Review: 'The Loneliest Whale' is a heartfelt, if narratively thin, pursuit for answers to an oceanic mystery

There must be no feeling worse to a documentary filmmaker than getting your footage together, after years of filming, and realizing there’s not enough story there — which makes director Joshua Zeman’s accomplishment in “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52” kind of remarkable, because he squeezes out a good yarn in spite of a thin story line.

Zeman’s search begins with a decades-long mystery in the field of oceanography. It involves the songs of whales, and one particular whale who emits a specific frequency — 52 hertz — that’s higher than the sounds made by blue whales or fin whales. (It’s far lower than the whale songs most familiar to humans, those of humpback whales.) 

It was theorized, based on recordings made by a secret U.S. Navy underwater program, that there was only one whale who made this 52-hertz sound, which presumably meant no other whale could understand the song. Thus the so-called “52-hertz whale,” or 52 for short, was referred to in reports as “the world’s loneliest whale.”

Zeman starts by talking to the resident experts in oceanography, particularly those who have studied whale songs and the mystery of 52. He then goes one better, taking his meager production budget — raised through a Kickstarter campaign, and such benefactors as actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Adrian Grenier (who are among the producers) — for a one-week expedition off the California coast, where many of these same experts combine their talents to try to figure out where 52 might be, if he/she is still alive at all.

Through the expedition, Zeman explores the many challenges faced by whales in the open ocean. One of the biggest is commercial shipping, because the giant freighters that carry goods here and there produce tons of noise that drown out the whales’ sounds, thus cutting them off from communicating with each other.

The adventure of the expedition isn’t as exciting as one might think, since much of it involves pleasant young scientists and grizzled old scientists staring intently at computer monitors. It also doesn’t fill a lot of screen time — leaving Zeman to fill with narrative side trips into the history of whaling and how a recording of humpback whales became a best-selling album that jumpstarted the environmental movement. He even lets comedian/musician Kate Micucci (from Garfunkel & Oates) perform a funny little ditty about the loneliest whale, which she names “Doreen” mostly because it’s an easy name to rhyme.

Zeman is an engaging enough narrator, and his earnest pursuit of answers to this longstanding aquatic mystery allows the viewer to forgive the occasional dull patch. Like any fishing trip, “The Loneliest Whale” is more about the pleasant company of one’s companions than on whether you catch anything.

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‘The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 9, at Megaplex Theaters at The District (South Jordan); available on demand starting July 16. Rated PG for some unsettling whaling images, language and brief smoking. Running time: 97 minutes.