For freight liner captain Richard
Phillips (Tom Hanks), the day starts with a mundane drive to the
airport with his wife, casually discussing the challenges their
children will face in the modern workforce. “It's tough out there
these days,” he ruefully acknowledges. “... 50 guys competing for
the same job.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in
impoverished Somalia, 50 men are competing for a job as well; hoping
to be selected to a pirate crew just to stay fed and pay off their
warlord oppressors for another week.
The disparity between these two worlds
– one of affluence and one with no opportunity at all – is made
sharply visible when men from each clash violently on the high seas
in Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips. Based on harrowing true
events that unfolded off the horn of Africa in 2009, Greengrass
depicts in straight-faced detail how a band of four Somali pirates
armed with automatic weapons pursued and boarded the Maersk Alabama
and held its captain hostage in a confined lifeboat until the
military intervened.
Throughout his career, Greengrass has built an impressive portfolio of action dramas that adhere to a stringent code of realism, and it's a philosophy that penetrates every facet of Captain Phillips from the performances onscreen down to every technical behind-the-scenes detail. Tom Hanks, for instance, chooses not to portray Phillips with any hint of blind heroism or extravagance, but as a pragmatic everyman whose initial composure is eroded away over the course of his ordeal, revealing in the film's poignant final minutes the type of scarring such a trauma would inflict.
This ingenuous treatment is not solely
reserved for our story's hero. One of the smartest decisions of
writer Billy Ray's no-nonsense screenplay is to humanize its
antagonists as well. It's much to the credit of rookie actors Barkhad
Abdi, Faysal Ahmed, Barkhad Adbirahman, and Mahat M. Ali that we
don't collectively recognize them as “the pirates”, but as four
distinct and believable characters. Abdi in particular has been
drawing notices for his performance as the pirate ringleader Muse. He
goes nose to nose with veteran A-lister Hanks with a ferocity
underlain by sheer desperation.
Greengrass builds his procedural with
an effective fly-on-the-wall sensibility that puts you right there in
the action. Barry Ackroyd's hand-held camera work effectively defines
the space of each scene (particularly in that claustrophobic
lifeboat), as does the vital sound mix. Piecing it all together and
carefully moderating the pace is Greengrass' editor Christopher
Rouse, who just might win his second Academy Award for this movie.
Given that the story has been well covered by the media since it
first broke, Greengrass and Rouse aren't able to derive much
suspense, but the tension they construct is omnipresent and
essential, especially throughout the sudden starts and stops in the
action during the lengthy second half of the film.
But for all its impressive craft and
edge-of-your-seat intensity, what ultimately allows Captain
Phillips to resonate is the theme that it speaks to and the
resulting thoughts and emotions that it triggers. In the midst of
troubling economic times, it's easy for those of us in the developed
world to take for the granted the relative luxury and opportunity
with which we've been blessed. When Phillips suggests to his captors
that there must be more to their lives than fishing and kidnapping
people, one can't help but feel a sort of sympathy as Muse mutters in
defeated response, “Maybe in America... Maybe in America.”
***1/2 out of ****
