Some people argue passionately over which is the Great American Novel, “Moby-Dick” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
A new mini-series based on Herman Melville’s novel tries to have it both ways, adding a fillip of Mark Twain to the immortal tale of Ahab and the white whale.
That’s at least what seems to be going on in the opening scene of “Moby Dick,” running Monday and Tuesday on Encore. A young man riding on the back of a horse cart hears a cry from a nearby field and jumps off to stop a white man savagely beating an African-American youth. The brute chases them, but the two escape by pulling themselves to the safety of the moving cart. “Thank you, sir,” the victim says meekly. His rescuer smiles. “Call me Ishmael.” The black youth is Pip, and together Pip and Ishmael agree to run away together, not on a raft on the Mississippi but aboard a Nantucket whaling ship.
That’s of course not how they meet in the book, but then again it’s almost impossible not to take liberties when putting this tale on screen. The novel is a leviathan of a read, thick with allegory, Scripture and some of the most poetic and dense writing in the English language. It’s not exactly an easy fit for television. As the humorist P. J. O’Rourke once put it, “There’s not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.”
The Encore “Moby Dick” stars William Hurt as Captain Ahab; Ethan Hawke as Starbuck, the first mate; and Charlie Cox as Ishmael. It was written by Nigel Williams, who seems to have taken Mr. O’Rourke’s critique to heart. This script dignifies Pip, offers the whale’s point of view and, most startling of all, invents scenes for Captain Ahab’s wife, who is only fleetingly mentioned in the novel and never named.
Here she is called Elizabeth and is played by Gillian Anderson as a loving wife who worries that her husband hasn’t been the same since a giant white whale bit off his leg. As Captain Ahab broods in his study, his wife gently tries to probe his mood.
“He isn’t just another whale, though, is he?” she asks.
The producers call it a “reimagined” version of the story, and it’s certainly more inventive than John Huston’s 1956 version, which starred Gregory Peck; a 1998 USA network mini-series with Patrick Stewart was also more faithful to the book. But for all its flights of fancy the Encore mini-series is not entirely silly or even half bad. Shot mostly in Nova Scotia, it’s an ambitious, beautifully made adventure tale that seeks to be respectful of the book while still making the characters and story accessible to modern viewers.
Some shortcuts and substitutions are useful. Too often, however, the improvisations fall back on clichés that don’t visually distill Melville’s words as much as they forcibly remind viewers of other books and movies.
Besides “Huckleberry Finn” there are intimations of “Jaws” and “The Perfect Storm,” and even “Bridesmaids”: In one shot the camera frames the Pequod’s few good men striding purposefully toward the ship in almost the same kind of slow-motion hero walk employed in “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Right Stuff” and which was parodied in that Kristen Wiig hit comedy.
Language sometimes turns just as contemporary. One wag tells Ishmael not to worry about Stubb, the second mate, because “he’s just messing with you.”
Peter Benchley was inspired by Melville’s novel when he wrote “Jaws,” so it’s only fair that any new telling of Ahab’s hunt borrows images that made that Steven Spielberg movie famous. An underwater shot of a big white predator is going to prompt memories of the killer shark. Whenever a huge sea creature suddenly breaches the surface at close range, some viewers will flash on the phrase, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” But other allusions to “Jaws” are less inevitable.
Mr. Hurt has played madmen before, and he’s persuasive and compelling as the vengeance-obsessed sea captain, bringing his own brand of mumbling intensity to the role. But the filmmakers felt the need not only to humanize Ahab with a homey back story — we see him putting his young son to bed and flirting with his wife — but also to align him with another, more contemporary obsessive, Quint, the shark hunter Robert Shaw played in “Jaws.”
In one scene Ahab shares with Ishmael the tale of how he lost his leg to the whale. (“I was in his mouth!”) He recalls it with the faint, weird smile and soft delivery that Quint uses to describes his ordeal by shark attack after the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis.
Mr. Hawke is affecting as Starbuck, the loyal Quaker who begins to doubt the captain’s sanity and contemplates mutiny. Mr. Cox is equally appealing as Ishmael, an outsider and observer who in this version falls deep under Ahab’s spell. Raoul Trujillo (“Apocalypto”) is wonderful as Queequeg, the tattooed harpoonist from the South Pacific whom Ishmael befriends, even though he at first fears he is a cannibal.
Pip, the cabin boy from Alabama, is played by Daniel Gordon in an accent that suggests he was raised not in the South but north of Wilshire, perhaps because filmmakers wanted to avoid any hint of stereotype.
That eagerness to appease could explain Donald Sutherland’s performance as Father Mapple, the preacher who delivers his homily about Jonah and the whale from a pulpit shaped like a ship’s prow. The sermon as Melville wrote it is many pages long and hard to parse. But rather than extract its flavor, the writers invoke more familiar words from William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus.” (“There may be among you today those who think they are the captains of their fates and the masters of their souls,” Father Mapple says.)
The camera is mightier than the pen in this film. The writing doesn’t really matter. It’s the vivid, evocative images of life at sea, midstorm and even under wilting sun and windless skies, that best pay tribute to “Moby Dick.”
