‘Greyhound’ a good fit for the small screen
I can’t say how “Greyhound” might look and feel on a big movie screen, because it’s premiering July 10 on Apple TV Plus, a pandemic change of plans described in one recent interview as “absolutely heartbreaking” by the screenwriter and star, Tom Hanks.
But honestly, it’s a pretty good fit for home viewing. Clocking in at under 90 minutes, not counting the credits, the drama comes by its name honestly. Like the canine, it’s trim, narrow of scope, and it runs efficiently and well despite a barrage of on-screen time stamps and vessel identification markers.
In other words: close-up of Hanks looking through binoculars at two ships. Cut to the binocular perspective, and the on-screen labels appear: “British Destroyer HARRY and British Destroyer EAGLE.” A World War II movie made during WWII would’ve used some quick, spoken exposition delivered by, or to, a secondary character, to let the audience know what they’re seeing.
But this is 2020, and the on-screen labeling, the thinking goes, keeps the audience on track without dialogue that sounds like tin. I don’t love the solution Hanks and director Aaron Schneider favor, and it’s hardly the first time anyone’s used it. But it’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.
“Greyhound” tells its fictional story headon, no structural messing around, compared to Christopher Nolan’s similarly compact but infinitely more ambitious “Dunkirk.” Hanks has nursed this project for years. He adapted the 1955 novel “The Good Shepherd” by C.S. Forester, best known for his “Horatio Hornblower” adventures and “The African Queen.”
The “Greyhound” script remains faithful to certain aspects of the novel, notably the protagonist’s devout Christian beliefs and practices. Hanks’ script stays tightly focused on his character, first-time U.S. Navy Capt. Ernie Krause, a convoy task force commander leading 37 supply ships across the Atlantic, to Britain, in 1942. It’s a fraught 48-hour timeline. The Nazi U-boats travel in “Graue Wu00f6lfe” or “Grey
Wolf” packs, presenting Krause and his crew with terrifying strategic challenges. How, for example, does a destroyer elude two or more torpedoes speeding toward their target at the same time?
As depicted in “Greyhound,” it’s a tense and effective sequence, and the movie has little time for down-time between crises. Hanks’ flashback framing device is a brief scene featuring Elisabeth Shue as the devoted love of Krause’s life. He thinks of her often, out on the ocean, months later, grappling with one life-ordeath scenario after another.
If this sounds clichéd, it’s hardly Shue’s fault; she does every simple, clear, telling thing as an actor to ground the flashbacks in something more substantial than honey. At its sharpest “Greyhound” uses its preferred “Law & Order” pacing and frequent fade-outs and fade-ups between scenes to roll forward, while the actors keep the one-to-one interactions as honest as possible. Stephen Graham (as Charlie
Cole) and Rob Morgan (barely verbal but nonetheless excellent as the ship’s cook, Cleveland) add crucial, tight-lipped support.
Hanks’ conception of Krause as a deeply principled man of action, who makes a serious tactical mistake in the first 15 minutes of the story and must earn back his crew’s trust because of it, has its moments of piety (a matter of textual emphasis, not actorly indulgence). There are other moments in “Greyhound” belonging to a lesser grade of WWII drama; the voice actor playing the U-boat commander heard via sniveling radio transmission sounds like pure 1942 Hollywood Nazi.
Well. It’s a movie, after all, not a 91-minute History Channel re-creation. Thanks to Hanks, Scheider and company, it’s a satisfying one.
‘GREYHOUND’ 3 stars (out of 4). MPAA rating: PG-13 (for war-related action/violence and brief strong language). Running time: 1:31. Streaming on Apple TV Plus.