Big Miracle (2012)

Big Miracle arrives from 2012, which in the taxonomy of these matters places it just before the cultural temperature spiked. Ken Kwapis directs the 1988 saga of three gray whales trapped beneath the Alaskan ice near Point Barrow, and the improbable coalition that assembles to free them: a Greenpeace volunteer, Inupiat whale hunters, an oil executive, the National Guard, two Minnesotan entrepreneurs with de-icing machines, and eventually a Soviet icebreaker. The film is warm, well made, and entirely sincere. It is also, for our purposes, a specimen of modest interest.

The environmental streak is real but shallow. Greenpeace gets a favorable glow, an oil man is folded into the rescue instead of villainized, and the Exxon Valdez spill earns a single mention in the closing narration. That is a mood, not a movement. The Inupiat hunters appear as supporting figures whose presence is native to the setting; the film treats their culture as texture, not as a subject for critique. Drew Barrymore's activist and Kristen Bell's climbing reporter are competent women operating inside a story that never pauses to argue about gender. Nobody lectures. The moral, when it surfaces, is that cooperation beats rivalry, delivered through family sentiment and a dead whale calf.

Which leaves us with a curious artifact: a film about environmentalism, cross-cultural rescue, and the thawing of Cold War hostility that declines to convert any of it into a thesis. It wants us to feel good, and then it wants us to go home. There is something almost quaint in that restraint, and the sommelier in me notes it with a certain wistfulness. The vintage is pleasant. It is not fortified. The whales are freed, the Soviet ship does its work, and the audience is released into the evening without having been scolded about anything at all. A gentle, decent, unremarkable bottle, best served at room temperature to a family on a Sunday afternoon, and then forgotten by Tuesday.

One notes, finally, that a movie can be about saving the planet and still possess no interest in the vocabulary we now use to discuss it. This one saves three whales and asks for nothing in return. Charming, in its way. Also, for the ledger, largely irrelevant to the matter at hand.