter the smell, to collect the most precious clean-burning whale oil that was the lifeblood of Nantucket.

The Essex was out in the ocean for months with no sign of whales, when they went ashore in South America and heard tell of a large pod of whales being guarded by a massive 100-foot “demon” white whale. They set out for the pod and of course, were attacked by the white whale. The ship was destroyed and the survivors piled into three smaller boats. The whale continued to harass them until in a somewhat hokey moment, Chase passes up an opportunity to harpoon the whale after looking in its eyes.

The crew find a small island where they are able to find some food, but ultimately, they know they’ll have to go back out on the water and try to make it to a populated area if they are going to survive. It takes months, and they are forced to resort to cannibalism, but eight of the original crew are finally rescued and return to Nantucket. After such a harrowing ordeal, Chase becomes a merchant seaman (which, I guess, is safer???) and never goes whaling again.

The story is told from Brendan Gleeson’s perspective as he describes the ordeal to Herman Melville. The best part of the film is how Gleeson shows the effect the ordeal, particularly the cannibalism, had on his character’s life.

In the Heart of the Sea didn’t do as well at the box office, and actually lost money compared to its budget. I can see why. It’s not that it was a bad movie, but the character work was definitely weaker than it was in Rush, and considerably weaker than in many of Ron Howard’s other movies. The film does immerse you in the world of whaling, but a lot of that world is pretty unpleasant. I know I had a previous bias against certain aspects of the whaling world, but I don’t think I’m the only one that doesn’t necessarily enjoy the chaos of a stormy sea or the carnage of butchering a 50-foot whale.