FIRTH SAILS FORTH INTO DEEP WATERS
The star is superb as a doomed yachtsman who is utterly adrift on the high seas
Donald Crowhurst, played here by Colin Firth, was the weekend sailor who had never even crossed the Channel, yet in 1968 set off from teignmouth in devon on a circumnavigation of the globe — on a boat hopelessly ill-equipped for the purpose.
somewhere in the atlantic, realising that he couldn’t press on but feeling unable to turn back, he began to send fake reports of his whereabouts.
his wife and children were among those, back in England, who were duped into thinking that he was progressing around the world at record-breaking speed. But the deception did not continue.
when eventually his boat, the teignmouth Electron, was found, Crowhurst wasn’t on it.
the last of his increasingly incoherent log entries suggests he jumped overboard to embrace a certain, welcome death. ‘It is finished . . . it is the mercy,’ he wrote.
It’s a sad, well-known story that was chronicled in a fine 2006 documentary called deep water. dramatising it is a trickier task, requiring speculation to be treated as fact, and reliant on the convincing depiction of a man’s slow, salty descent into madness.
the casting of Crowhurst needs to be spot on, and it is. By the end it’s hard to imagine who else but Firth might have played him.
he is 20 years older than Crowhurst was at the time but somehow that doesn’t matter, not least because half a century ago, slightly repressed middle-class Englishmen in their 30s looked passably like slightly repressed middle-class Englishmen in their 50s do now.
when Crowhurst sets off on his doomed adventure, he is wearing a collar and tie under his bright yellow sou’wester, as if the dolphins or the trade winds might object if he turns up sloppily dressed.
the film begins at the 1968 Boat show, where Crowhurst, there to sell a navigation system he’s invented, is captivated by an address given by the round-theworld yachtsman sir Francis Chichester (simon McBurney).
the great man announces a new race, the Golden Globe. with a window of several months in which to set off, there are handsome cash prizes for both the first and the quickest sailor to complete a solo, non-stop circumnavigation. I am just old enough myself to remember the hoopla caused by Chichester’s own 1967 circumnavigation, with only a single stop, in Gypsy Moth IV.
Firth has said that it is one of three events in the sixties, along with the moon landing and Churchill’s funeral, of which he
still has vivid memories. So it’s easy to understand why the challenge might have inspired a dreamer like Crowhurst.
He is motivated partly by the romance of the notion, but also by pragmatism. His business is failing, and the £5,000 prize being donated by the Sunday Times newspaper will bail him out. He persuades a local entrepreneur, Stanley Best (Ken Stott), to give him financial backing, and pledges the deeds of his family house as collateral, should he drop out of the race. And in a move somewhat ahead of its time, he hires a PR man, a rather unscrupulous former journalist called Rodney Hallworth (David Thewlis), to keep him in the public eye.
Thanks to Hallworth’s tenacity, the BBC give him a 16mm camera to record his adventures, and the brewer Whitbread offers to supply him with barley wine. All this unnerves his loyal wife, Clare, played by the distractingly beautiful Rachel Weisz. I watched The Mercy with my own wife, who thought Weisz, as fine an actress as she is, was miscast.
It’s probably true, with all due respect to that characterful little Devon town, that Teignmouth housewives in 1968 didn’t look like her.
Still, there are bigger problems with James Marsh’s film, knocking it off an entirely even keel. The storytelling, once the voyage is underway, sometimes becomes confusing. Crowhurst is a good enough sailor to reach Argentina, where he lands and seeks help with much-needed repairs.
But it’s not entirely clear why he returns to sea at all, or why the Argentinian coastguard doesn’t rumble him. Also, I found the script by Scott Z. Burns just a little pat in places. When the press converge on the Crowhurst home after Donald’s disappearance has been confirmed and his deception revealed, Clare berates them not with the vocabulary of a grieving wife, but that of a screenwriter at his keyboard.
‘Last week you were selling hope, now you’re selling blame,’ she scolds.
Nonetheless, there are far more reasons to see The Mercy than there are to give it a miss. Chief among them is Firth’s convincing and deeply moving performance as a decent man, devoted to his family, who finds himself out of his depth in more ways than one.
AT THe start of the film he radiates almost Tiggerish enthusiasm (again I’ll cite my wife, who says he reminded her at this early stage of Tom in The Good Life).
But even before he sets off, the scope of the challenge and the manifest unsuitability of his trimaran have sapped his spirit. He knows he is insufficiently prepared, and the scene in which Clare and the children wave him goodbye — a high-pitched ‘good luck, Daddy’ carried away on the wind — is heartrendingly sad. It is no longer buoyant optimism but misplaced pride that propels him over the horizon and out of sight. From that point on, Marsh overcomes the obvious difficulty of how to tell the story of a lone sailor — with flashbacks to cheerful family life, and by cutting to scenes of burgeoning excitement back home as news emerges of Crowhurst’s amazing progress.
But, to paraphrase another Donald, it is fake news.
The Mercy is similar in some ways to Marsh’s 2014 hit The Theory Of everything, about Stephen Hawking. This too is a story defined by its period setting and by a certain doughty, middle-class englishness.
But where The Theory of everything was a tale of triumph over seemingly insuperable odds, here, alas, it is the insuperable odds themselves that conquer.