Delusions of Adequacy

RASSM regular and Friend Across the Waters Policraticus McEwok posted this review of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World to RASSM last week. It is reproduced here by his kind permission. Pol's thoughts on the movie are good, and I actually agree with them -- mostly. But I still love the movie. And I suspect Pol has more affection for it than his Scottish disposition will allow him to demonstrate openly...

I took the unforgivable liberty of editing out a potential spoiler for those who might plan to read the books... which everyone should.

I was... I dunno. I'd say ambiguous, but that's not quite right.

The title is a mouthfull - they didn't need "Master & Commander", since AFAIK, it's only used as a series title in limited Eastern Seaboard contexts, and it's a historical canard... but they almost made up for it with the beautiful font they used for the titles and credits.

Cinematography was superb, set design was phenomenally impressive (I mean, it helps that they could just buy HMS Rose, but can we complain?), the acting was of a very high standard, and as storyline goes, the film was an impressive distillation of the series into the context of a Holywood movie...

But it was still a Holywood movie - O'Brien's novels flow effortlessley in the way the best sea stories do, but this was surprisingly episodic. We had a selection of moments fans would expect to see (trepanning Joe Plaice, the lesser of two weevils, the floating island in the shape of the Galapagos), and every supporting character gets a look-in (except Diana [SPOILER] - though Jack's relationship with Sophie is cued with a locket and one of his endless letters)... but inevitably, characterization suffers (Padeen - who may be bog-Irish and slow, but is nevertheless a competent barber-surgeon, and a Latin-speaking confidant of Stephen's for medical matters he can't discuss with Jack, is reduced to clumsily carrying stuff)...

In fact, you could see the trajectory of every character from the outset of the films, with the real stalwarts of the series (Tom Pullings, Barret Bonden, Preserved Killick) being relegated to for'ead-knuckling - subtle, constant characters, Weir didn't really seem terribly interested in them...

More worryingly, the story was emphatically a post-September 11th swashbuckler, not so much a trivialization as an attempt to impart a level of obnoxious moral selfrighteousness that's mercifully absent in the novels - Aubrey and Maturin get in the obligatory GOP vs. anticapitalist argument, but the subtleties are lost (Aubrey, the shire Tory, is the son of a Liberal MP, and his reputation is built entirely on his bravery at sea, while Maturin is Irish, Catholic, and a British Secret Agent)... and very soon, even that token gesture is thrown to the wind in favour of the 'need' to fight the monster frigate Acheron, a slightly classier sister-ship of the Black Pearl...

Aubrey's "this ship is England" speech is a template for American commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan - I'm not sure Weir realised the absurdity of the idea of "a guillotine set up in Picadilly" as late as 1805, and the audience certainly won't... In the final battle, we finally see the bad guys as more than a monster - in the shape of an improbable horde of pike-wielding sans-culottes crewing the French frigate (an American frigate in the novel - need I say more)... and Maturin throws principle to the wind and charges into the battle, weapons in hand...

We close with a burial at sea... and of course, the entire ship's crew gather round. All good English-speaking Protestants, unquestioning now in their unity.... anyone who knows the novels might note a slight shift of emphasis from the way O'Brien plays such stuff... such subtlety as remains in the film (the sneaky French captain, and the fact that the monstrous Acheron is American-built) is, I suspect, entirely unintentional...

All that would have been forgivable for fans of the novels, though, if the characters we know had been brought to life...

But the casting?! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! That's not to say that the actors didn't inhabit their roles adequately - just that they weren't the characters from the novels. Paul Bettany is just about acceptable as Stephen Maturin (too young, too handsome, not Irish enough, not wearing a wig - Colin Farrel was born for the role), but Billy Boyd has quite clearly wandered in from the wrong film. Twelve-year-old Max Pirkis deserves special mention for being brilliant (and, unlike almost anyone else in the movie, perfectly cast) as Mr. Midshipman Lord Blakeney, but while the fact that he has such a chance to shine is a testament to his genuine talent, and Weir deserves a comendation from some sort of minority rights committee for writing such a major part for a one-armed twelve-year-old, the fact that he's elevated to a position alongside Aubrey and Maturin in the film is that this is a Peter Weir film before it's an adaptation of the novels. Alongside Pirkis, Weir gave us another well-cast young unknown in seventeen-year-old Max Benitz - superb as the doomed Anakin Solo, though his character didn't get quite the screentime that Blakeney did.

And again, wrong bloody franchise.

And as Jack Aubrey, Russel Crowe is just a mistake. Not a bad actor, not any sort of doubts about the character he plays. Just not the character he should be playing - and that's not his fault. It's well-known that O'Brien originally wanted Chuck Heston in the role, and Weir's slightly snide jokes about this show how much he missed the point. Jack Aubrey has the energy, physical stature and mild insanity of Chuck at his best. Or Burt Lancaster, perhaps, if Weir wanted someone slightly more credible...

And this is the main problem with the film. We have a credible character whose determination and courage border on the obsessive, but in doing so, Weir creates a narrower world, one that seems compassed by the confines of his own outlook and attitudes (the ambiguity this sets up against the political subtext seems unintended)... Aubrey in the novels is a character of subtlety and nuance, yes... he gets depressive and obsessive sometimes, but he's not "prickly and hard to eradicate" - on the most fundamental level he's like his sword - big, heavy, sharp-edged, and built to kill things...

There's a scene near the start where Crowe, climbing back to deck, catches himself, drawing breath, and hangs - stunned and shocked by what's going on around him. NO! Aubrey is, in his own way, an articulate and conscienscious man, but if he ever did have that sort of moment (I think it does come from one of the novels) it would end with a mad sort of smile, and a hollering order to some member of his crew.

The same problem runs through the film. We have a character who's far more like Hornblower than Aubrey should be (is it any coincidence that the novel they ran with is the one with the most superficial similarities to the first Hornblower novel, filmed back in the '50s?) and this has an impact on the battle-scenes. It's carefully-choreographed chaos, certainly but curiously weightless and uninvolving, and somewhat anticlimactic. It's as if Weir doesn't want to face up to the idea of a larger-than-life lunatic who does this for fun - and makes it fun for those around him, too...

Now maybe that sounds darker and more difficult than the film ended up being - but in the novels, it doesn't work like that. It's more real, and also bigger... and the only time we really catch the humour and reality of the novels is in the very last scene... which, ironically enough, I'm pretty sure isn't in the novels - it's 100% Peter Weir, Russel Crowe, and Paul Bettany...

All in all, it could have been much, much better...

Pol'

So; count Pol among the Christopher Hitchens school of thought with regard to M&C...

I suspect Pol may have been expecting rather too much from a two-hour Hollywood movie. I, on the other hand, went in expecting the books to be utterly slaughtered by ham-fisted filmic adapters... and was pleasantly surprised at how much of Patrick O'Brian's brilliant novels ended up on the screen. M&C is far from perfect, as Pol says... but it's much better than it had any business being, given the state of movie-making in the US these days.

And it was a better adaptation, I think, than was Return of the King.