The Perfect Storm
**1/2
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Warner Bros. on July 28, 2000; certificate 12; 129
minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen; produced
by Gail Katz, Wolfgang Petersen, Paula Weinstein.
Written by Bill Wittliff; based on the novel by Sebastian
Junger.
Photographed by John Seale; edited by Richard
Francis-Bruce.
CAST.....
George Clooney..... Captain Billy Tyne
Mark Wahlberg..... Bobby Shatford
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio..... Linda Greenlaw
John C. Reilly..... Murph
William Fichtner..... Sully
Diane Lane..... Christina Cotter
Karen Allen..... Melissa Brown
Allen Payne..... Alfred Pierre
John Hawkes..... Bugsy
Cherry Jones..... Edie Bailey
Here's a frustratingly anticlimactic little number.
Imagine a version of "The Great Escape" in which the guys decide to bail
out at the last minute in favour of forming a suicide pact. It builds as
a story about triumph over the elements. Then the elements
win.
The story of "The Perfect Storm" is
true. In 1991 a fishing boat called the Andrea Gail ventured far into cold
Massachusetts waters, and on its way back three giant tempests met in the
point the boat was sailing through, forming a textbook meteorological phenomenon
known as 'perfect storm'. Sebastian Junger wrote a detailed novel about the
event two years later, which reached best-seller lists and was the source
material for this film.
The opening scenes are great examples of old-school
Hollywood gusto -- a throwback to the days of actors like Steve McQueen and
Charles Bronson, when men were men, and built muscles through wood-chopping
and bare-knuckle boxing, not health clubs. The gruff, dishevelled, sweat-caked
characters get thrown around on their boats, grunting as they reel huge catches
in, proudly slinging them on their shoulders as they dock. They moan about
their pay. They play hard in a local bar run buy a big, loud ol' gal, squeeze
their girlfriends, jokingly give each other violent headlocks, cheer and
hoot as the lights shake from couples screwing upstairs. Heroic music shamelessly
sweeps through the soundtrack.
Then they have to go out again, for one big score
before the weather turns bad. George Clooney plays the mad-eyed, obsessive
captain, determined to show that he has not lost the skill of his youth.
Mark Wahlberg is the onboard peacemaker, a rational kid who longs to get
home to his loving woman. William Fichtner and John C. Reilly try to work
together without fighting. Allen Payne is a quiet but reliable West Indian
stud. John Hawkes is another good worker, but in terms of personality, the
team goofball.
An enormous catch is made, just before the radio
comes in with storm warnings. But the ice machine that the fish are stored
in has broken down, so if our heroes play it safe and stay stationary until
the weather cools off, their goods will turn rotten. High on a sense of victory,
unaware of the extremity of the weather, the men decide to brave it, and
make the journey back.
The storm footage is amazing. It takes up about
forty minutes of the movie, but never gets repetitive or boring, because
it builds slowly, keeps presenting different challenges to the men, increases
in danger, and is brilliantly realised. The special effects are such an invisible
and effective part of the story that we never stop to consider them with
awe; we're too wrapped up in instinctual tension. Waves the size of buildings
whoosh around in grotesque foam patterns, dominating the scene as angry gods,
crashing down in surround-sound that attacks us like the D-Day sequence in
"Saving Private Ryan".
As action filmmaking, this is superior stuff.
It holds us on edge, raising the stakes high, and we demand to know "How
on earth did they get out of it?" If that question isn't answered, then the
exercise is pointless, and so I felt cheated at the end of the picture, when
all the men died, and I realised the whole thing was supposed to be elegiac
drama. It simply does not work as a serious movie. How could it, with lines
like: "My home? Ha! The sea is my home, kiddo!"
The director, Wolfgang Petersen, and his writer,
Bill Wittliff, have made a gloriously goofy entertainment of comic book
relationships and forced emotions, only to turn around at the last minute
and claim that they're sincere. Obviously, since the characters died in real
life, I'm not asking for a movie that saves them; but we should have been
given one that prepares us for their deaths, or gives them some kind of
significance. What's so special about going up against impossible odds, and
losing?
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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