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MASTER
AND COMMANDER : THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
8/10
USA 2003
: Peter WEIR : 139 mins
It ... is
of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables
and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover
over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into
the book -- on risk of a lumbago & sciatics.
–Herman Melville, Letter to Sarah Morewood, September 1851
Moby-Dick
is generally rated one of the greatest American novels ever written
– but while Master and Commander will have to settle for being
merely one of the best American movies of the year, the Melville quote
isn’t entirely inappropriate. This is a full-blooded all-hands-on-deck
maritime tale so convincingly briny that more sensitive viewers may need
time to find their land-legs on leaving the multiplex: an ideal viewing
environment would be a North Sea ferry’s on-board cinema at the height
of a raging gale.
The esteemed
Patrick O’Brian wrote a sequence of twenty novels featuring the early
19th-century exploits of intrepid Capt. Jack Aubrey and his
great friend, ship’s medic Dr. Stephen Maturin, and this big-screen
adaptation conflates two of them – hence that unwieldy, broken-backed
title. But everything else in the script (by Weir and Scots former medic
John Collee) us admirably sturdy, to-the-point and no-nonsense, with barely
a minute of slack over two-hours-plus.
Though outwardly
watertight in every aspect of direction, technical detail and performance,
there is one troubling aspect to the hidden structure of M&C:TFSOTW
(M&C for short). The two novels on which it is based pit
a vessel of the gallant British fleet – here the 28-gun HMS Surprise
– against a foreign opponent: an American ship in one book, a Spanish
in the other. In the film, the ‘baddies’ are magically transformed
into the French. Given the filming timeframe, this is surely accidental
– but it’s an unfortunate one given Hollywood’s current
demonisation of all things Gallic in idiotic enterprises such as S.W.A.T.
This issue
won’t be picked up on by M&C’s many viewers worldwide,
of course, most of whom be swept along by what is a terrifically entertaining
example of Hollywood product (via 20th Century Fox, Universal
and Miramax) at its most professional and mature, sans tacked-on
romance, sans bells and whistles of any description. In retrospect,
however, it’s surprising how little actually happens during
these 139 minutes: the ‘Surprise’ spends most of its time eluding
the more-powerful French vessel Acheron, and most of the drama plays out
on and below decks. But when action does erupt, it does so in stirringly
full-blooded style as Aubrey and Maturin plunge into the literal cut-and-thrust
of hand-to-hand combat.
It’s the
attention to character, however, which elevates M&C beyond
the level of more flippant swashbucklers such as Pirates
of the Caribbean. As in A
Beautiful Mind, the bulky Crowe and the spindly Bettany make for
a very engaging odd-couple – the difference being that Bettany’s
character doesn’t turn out to be a figment of the hero’s fevered
imagination this time. And while Aubrey/Crowe powers the plot forward,
it’s Maturin/Bettany who is really the heart and soul of M&C:
scholarly, rational, skeptical and, when performing an operation upon
himself or wielding a cutlass in battle, surprisingly brave. The pair
are backed up by a strong, almost entirely male supporting cast in which
Max Pirkis (as a very youthful midshipman) and David Threlfall (shamelessly
OTT as the irascible ship’s cook) make the strongest impact.
Behind the
camera, credit is due to Russell Boyd, whose widescreen cinematography
thrillingly captures a world of washed-out blues and greys, with even
the copious gouts of blood oddly drained of colour. And Iva Davies’
music, like the film itself, is a textbook example of how to create an
epic mood without hitting the audience over the head with thudding bombast.
That everybody seems to ‘get’ what the film is about is of
course mainly a reflection on the ‘captain’ of this doughty
venture, Peter Weir – an occasionally erratic director who, in even
his best films, has been prone to the odd lapse into cliché or crudeness
(the final montage in The Truman Show, for instance.) Here, buoyed
by the solid-oak of O’Brien’s structure and research, the daunting
logistics of what must have been a tricky production seem to have focussed
his mind as never before. Even the notoriously tough author would probably
approved – as might the real-life Aubreys and Maturins, so realistically
does the film present every detail of old-time naval life. Well, almost
every detail. The three classic features of the Royal Navy were, as
commemorated in the title of a Pogues LP, ‘rum, sodomy and the lash.’
Two out of three ain’t bad.
3rd
December, 2003
(seen 27th November : UGC Cinemas, Boldon Colliery)
by Neil
Young
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