The North Water: Is this foul 19th-century whaling ship series the anti-Ted Lasso?
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
Upbeat portrayals of humanity on television have been highly celebrated lately, with Emmy coronation of Schitt’s Creek and the Alaska-set animated series, The Great North.
And, of course, especially, Apple TV’s endearing breakout comedy, Ted Lasso, starring Jason Sudeikis as a positive-thinking American football coach, losing games but winning hearts in chilly England. The New York Times’ TV critic James Poniewozik, who said he sought solace in Ted Lasso after the Jan. 6 attack on the American capital, claims: “Being nice in Ted Lasso. is not a naïve denial of the darkness of life. It’s a clear-eyed adaptation to it.”
Colin Farrell is a psychopathic harpoonst in the dark British series The North Water.
Well, there’s your garden variety darkness of life and then there’s the stygian abyss of human despair and depravity. Let me introduce you to a different kind of English drama, The North Water, the antidote to Ted Lasso-itis. If anyone in this audaciously bleak series gives anyone else a warm hug, it’s probably accompanied by a shiv under the rib cage.
Each of the hour-long episodes of this Canada-UK co-production (which truly work as one five-hour movie), follows a young Irish surgeon, Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell) on an a doomed 19th Century whaling ship. The series is adapted by the talented and versatile writer-director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Looking, Lean on Pete) from Ian McGuire’s grimly brilliant 2016 novel, a sea yarn in the literary philosophical adventure tradition of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville.
While Haigh can’t replicate the retching impact of McGuire’s prose - (Sample sentence from the book: “The cabin air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces.”) - this is not a series for the weak of heart or stomach.
Sumner, we learn, was involved in some dirty business during the suppression of the 1857 Indian rebellion, which left him with a shady reputation, bad foot and a laudanum addiction. In the first episode, we discover a couple of reasons why getting on board The Volunteer, the whaling ship out of Hull, was not a wise choice.
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First, the owner, with the complicity of the captain and first mate, plans to deliberately wreck the vessel for insurance money.
Worse, the master harpoonist on board, Henry Drax (Colin Farrell) is a psychopath.
One of the more nightmarish characters to visit screens, since Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men. Farrell, beefed up with a mound of muscle and fat like a furry sumo wrestler, has no resemblance to one of those romantic 19th century towering Satanic anti-heroes like Wuthering Height’s Heathcliff or Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab.
He’s a snuffling, shuffling, beast, who operates on urges and a ruthless survival drive, unburdened by conscience.
The most obvious interpretation of the novel and series is that Sumner, a man of science is forced to acknowledge the preeminence of his own survival instinct and killer instinct . It’s probably not a coincidence the story is set in 1859, the same year as the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
At the same time, Sumner’s experience of visions, a totemic polar bear, and events that might easily be called miraculous, subvert that reductive survival-of-the-fittest view. The story also indicates that the brutal perspective is shaped by the imperialism and racism of the era, shown in flashbacks to India, encounters with Inuit hunters, and the bigotry to which the Irishman doctor is also subjected.
But all that suggests something more precious and preachy than this immersive series, which doesn’t pander or hold anything back. Shot in authentic locations a few hundred miles north of Norway, the exterior scenes show the sublime Arctic seascapes. The seal and whale slaughtering sequences are laced with geysers of blood.
The lamp-lit, claustrophobic bowels of the ship are a place of rape, murder and constant dread, set to music pitched at the level of whale song. Periodically, Sumner’s drug or pain-distorted brain dissolves into a hazy recollection of India, a treasure, a murdered boy, a polar bear.
The cast is excellent, working with collective restraint with the dramatically. extreme material, including Stephen Graham (Boardwalk Empire, The Irishman) as the ship’s captain; Tom Courtenay as the ruthless owner Baxter, and Peter Mullan as an ailing priest, determined to convert the Inuit to the blessings of Christian European civilization.
The North Water. Directed and written by Adam Haigh, based on the novel by Ian McGuire. Starring: Jack O’Connell, Colin Farrell, Steven Graham, Tom Courtenay and Peter Mullan.
The North Water appears on Super Channel Fuse on Sunday at 9 pm, with each episode available on Super Channel On Demand the next day. The series will be available in wide release on CBC TV, CBC Gem in fall, 2022. Superchannel Fuse is available on most Canadian cable providers as well as through Amazon Prime and the Apple TV app.