On our latest excursion to the Greenfield Garden Cinema we took in Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass’ latest film, which retells the 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates, its captain’s brave stand against them, and his tense rescue by a Navy Seal team. The film has won much critical acclaim, and its editing will no doubt earn it an Oscar nomination and perhaps the Oscar itself. Tom Hanks’ performance, which takes the taciturn Yankee captain from stoicism to complete breakdown after his rescue, may also earn an Oscar nod.
But the film, though high drama, is not fully realized cinema. Greengrass, who made United 93, another faithful reproduction of contemporary heroism, does little to transform his stories from news events into art. Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, made long after that spaceship’s perilous rescue, also starring Tom Hanks (perhaps not coincidentally), makes a useful contrast. Howard and his screenwriters lift Jim Lovell’s ill-fated space flight out of docudrama and embed it in a mythic context—Odysseus’ return to Penelope, Dorothy’s struggle to get home from an exotic and dangerous other world... The film is structured around multiple ironies that build to the final one—the mission as a “successful failure”—and is laced with other recurring motifs (outer-space urination being one of the most obvious!) Greengrass gives us finely observed characters, but little else to hang our cinematic hats on.
Great editing and Hanks’ performance make Captain Phillips worth the price of admission, but, like so much contemporary news, it leaves one unsatisfied and slightly depressed. How, one wonders, can people can exist in such poverty and anarchy as these Somali pirates? (To his credit, Greengrass is uncompromising in his portrayal of their wretchedness.) And while one is grateful for the Navy’s efforts, the sight of America’s overwhelming force and cutting-edge technology arrayed against the bedraggled beggars is more chilling than heart-warming. The world’s inequalities are on full display in this film, with no resolution in sight.