Saturday 9 November 2013

All by the board ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


9 November (updated 10 November)


* Contains mild spoilers *


79 = S : 15 / A : 14 / C : 12 / M : 11 / P : 13 / F : 14


A rating and review of Captain Phillips (2013)


S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)


I know that I am not alone in saying that the closing minutes of Captain Phillips (2013) made all that went before worth watching.

Much of those two hours was, not very subtly, made to seem more thrilling by quick cutting and by the effects of heartbeat-like pulsations, other percussive sounds, and sustained high-frequency notes, which one may not register in Henry Jackman's score, but whose sudden absence lifts the preceding tension. The script also makes use of power-games, and games of people tryin g to work out which game is being played, such as wearing your opponent down through talk, addressing comments to someone who is not there to make it seem as those one has a powerful ally, and, equally, speaking when one knows that, unknown to others, someone else is listening.

The film has some basis in actual events. We have a captain, in Tom Hanks, who notionally establishes his American Irish credentials by saying one line in a lilting brogue (brogues always lilt), but not at any other point. Prior to finishing getting ready, he gratuitously brought up the itinerary on his PC, telling it to us, but as if he was just checking to be sure, which might fit his desire to have things shipshape.

On the journey to the airport to meet his vessel, Rich (Phillips) is admirably concerned about his children's future, when in conversation with his wife Andrea, but he sounds as though he is paraphrasing the lyric of 'Times they are a-changing' in a Forrest Gump (1994) sort of way. His arrival in port in Oman has him check the security on the way up to the bridge, which he announces that he wants rigorously put in place, but, when the time of testing comes, it puts up no resistance whatever.

This is where one wonders what has gone before - Phillips must know more than the e-mail warnings of Somali pirates that we see on his screen on board, and the hoses that are deployed must have been installed as part of a stratagem on the part of Maersk, but, if so, it all seems a little rusty, and rather too ineffectual.

We have Phillips' preparations for sea, and we have that of Muse's (Barkhad Abdi's) crew, under his warlord boss - we compare the Western approach of civility in giving orders with that of the Somalis, shouting at each other and jostling for position, but it is there in the relations on the Maersk Alabama, when Phillips takes on an objecting union member, and urges people to finish their break on time. Another point of contact is engines, on both vessels, being taken beyond their limits, all of which tends to suggest how similar things are in this parallel way.

Still, we do not quite know how much, on Muse's and Phillips' side, is instinctual thinking on their feet, and how much training. Maybe a vain boast from Muse that a $6m Greek vessel had been caught, maybe it was, but all benefit went to his boss - the huge surprise is the successful boarding. From there, everything is bound to go in cat-and-mouse fashion to sustain the film's need for twists and turns, even if Phillips seems the person least likely to convince in lying (both as he does it, and with the lies to hand), and when Muse allows a powerful position to slide for reasons that are fairly tenuous : either he knows how to conduct a situation like this, or he does not, whereas he seems swayed by Phillips, almost as if the white man saying that he does not know what happened to the crew is worth listening to.

For me, when Phillips is left to his own devices, the situation does not build a claustrophobic tension whose resolution one longs for, but one that drags, and where the visuals did not impress a sense of confinement on me. (However, we do have the very necessary element that all this happens at the time of the full moon.)

Hanks after that, though, is an excellent end to the film, focusing just on him, his essential responses and feelings, before we pull out from a wide view and close. Abdi and his fellow captors, especially Najee (Faysal Ahmed) and Elmi (Mahat M. Ali), are very strong, and suitably threatening.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

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