Master
and Commander 11/27/2003
What’s Good:
Great performances placed
within a great set where everyone has a job and everyone seems to know
what they're doing. Amazing visuals too. Plus,
while
there are plenty of battle sequences, I found the film’s true center to
exist in the behavioral attributes of the ship's crew. I'm just glad a
film like this is out there.
What's Not:
Read
the last paragraph. And I still say a film like should have been in
SmellOvision. Also, a story like this may be even better in novel form
though I've never touched O'Brien's celebrated series.
Directed by
Peter Weir
Outline:
Ship Surgeon Stephen
Maturin (Bettany) and Navy Capt. Jack Aubrey (Crowe) sail out to see the
richness and strangeness of life on the far side of the world, against
the backdrop of Napoleonic Wars.
I’m going to do something that other critics didn’t have the courage to do when reviewing Master and Commander. I’m not going to use the word swashbuckling… swashbuckling, swashbuckling, swashbuckling. Fuck. Well okay, now that I got it out of the way I can get to more important things.
Lets start with
the plot of a tenacious French super ship hunting our resolved Brit boys
down with amazing precision. This is basically all that goes on in the
overall scheme of the film and is basically all that motivates the
mechanics of the high seas plotting. The menacing Frenchmen (which is
not an oxymoron) is a bit pat as it does nothing but provide the
British characters (as well as the plot) with something to be intense
about every few minutes until, whew, “we lost em again.” Picture the
structure of Jaws (i.e. shark comes, crew evades shark and
has a party, shark comes again, crew gets serious) and know that this
film's beats are basically on the same wavelength. I’m not complaining
for this is probably how oceanic warfare circa 17th century actually
went. In fact, I loved the unflinching attention to period detail and
the willingness to make a movie about warfare that is not wall-to-wall
action (just picture for a moment what Jerry Bruckheimer would have done
with this film?). The production design by William Sandell (from
designing Perfect Storm to Deep Blue Sea, this bloke loves
salt water) is stunning both because it looks great and because the
characters are able to interact with the designer’s sea worn work. Not a
once did I doubt that these characters were on a real ship and that's
probably because they WERE on a real ship.
Also, the dialogue is spot on and thankfully wasn't
dumbed down for an ignorant Yankee audiences. No utterance seemed out of
place or labored; the dialogue is just about perfect. So the cockney and
nautical bits that come from the script is handled with a natural ease
as the seamen (he he) run about the ship screaming at each other and
performing tasks with amazing believability. Sure I may not have
understood everything the characters were saying but the conviction of
the cast overrode any syntactical gaps to make for a perfectly
understandable adventure.
Besides sounding the part, the ensemble, ranging from the tree-humping, pointy nose dude from Lord of the Rings to that guy from Emma were really convincing in the way that they sounded, in the way they all did their specific jobs on the ship, and in the way they interacted with each other. So besides sounding like weary naval soldiers who have been on the job far too long, the film also tackles worthy subjects such as the class divide between the lower seamen and the officers who come from good families and are officers for that reason alone; notions of history and past battles are welcomed as characters are always alluding to past events without ever making anything feel like exposition; and my favorite aspect of the film was the Darwinist science of evolution and notions like what part god (or man) has to play in any of that--there is also lot of dual-meaning talk from the film's science man as he discusses species in the insect world who, over eons, have “changed” and have adapted to camouflage themselves and blend in with the environment... ya see, cuz ships in the film do the same thing!
