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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Russell Crowe and director Peter Weir bring Patrick O'Brian's seafaring adventures to the screen in this glorious and heartfelt action movie for grown-ups.
Nov 14, 2003 | Tall ships are natural movie stars. Their patrician bone structure looks grand from any angle, and the whiteness of their sails generously and graciously reflects back more light than it absorbs. They respond to the air around them and the water below with flirtatiousness, authority and, when it's called for, shuddering humility. Like pianos, guitars and violins, they're built of stuff that used to be alive, and it sometimes seems as if, deep down, their once-spongy cells retain a sense memory of what that was like. Vain if not exactly haughty, they love the camera -- but not nearly as much as the camera adores them.
I suspect most viewers will know if Peter Weir's magnificent and heartfelt "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" is their kind of movie within the first 10 minutes, when they get that first long-shot glimpse of HMS Surprise, the vessel on (and around) which nearly all the movie's action takes place. "Master and Commander" is drawn largely from the 10th novel of the late Patrick O'Brian's regal 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series (named after its two central characters, close friends who are nearly polar opposites), a body of work that has attracted a loyal cult of readers for more than three decades.
But I don't think you need to have read O'Brian to understand the visual shorthand of that shot of the Surprise, its sails catching the wind like a gift, its masts standing taller and prouder than anything built by man has a right to. We all know that ships represent the romance and allure of the sea. But with one shot, Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd cut past the clichés to explain why ships (and, by extension, O'Brian's novels) touch so many of us as they do: Suspended between the storybook and the prosaic, they're the precise intersection of visual poetry and damn hard work.
"Master and Commander" is a gentleman's action movie, one in which the delicate psychology of human notions like bravery, honor and duty thrive amid, and not in spite of, the crashing boom of cannonballs as they splinter wood, the clang and thunk of swords as a tangle of men fight to the death, the roar of the sea as it threatens to swallow the bunch of them whole. "Master and Commander" is exciting without being unnecessarily loud, and vital without being garish: Weir has used every tool available to him, including sound -- the gentle, ominous creaking of the ship might stick with you longer than the thunderousness of the movie's numerous battles -- to make a movie that feels not just authentically of its period but somehow suspended in time. Even its special effects (which blend so seamlessly into the narrative that it's not immediately obvious how technically advanced they are) seem buffed to a rich patina.
"Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World"
Directed by Peter Weir
Starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd, Max Pirkis
It's 1805, a time when, the movie's opening frame tells us, "Oceans are battlefields," thanks to Napoleon's highly inconvenient efforts to rule the world. Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe), of the Royal Navy, guides his warship, the 28-gun Surprise, through the South Atlantic, just off the coast of Brazil, when it's attacked, suddenly and brutally, by an aggressive French privateer, the Acheron. It had been Jack's task to intercept the ship -- "you will sink, burn or take her as a prize" went the mandate -- but instead he's left with a grave number of injured crew members and a badly damaged vessel.
The rest of "Master and Commander" details the journey of the Surprise, around Cape Horn and up to the Galápagos Islands, as Jack doggedly trails the French ship that has caused him so much trouble. But getting from here to there isn't even the half of it: The core of "Master and Commander" is the hardy, thriving friendship between the good-natured, rough-and-tumble Jack, who's possessed of great bravery and superior good judgment, as well as a fondness for lousy jokes, and the ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), a scholarly lover of nature who, while at sea, puts his knowledge of science to use by, among other things, sawing off the tops of injured sailor's heads. (Believe it or not, he knows how to put everything back together afterward, sending his patients off good as new, which earns him unwavering respect and devotion from the crew.)
Jack and Stephen know one another better than they know themselves; they spar and bicker like an old married couple. At one point, when Stephen tries to express how grateful he is to Jack for giving him a chance to explore the Galápagos -- some 30 years before Darwin ever set a toe there -- Jack waves him away with faux grouchiness: "Name a shrub after me -- something prickly and hard to eradicate." Stephen is soft-spoken and has gentle manners, but when the occasion calls for it, he wields a sword like a warrior. Jack is a bit rough on the outside, but his conversations with Stephen reveal an inner nature that's ruminative and tender. In between bloody battles, the two of them retire to the captain's quarters to play string duets (Jack on violin, Stephen on cello) and drink tea out of china cups. Now that's civilization.
Weir -- who, with John Collee, adapted the screenplay from O'Brian's work -- gets the balance between the two characters just right, showing how their give-and-take sets the tone for the minisociety of the ship. And it is its own society, a smaller, rejiggered version of the great one back at home: At one point, Jack refers to the ship as "this little wooden world." O'Brian's work is incredibly multilayered -- one minute he's detailing a bit of rigging minutiae with the enthusiasm of a brainy schoolboy; the next he's describing how a young lower-class sailor, having been ordered by his captain to write a letter home, bursts into tears as he puts pen to paper. The act of inquiring after every friend, neighbor and dog in his village has made him unspeakably homesick.
