Miniseries captures its white whale; Rich looks, strong lead and passable effects make 'Moby Dick' worth catching.

It looks as though Hallmark has gotten its money's worth in a new
adaptation of Herman Melville's epic tale "Moby Dick."
The two-part miniseries, which airs at 7 p.m. today and Monday
(repeating each night at 9) on cable's USA Network, features a solid
cast, passable special effects and rich cinematography. They make
this a worthy successor to the much-maligned 1956 movie version
directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab.
Peck is back for the remake, but this time in the peripheral role
of Father Mapple, who preaches a sermon midway through Part 1 and
then is heard from no more.
Instead our Ahab is Patrick Stewart, who alone is reason enough
to commend the film, especially to those who have actually read
Herman Melville's novel. This may be the great American novel, but
Ahab's over-the-top rhetoric, those maniacal exhortations to his crew
as he and they pursue the unstoppable white leviathan, are probably
best suited to an accomplished Shakespearean actor like Stewart.
Part 1 takes place mainly on the shore of Nantucket, where a
young wide-eyed Ishmael (Henry Thomas) arrives looking for adventure
at sea. But he gets plenty of excitement on land before that, when an
innkeeper gives him a bed that he learns he will share with a wild
Polynesian harpoonist named Queequeg (Piripi Waretini).
The two become friends and Queequeg later comes to Ishmael's
rescue when he is subjected to a brutal initiation aboard the whaling
ship Pequod.
Ishmael and Queequeg's alliance is a uniquely American paradox.
The two men are both outcasts, the one a foreigner with his worthless
lineage ("Queequeg son to island king," he declares), the other a
schoolteacher with his useless intellectual goals. Yet both swallow
their pride to chase glory across a vast frontier. (Ishmael usually
is thought to be the eyes and ears of Melville, who seafared with a
whaling ship in the 1840s.)
When Ahab makes his first appearance to the crew, he makes it
clear that his singular desire is to kill not just any whale, but
Moby Dick. Regardless of what the men thought they had signed up for,
they will pursue this "monstrous fish" at all costs.
Ahab is opposed, here and subsequently, by his chief mate
Starbuck, played by Ted Levine ("Silence of the Lambs") in an
outstanding performance. Yet no one can seem to crack Ahab's ironclad
will or reverse his fatally flawed mission.
Part 2 begins shortly after Ahab and the crew spot Moby Dick for
the first time. With each scene, those aboard the Pequod are drawn
deeper into Ahab's pathological quest. Their enthusiasm soars
whenever they sight their whale and crashes into despair and chaos
each time they encounter a new obstacle. It is in one of these
moments that Starbuck tries to organize a mutiny, but after awhile he
realizes that they are all under Ahab's spell. There will be no
escape from a final confrontation with the beast.
The hardest challenge in adapting this book to the screen is
Melville's narrative. Melville could quite literally could write up a
storm, capturing the tumult of an ocean squall in all its fury and
terror. No amount of special effects will ever completely replicate
those narrative passages where, as the scholar Alfred Kazin once
wrote, "Ishmael reproduces, in the rhythms of the prose itself,
man's brooding interrogation of nature."
But very little narrative is used in the movie, and the Ishmael
we see on screen is so often shaking in his boots that he seems not
to bear any resemblance to the storyteller of Melville's book.
Stewart is fairly commanding as Ahab, but he walks so
uncomfortably with that pegleg that it's at times distracting. It's
not entirely clear if this is intentional. Maybe the prosthetic is a
bad fit for Stewart. Or maybe it's because Ahab's hobbling is the
touch of fallibility that will help viewers connect with the
inscrutable captain. With something as symbol-laden as "Moby Dick,"
who can tell?
Shot mostly off the eastern coast of Australia, "Moby Dick" was
co-produced with Francis Ford Coppola and Fred Fuchs ("Don Juan
DeMarco"). The whale is nothing to write home about - most of the
time we see him from a distance, with only a few tightly controlled
close-ups - but neither is it absurdly fake. That's accomplishment
enough on a television budget, even one as comparatively hefty as
"Moby Dick's."