Russell Crow as the kindhearted but tough Captain gives the film its footing as this solid performance buoys the narrative and allows the plot to stay on track as it never gets too serious, or stogy, or pretentious or melodramatic etc. From humor to horror the film hits upon a plethora of tones but Crow keeps them all believable within the film's context. Crow is the kind of movie lead that doesn’t just give good performances on his own terms but is infectious to the rest of the cast. Contrary to what we hear about his dick-head personal life, he comes off as a decidedly unselfish actor here. In M&C, Crow may be playing the heroic Capt. Jack Aubrey but he does not monopolize that opportunity as just about everyone in the huge cast gets their chance to shine—Crow is not in the movie as much as one would expect from a 20 million dollar lead. So despite... or is it because of that caveat, the ship gets stolen from the actor by two men. First is his Beautiful Mind co-star, Paul Bettany playing Dr. Stephen Maturin, the ship’s ambitious surgeon who is also Jack's best friend (I loved how the two played music together in their off time). Every scene with Paul achieves a quiet grandeur as this character mocks men of war, revels in science, makes friend with an armless boy, loves his captain and crew and even has time to bust the Captain's balls about the way he rules over his vessel. The line “am I addressing you as a friend or the ship’s captain” comes up a few times and is very potent in the way it describes the film's central relationship to a tea—the two can almost be called a couple! So Crow and Bettany make for a fascinating Master and Servant, er, I mean Captain and loyal follower and we could be looking at the best movie pairing since Clooney and Markey Mark. This is the most clear Best Supporting Actor performance I've seen since Ben Kingsley was in Sexy Beast.
A triumphant Galapagos Islands sequence (the first time any film has been allowed to shot on there) entails this man of science being taken to an island of isolated zoology to heal along side the natural world. Sound's cheesy but it's sooo not... it's the best part of the movie in fact. You see, the Doctor is sick from a bullet in the gullet (don’t ask) and because of the Captain's moving sympathy and kindness towards his friend, the Doctor is allowed to heal in the one place the he wants to be; a place where he feels close to nature and a place where he comes to understand the nature of both animal and man and, best of all, a place where he doesn't see death coming from all directions. After the bullet is removed and Doctor gets better he and his young friend (the kid without an arm who is looking to be a scientist himself) start exploring the beautiful island. Here his solace is once again interrupted by a warship that he spots in a great rack focus shot where the Weir switches perspective from a beetle the Doctor is holding up in the air to a lurking French ship. This forces him to abandon his research but allows the Capt. to finally gain the upper hand which leads into a bravura final battle scene. These scenes and what they say about both Paul’s character and Russell’s Captain is more adventurous (from a drama/human interest standpoint) than any battle scenes I saw and I am grateful that Weir was able to make this film about something other than war. Others may disagree but I saw the film to be far more concerned with matters of the crew and the dynamic between these men who have been at sea together all this time vs., well, the sea. M&C is an internal epic where all the great sweeps of drama and action occurs in these men’s hearts.
The second thing that steals the film from Crow is of course the director. Every shot is meaningful and Weir bravely directs what he has called “a hundred million dollar art film”--though I have NO idea why the film cost around $135 million dollars considering it was mostly set in the crew’s quarters. Anyways, my point is that Weir’s film may be long but it never felt long. The film is isolated but Weir never allows us feel that either. This is a magnificently directed picture and a visionary like Weir (who may have the most amazing range of any filmmaker I've ever seen) should be propelled to the status of one of the world’s great directors who should be allowed to make any film he wants any time he wants at any cost he wants.
While proof reading (yes, I have been known to do that from time to time… though not very well) I see that my words read like I’m giving the film an A grade and though I have a lot of respect for what I saw over this Thanksgiving weekend, I had one problem with Master and Commander that couldn’t be reconciled. Everything I said above is true --this is a solid film that anyone who has ever watched the History Channel should go sea… get it, sea?-- yet what’s missing in what I write is the level of my detachment after I saw the film. I was truly indifferent about most of the plot and the film hit me on an aesthetic level over the kind of visceral I’m-on-the-boat-and-I'm-going-to-vomit level it was aiming for. I could intellectually process everything that’s going on (from the naval strategies to the bloody-cool battle set piece at the end) but never did I care about the action on the same kind of personal level of a film like The Perfect Storm. I think I care about what happens in this film as much as I do a documentary... and I suppose that was Weir's intention. So then I don't mind saying that my enjoyment of this film is more from the standpoint of a critic, not a spectator and I examined the beautiful film much in the same way the film’s eager doctor examined dead insects. That is to say he appreciates their beauty without ever becoming emotionally invested or attached.
{B+} 135 +me critics recommend Master and Commander, 25 wankers don't.
The character of
Agent Smith, played by a scenery chewing Hugo Weaving may be the only
redeeming thing about this unredeemable film--I loved that Dr Evil "bwah,
bwah ha!" laugh Smith belted out after he absorbed the Oracle but am not
sure if my laughing at his laugh was intended.