Moby Dick

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Moby Dick doesn't lend itself to film and TV adaptations. The tale is dramatic, it's action-packed, it's visual and it's exciting, but there's an awful lot in the original text that you have to leave out in order to film it coherently. Melville's book is encyclopedic. It tells you a lot about whales and whaling; the motivations of the whalers, the camaraderie on board, the mechanics of capturingand dissecting the largest animal in the ocean and extracting theuseful stuff that keeps America burning. This adaptation (and probably ANY adaptation) cuts to the chase, omitting these complex descriptions of whaling life in favour of characters and action, the meat and potatoes of Hollywood filmmaking. In doing so, it loses something of the quality of the story. It also loses the narrator: on TV, Ishmael, a witty and endearing narrator, becomes a one-dimensional protagonist, totally overshadowed by Ahab.

This is Ahab's film. William Hurt dominates every scene he appears in, and he appears in most of them. I'm convinced he's pulling out all the stops, aiming for an Emmy. I'm not sure how else to explain the hammy overacting, the grizzly beard, the cheesy dialogue delivered in a carefully cultivated "old salt" accent (ie. "aargh!" "aye!"). Hurt thinks he's playing Hamlet, and he wants Ahab's descent into madness to be central to the story.

Ahab is typically dark, cursed, scarred, traumatised, intimidating and vengeful. Hurt's Ahab is just plain crazy. He jokes around with his men, delivers many of his most serious lines while grinning through his beard and squinting his eyes. On board the Pequod, he's like everybody's affectionate but slightly volatile Grandpa, not averse to a hug or a bit of laugh over a stein of grog. He says too much, and much of it is hard to understand, delivered in a sing-song cadence with emphasis in unusual places. Oscillating between booming vocal projection of Shakespearean proportions and just plain talking to himself, and introspective mumbling in which he appears to be talking to himself, Hurt seems to be performing for his own benefit rather than for an audience. This is an attempt to indicate Ahab's madness in a way nobody else has done before, but it alienates the audience as well as his fellow actors, and it's just not good acting. He's a piratey caricature whose attempts at pathos are unpersuasive. I prefer Gregory Peck's intense, brooding Ahab. A good Ahab should indicate more than he actually says, a dark exterior concealing untold depths of turmoil and mystery - like the sea! Argh!

Ethan Hawke is a solid Starbuck, and a very human foil to Hurt's gruff, squinty captain. He's emotional, penetrative, and seriously worried about the fate of the ship. More than anyone else he embodies the atmosphere of impending doom that plagues the voyage, and his sense of mortality is a visibly heavy burden. When Starbuck says that what he wants most from the journey is "to see Nantucket again", you believe him. He's a homesick sailor. At that point, everything's beginning to go awry and we'd all like to see the Pequod turn around and go home. Starbuck's finest hour comes at the very end - I won't give anything away, but it's profoundly moving. Hawke's performance salvaged something of an otherwise perfunctory adaptation.

Moby himself is, of course, CGI. In short, like so many massive movie monsters, he doesn't look real. It's not bad CGI, but it's difficult to convey the sublime weightiness of such a vast, living creature with special effects. Moreover, Moby is no ordinary animal - he's an icon, with a personality and a sense of mischief. At it's heart, the story of a whale cheating a whaler is almost comic, with the feel of a fable. I wonder if an animation might capture the spirit of the character (Moby is a character!) more than live action film with CGI. For the most part, they do a pretty decent job of Moby, except for a totally unnecessary scene at the very end which is embarrassingly rudimentary and looks like a scene from a video game.

In summary, as a production it could be worse, but it didn't add anything to my experience of the story. I couldn't help feeling some of the actors involved (Donald Sutherland, Gillian Anderson, William Hurt) were simply trying to add another period piece to their CV's. They fulfilled the brief, but their performances were not memorable. Honourable mentions go to Eddie Marsan, who was an excellent Stubbs, and Billy Boyd who makes an impressive cameo as deranged prophet Elijah. There were some saving graces, but I'm yet to see an adaptation of Moby Dick that captures the spirit of the book. As nautical tales go, Peter Weir's Master and Commander gives a more vivid impression of life at sea.

This canonical story with the feel of a great myth is told and retold, so perhaps there is yet hope for a cinematic adaptation that does the book justice. No doubt someone will take another stab at Moby Dick in the not-too-distant future; pun absolutely intended.

After non-stop disappointment at the movies this Summer, the latest being Cowboys & Aliens for so many reasons, this "freebie" on Encore came as a very pleasant surprise. William Hurt as Ahab was rock solid and while this may sound like heresy, was more fully rounded and interesting than Gregory Peck, whose monolithic performance embarrassed him in later years, and he didn't mind saying so in numerous interviews. (Still he had that great baritone voice) The supporting cast was fine (Ethan Hawk a bit too contemporary) and the production values commendable given the constraints of the budget. Liberties were taken from the classic novel but far from a dumbing down. And the finale, a virtual battle with the white leviathon was surprisingly effective if not all together a solid action set-piece....... far more so than anything in the aforementioned Cowboys and Aliens. I would have to say its worth checking out for most tastes and nothing too objectionable for kids over seven if they can deal with the hunting of whales.

I just finished watching this and I don't have time to write an extensive review, but I will say a couple of things about this production.

Many, many liberties were taken with the plot. In fact the opening scene may blow you right out of the water. And Caption Ahab has apparently been swayed by New Age sharing and caring! But the essence of Melville's work may be considered intact if you take the view that he was a Transcendentalist, along with Whitman and others of that era.

If you hold to that interpretation of this production you may enjoy it on that level (see Jed Mckenna's "Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment" for more on that). In fact if you hold to the conventional interpretation- that of a psycho-social critique of man's hubris against Nature, you will also probably be satisfied at the thematic level.

A few fine scenes but Ahab's wild and fantastic speeches are missing - which to me are the greatest of joys.

The treatment of the finale is decent.

Good luck!

(7.5/10) My husband and I picked it up at our local rental place and we were surprised at how well it was done. Really strong performances from William Hurt and Ethan Hawke as Ahab and Starbuck, and the rest of the roles were well-cast, too. The filmmakers managed to capture a lot of the symbolism and themes of Melville's novel, and if you think about what was happening in Melville's time (civil war was brewing, American society seemed to be disintegrating), the mini-series makes it clear that the story was about much more than a Nantucket whaling expedition. Melville was issuing a warning to his fellow Americans that still has resonance today. We're Canadian, so it was fun to see that much of the movie was filmed in Nova Scotia. The whale special effects were a little weak at times, but otherwise, well worth watching.

It seems that each filmed version of Moby-Dick is compelled to be worse than the one before and that each embodier of the partially disembodied Ahab must make his predecessor seem better, not just in the distance of time but also in distanced performance. Who will underperform William Hurt I hope never to see. Each scriptwriter also must feel a need to demonstrate the superiority of Melville's original, both in his concept and execution. The most recent version appears somewhat like a Second City take on Moby-Dick Meets The Outsiders: all the tortured Jugendangst! Ethan Hawke does do a good C. Thomas Howell sendup, but Hawke should rather be doing a good performance of a first mate, one who is one step below the ship's master. Even the Pequod gets nonverisimilitude. A square-rigged whaler gets turned into a bark. If people cared enough to write, finance, film, and present what is generally regarded as a if not the preeminent work of American fiction, why was care and cash not more carefully scripted and directed? Even the cgi attempt at the whale of whales had the look of an audition submission for an early ScyFy project.