Captain phillips12/30/2023 Like last year's Zero Dark Thirty, Greengrass' new movie is Based On A True Story and climaxes with a successful operation by Navy SEALs, those precision instruments that we rightly revere. What's empirical is that the film spends more screen time on the hapless, teenage pirates than on any of its other characters, save for Richard Phillips himself - played by America's everydad, Tom Hanks, whose next role will be that of Walt Disney. Unless, of course, it's a Dog Day Afternoon-style chronicle of the final days of a few sympathetically inept criminals who want money, not blood, but who end up dead anyway. But it's also because, whatever Phillips' fate, the movie suggests that we're never safe - that the forces that put him in harm's way are still out there, closer than we realize, speeding toward our giant ship of state.Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.Ĭaptain Phillips, Paul Greengrass' tense movie about the April 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates, is a love song to the patience-through-overwhelming-fire-superiority of the U.S. Mostly it works because it's played so beautifully. There's a perils-of-globalization theme in Captain Phillips, telegraphed early when Phillips says to his wife, played by Catherine Keener, "The world's movin' so fast." That's one reason the scene after the brutal climax is so powerful. Navy - but we come to see the larger tragedy of the Somalis' existence. We're always on Phillips' side - and the side of the hostage negotiators and the U.S. At times he makes us revile his captors, at other times view them with pity. Hanks' performance is internal, but his eyes are so expressive that we're guided by their flickers. His second and third Bourne pictures were in the same style, and I think his overreliance on that style often makes him seem like a one-trick pony.īut in this movie's last half, when the camera is stuck inside the lifeboat with the crazy-anxious characters - the kidnappers and their hostage - the jitters finally seem earned. He's so young, so naive, and yet so dangerous.ĭirector Greengrass made his name using jittery hand-held cameras to create a newsreel-like present tense in the Irish drama Bloody Sunday and the Sept. He speaks tenderly of moving to America and buying a car. Muse is there because his warlord has demanded it. He truly doesn't want anyone to be hurt - and he has to work hard to rein in one particularly aggressive fellow hijacker. The triumph of the actor and the director, Paul Greengrass, is that we come to feel as deeply for Muse as for his hostage. It's so skinny he looks starved, and his teeth seem out of scale. The face of the Somali-born Abdi as the self-appointed new captain is like nothing I've seen in a Hollywood film. It is shot and edited to suggest a violation of a sacred space. In the wheelhouse, the four - led by actor Barkhad Abdi as a man known as "Muse" - finally confront Phillips. The Alabama doesn't have guns or security guards, but it's still impressive that the Somalis get aboard this behemoth of a ship while being blasted with water cannons and at such a high speed. But as soon as he and his crew sight the small boat of Somalis headed their way, the dread takes hold like a vise. The movie begins rather limply, with a lot of aimless, hand-held camera footage of Phillips - played by Tom Hanks - driving to the airport from his house in Vermont and then getting on his ship. They said they'd execute him unless they were paid millions of dollars. The hijackers failed to secure the Alabama but managed to escape with Phillips in a covered lifeboat. American Richard Phillips was the captain of the Maersk Alabama, a Danish-owned container ship seized by four Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The movie's grip remains strong even when it cuts to black. So much terror and moral confusion has gone down - so much pain - that the cumulative tension can't be resolved by violence. I think it's telling that in Captain Phillips the most overwhelming scene is after the resolution, in the infirmary of a ship. There are sighs of relief, tearful reunions with families, cameras that dolly back on domestic tableaux to suggest the world has at last been righted. Most kidnapping melodramas have final scenes - after their climaxes - that are, effectively, throwaways. With: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi, Catherine Keener Rated PG-13 for sustained intense sequences of menace, some violence with bloody images, and for substance use
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