The brilliant, haunting last scene of Captain Phillips features a real-life Navy medic and Tom Hanks in an improvised scene that sums up the emotionally wrecking experience Hanks has just endured. It underscores both Hanks’ amazing acting talent and director Paul Greengrass’s ability to turn his extraordinary rendering of realism on its side and look at the human scale of a near-disastrous confrontation. It is as if Greengrass is saying, “OK, I brought you there for all the tenseness and confusion, now with equal frankness I’m going to show you the human toll that results.”
Greengrass, who directed the second and third installments of the Bourne franchise, also made two excellent documentary-style dramas: one about the Northern Ireland conflict, Bloody Sunday (2002), and the other, the 911 hijacked jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, United 93 (2006). The use of Navy personnel in Captain Phillips hardly represents a new tactic for Greengrass. In United 93 numerous speaking roles, including the lead traffic controller, were played by their real-life counterparts, who recreated their stressful roles in the day’s tragedy far better than we can imagine any professional actor could have. Greengrass’s equally trademark use of hand-help cameras and a jittery, effectively kinetic style, bring Captain Phillips an immediacy that is often exciting and suspenseful.
What rises the film above that of its ilk, is his ability to interject moving snapshots of the desperation of the Somali pirates alongside the bravery/vulnerabilty dynamics of Hanks’ Captain Phillips. Their chess game points to the larger issue of how there are no real winners is such a high stakes game. Nor does Greengrass go overboard in allowing us to feel a certain empathy for the enemy. Any such sentiments are tempered by a mutual feeling of pity for their careless action and an awareness of of their socioeconomic plight that caused it. The good guys and the bad guys square off, then there’s a chilling afterburn as we realize global capitalism can have nasty side effects. Captain Phillips, the second film this year to rewardingly tackle the subject of Somali pirates and cargo ships, is a fine counterpart to the Danish film, A Highjacking, which approached the topic from the angle of the negotiations of a shipping company as it deals with the effects a successful highjacking has on a crew kept largely in the dark about the company’s actions.
Hanks, fascinating to watch, has as good a chance as not for his third Oscar. Opposite him, the film’s other captain, Muse, is played by Barkhad Abdi, a Somali refugee from Minneaplois, who never acted before in his life. Although Billy Ray’s screenplay errs somewhat on the side of portraying the film’s Somalis in a cartoonish fashion, Abdi is real good. Long invulnerable to attacks from a small band of fishermen in a tiny skiff, the fact-based story depicted in captain Phillips may be a one-off. International laws prohibiting crew members from arming themselves have been amended and cargo ships like the one depicted here are now wrapped in razor wire to fend off any “attacking” ladders. In Greengrass’s vision the ladders used by the Somali prates to board the Maersk Alabama, might also be said to symbolize their human basic wish to climb to a higher economic station. The vast differences in size between the two vessels, dramatically scaled in the film, can only be breached temporarliy before Navy seals reaffirm their distinctions. Life goes on, but at a brutal cost for all.
4 Frail Attackers Whip Out Their Skiffs, Ladders and Assault Rifles (out of 5 stars)