Man overboard! Tom Hanks is all at sea in this shallow drama
Dir Aaron Schneider
Starring Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, Karl Glusman, Thomas Kretschmann, Elisabeth Shue
True movie stars are among the trustiest brands around. Clint glares, Jack crackles, Marlon smoulders: it’s why we go to them, and keep coming back. As for Tom Hanks? Twee as it might sound, the man
inspires. Since his mid-nineties move away from comedy, Hanks has been Hollywood’s pre-eminent ordinary chap who weathers extraordinary times. Yet wherever in space and time his characters are struggling, the takeaway is generally the same: if he can get through it with stoicism, humility and grace, then perhaps so can we.
In theory, Greyhound should offer an interesting spin on the Hanks screen persona, in no small part because Hanks wrote it. An adaptation of the 1955 CS Forester novel The Good Shepherd, this one tells the story of Ernest Krause, a US Navy commander at the helm of a destroyer which escorts an Allied supply convoy across the Atlantic.
The year is 1942 – a point in the Second World War when the midatlantic gap had yet to be closed, and U-boats still prowled the ocean untroubled by anti-submarine aircraft. Ernie is a long-serving career officer on his first wartime mission, but is keenly aware of the treacherousness of the historical moment, even before the inevitable onslaught begins.
It is easy to see what drew Hanks to Forester’s novel, since Ernie’s decency is so foregrounded in the script. We meet him praying in his quarters, haloed in heavenly light, while on deck he shrinks at jingoism: when a younger crew member cheers the demise of “50 Krauts” after a U-boat is sunk, Ernie gently reminds him that they were officers too. Yet beyond such grace notes, there’s little sense of Ernie’s inner life or what he stands for, and even a prologue in which he bids farewell to his angelic sweetheart (Elisabeth Shue, the only woman in the picture) feels tokenistic rather than revealing.
As such, the film plays less like the Hanksian character study you might be hoping for – a new Captain Phillips, for example – than a Battle of the Atlantic simulator ride with a casting golden ticket. The procedural details are all nicely observed, but the tension is superficial – more a function of dramatic lighting and some well-timed bangs than an active investment in the characters’ plights.
Director Aaron Schneider shot the film on board the USS Kidd, a Second World War destroyer berthed in Baton Rouge, but the seascapes are all computer-generated, and the coaland-pewter colour scheme becomes relentless. No doubt that is how the Atlantic actually looks. But it’s easy to imagine Robert Zemeckis – one of the great directors of Hanks in Forrest Gump and Cast Away, and a master synthesiser of live-action and CGI – wringing some visual variety out of a tale like this that went far beyond a mid-film camera tilt up to the northern lights. The ocean may be perilously deep, but Greyhound’s currents swirl at ankle height.
If this is all Tom Hanks imagines a Tom Hanks vehicle to be, he greatly underestimates himself.