True grit on high seas
Story based on true-life event blends heroism, humanity
At one point in the tense docudrama Captain Phillips, the skipper of a U.S. container ship (Tom Hanks) tells the Somali pirate who has captured the vessel — a skinny, calculating mercenary named Muse (Barkhad Abdi) — that there must be another way to make a living besides fishing and kidnapping people.
“Maybe in America,” Muse replies. “Maybe in America.”
Or maybe not. Captain Phillips begins in Vermont, where we meet the captain, about to embark on a voyage around the Horn of Africa, talking to his wife (Catherine Keener) about the problems their children will face making a living in this modern world.
In America, the dispossessed young wind up living in their parents’ basements. In Somalia, they wind up boarding other people’s tankers at machine-gun point.
It’s not meant as an excuse, or even an explanation. It’s just a way to humanize the villains before the inevitable showdown.
Captain Phillips, based on a true-life event in 2009, is another in a series of recent films in which complex world events are boiled down to a small, highly focused moment, usually involving helicopters and Navy SEALs.
It’s not easy to dramatize the economic and political background of Somali piracy, but it’s exceptionally satisfying to bring in the artillery and the message that you don’t want to screw around with the U.S. Navy.
It was directed by Paul Greengrass, who brought a similar sense of history on the run — or perhaps history on the edge of a theatre seat — to his 9/11 masterpiece United 93. The Captain Phillips story is not as tense, or as pivotal, but when it comes to an authentically handheld grit, and a feeling of being in the doomed cockpit, Greengrass has few peers.
Phillips was the captain of the Maersk Alabama, a container ship out of Norfolk, Va., that was carrying commercial goods and food aid from Oman to Kenya.
It had to sail through dangerous waters, but the ship’s security measures — “pirate doors” that are locked shut and fire hoses that can squirt an invading ship out of the water — were all in place.
We meet the pirates in a Somali village, where they are rounded up by the henchmen of a warlord who sends them out to work in small boats with outboard motors.
They’re lean, fierce men armed with machine guns, going up against a sophisticated vessel that looks like a floating apartment building, but as they scurry aboard on a homemade ladder — a powerful scene that yokes together the computerized technology of the 21st century with the makeshift tools of a pre-industrial hacker — they arrive with a sense of control.
Phillips is an Irish-born Yankee, who, in Hanks’s accomplished and low-key performance, protects his crew with a series of ruses meant to mollify and fool the pirates. The pirates are a mixed crew of explosive tempers, made more unpredictable by their khat habit, but Muse emerges as a sly and cautious leader.
“Don’t worry. Everything going to beOK, ”he promises, and Abdigives an air of persuasive command to a character who could be seen as just another dangerous Other.
The action unfolds with a few surprises that Greengras choreographs well.
The crew of the Maersk Alabama, at first pictured as a group hiding behind union regulations rather than prepared to fight off pirates, turn out to be expert improvisers, and the film’s sense of power shifts precariously back and forth between pirates and crew.
The second half of Captain Phillips becomes more claustrophobic as we move into a modern lifeboat, an enclosed and airless vessel that practically sweats with desperation and cigarette smoke.
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93, The Hurt Locker) gives the film an unfussy and fraught intimacy that puts us right there with them.