Tom Hanks plays WWII captain facing explosive danger in ‘Greyhound.’
‘Greyhound’ gives movie star another chance to inspire as heroic everyman
The actual running time of “Greyhound,” minus the opening credits, is only 82 minutes, but it feels a lot longer — at least 40 minutes longer.
Normally, that would suggest a movie that drags, but something else is going on here. You know how, in moments of peak stress, everything suddenly slows down? “Greyhound,” available on Apple TV Plus starting Friday, July 10, gives us the movie equivalent of that phenomenon.
Adapted from C.S. Forester’s novel “The Good Shepherd” by its star, Tom Hanks, it’s the story of a naval captain leading a convoy of cargo ships across the Atlantic during World War II. If you’re familiar with the trajectory of that war, the fact that the film takes place in early 1942 will tell you all you need to know about the peril involved in such an assignment: In that early stage of the war, German Uboats (submarines) infested the Atlantic, and thus a large proportion of the supplies the United States was trying to ship to Britain ended up on the bottom of the ocean — along with the men who tried to deliver them.
Indeed, following Pearl Harbor, this was the only period in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill considered it possible that the Germans might still win. If the U.S. couldn’t resupply Britain or gets its soldiers safely across the ocean, the U.S. couldn’t apply its strength to defeat the Nazis.
The movie sets the dramatic terms from the first minutes. We’re told that American air support can guard convoys from embarkation up to a certain point in the western Atlantic. Likewise, toward the end of the crossing, British planes would be there to offer protection as well. But in between there was a vast stretch known as the “black pit,” during which ships would be vulnerable to an invisible enemy.
That’s the great terror here, the unseen nature of the danger. Hanks, as Cmdr. Ernest Krause, looks out at night at a stretch of black ocean, not knowing what might happen in the next minute. At any second, his ship might be exploding from an enemy torpedo.
In “Greyhound,” there’s an additional stress — this is the captain’s first command. He knows it, and his men know it, too. So we see him afraid and uncertain, but suppressing that fear and uncertainty, as he improvises from one crisis to the next. Fortunately, his ship has radar,
so he has an idea of where the Uboats are hiding. But the radar is imprecise. Essentially, he’s fighting blindly, and yet he’s unable to do what a blindfolded combatant might do instinctively — swing wild, and often. He can’t, for example, start dropping bombs into the ocean indiscriminately, because his supply of ammunition is far from limitless.
The role brings out another in the Tom Hanks gallery of seemingly unremarkable men rising to meet extraordinary challenges. Like James Stewart, Hanks’ career, at least since “Apollo 13” (1996), has been all about showing us that the average person isn’t average at all, and that the entire function and progress of the world depends upon the strains, sacrifices and nerves of supposedly average people.
There is something reassuring in that message, and also democratic and American in the best sense. It’s why Hanks has been, for more than two decades, the American actor, the one who seems to represent America’s spirit and values.
In retrospect, that’s surprising, as Hanks started out as just an appealing comic lead. Thirty years ago, it was Kevin Costner who seemed destined to fill that role. But no, it turned out to be Hanks, with his lack of vanity, unneurotic decency and his actor’s capacity to ride the elevator all the way down to the basement of his soul. He has somehow embodied the imaginative history of his time.
All of which is to say that, when it’s Hanks steering the ship and fighting the Nazis, it means something extra. It’s not just happening to him, or them, but to us. And so, we can better imagine what it cost those guys, who had to make that backandforth ocean voyage in the awful months before their leaders figured out how to sink the Uboats.
It was stressful enough that it makes 82 minutes feel like two hours, and that’s if you’re only watching a movie. The actual voyage must have seemed like forever.