The shock waves from 9/11 continue to manifest
themselves in unforeseen ways. Master and Commander, directed by Peter Weir, is
a naval adventure saga from the days of the Napoleonic wars, adapted for the
screen by Weir and John Collee from a novel by Patrick O'Brian. Starring Russell Crowe as
Captain Jack Aubrey, the skipper of the British warship HMS Surprise, the film
recounts in a relatively straightforward fashion how Aubrey and his men pursue a
larger French ship, the Archeron, from the northeastern coast of South America,
all the way around Cape Horn, and eventually take it off of Argentina, after
making a side trip to the Galapagos Islands. Rather astonishingly, J. Hoberman,
in a review of Master and Commander
in The
Village Voice entitled "Thar He Blows," describes
the movie as "fundamentally ahistoric," but no one would have to
look hard to see the parallels to contemporary history: the Brits are the
Coalition of the Willing and their French adversaries the ersatz representatives of
Islamic terrorism.
It was a genuinely odd experience to see this
film in a theater in Dubai, in English with Arabic subtitles, at a moment when I
was working on a ship of the US Navy attached to the Enterprise Strike Group.
Plus ça change....But the strangeness hardly stopped with the historical jeux
des miroirs. After making the unusual art house hit The Last Wave (1977), Peter
Weir became a big commercial director with Gallipoli (1981), a very teary
anti-war epic about two young men who perish in the World War I battle that
momentarily brought to a halt Winston Churchill's rise to fame and glory. It is
thus a bit surprising to find Weir taking credit for the most blatant
glorification of British imperialism likely to have appeared on screen since the days of
Sir Alexander Korda and such stiff-upper lip panegyrics to the glories of empire
building as The Four Feathers (1939), directed by his brother
Zoltan.
According to Gore Vidal in Screening History,
Churchill, a close friend of Sir Alexander, provided (uncredited) assistance in
the scripting of two Korda epics, Fire Over England (1936) directed by William K.
Howard, and That Hamilton Woman (1941). It is not difficult to imagine Tony
Blair having played a similar role in the making of Master and Commander. The
film endorses the most intransigently reactionary stereotypes beloved of the
English public: all foreigners are dangerous subversives that must be prevented
at any cost from taking over the world, while only Englishmen really have a
sense of honor and duty, etc. Watching Master and Commander has the morbid
fascination of seeing a great attack on imperialism like Bertolt Brecht's Mann
ist Mann turned completely upside down and made to say the exact opposite of
what the author intended.
In this best of all possible worlds, the captain
is a stern but impeccably fair man who only uses the lash when necessary.
Although Weir does not spare his audience the gruesome details of shipboard
life, particularly when the ship's doctor, Dr. Stephen Maturin, Aubrey's friend
and sometime antagonist, has to operate on himself, such incidents, like the
scenes of battle at the film's conclusion, are little more than passing clouds.
Aubrey's men--not to mention a covey of apple-cheeked ephebes who cheerfully
meet their doom in the final confrontation between the Surprise and the
Acheron--only doubt him when the ship is becalmed in the Encantadas. But,
needless to say, Father knows best and brings ship and crew safely through every
crisis.
One of the standard cliches of older historical
films, starting at least with D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, was to
reduce the French Revolution to the Reign of Terror and shots of barbaric
canaille thronging through the streets of Paris in thirst of fresh blood to
shed. It is thus worth keeping a few things in mind while cruising through these
balmy waters where the sun never sets on the Empire. First of all, at the time
in England,
even slight infractions upon the sacred precincts of private property were often
punished by hanging and public executions were the scenes of orgiastic
celebration. France had a politically motivated Reign of Terror, but one that
lasted for months; England had a reign of judicially sanctified terror that
began in the eighteenth century and endured almost throughout the nineteenth.
I have no doubt that commanders like Aubrey may
have existed then, just as they certainly have throughout history. Nor would I argue
that any sensible person in Aubrey's position, in those days before radio
communication became common, could have afforded to ignore the ever present
possibility of mutiny. But never for an instant does the possibility glimmer
through the film that the system which made possible the sacrifices Master and
Commander glorifies was brutal and authoritarian, rooted in class privilege. To
someone who spoke to him of naval tradition, Churchill snarled back, "Rum,
buggery, and the lash! That's naval tradition for you." His words were a
far more accurate description of life on board British warships, particularly in
the early nineteenth century, than anything that shows up in Weir's flag-waving
opus.
Strategically, the film tries to disguise its
intransigently upbeat if retrogressive depiction of imperialism by throwing in
Maturin, a naturalist whose fascination with the flora and fauna of the
Galapagos Islands makes him both a precursor of Charles Darwin, and a premature
eco-freak. Yet if the movie allows Maturin at some dramatic moments,
particularly after Aubrey orders a sailor flogged for insubordination, to
challenge the master of the Surprise, no one could doubt who emerges as the winner in the last
reel. Superficially, the film would seem to be arguing for a reconciliation of
the fighting man and the humanist on the common ground of music, symbolized by
the duets the two men play together in their off hours. Nevertheless, if Master
and Commander concludes with the two reunited in spite of their differences, it
is Maturin who has to concede victory to Aubrey. The tacit moral here is that
imperialism is good for furthering culture and the arts--a moral to which I
doubt the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would have given his
assent.
In Weir's production, the French simply figure
as the Enemy. The film pointedly avoids the stereotyping of old historical epics
about the French Revolution like A Tale of Two Cities (1935), directed by Jack Conway, or W.S. Van Dyke's
Marie Antoinette (1937), in which aristocrats were all innocent lambs and
the Jacobins proto-Bolsheviks bent upon razing society to its foundations.
Still, the not only xenophobic but reactionary political implications of Master
and Commander manifest themselves in a far from insignificant detail, a classical
allusion--one that appears in Sigmund Freud's epigraph from the Aeneid that
prefaces The Interpretation of Dreams--likely to elude the average viewer: the
name of the French vessel. Acheron was the name of one of the two rivers the
dead had to cross in order to reach the underworld in Greek mythology. And what
in the eyes of its foes was the French Revolution, if not an opening of the
mouth of hell, throwing the devil's spawn upon an unsuspecting world?
Actually, in its best moments, which mainly take
place in fog or at night, Master and Commander succeeds in making of the French
ship a supernatural intruder in some effectively atmospheric shots. Echoes of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's sublime literary ballad, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, whose composition (1798) was nearly contemporaneous with the events
presented in Weir's movie, automatically spring to mind. And, as if to
reward half-way literate spectators, the film confirms their suspicions by
subsequently throwing in an albatross shooting episode which precipitates the injury
to Maturin. But the touch is abysmally ill-calculated. Coleridge's poem belongs
to the world of the French Revolution in a way that lies completely beyond
Master and Commander's feeble imaginative powers to envision on celluloid.
Such moments are sadly the exception rather than
the rule. For the most part, the cinematography by Russell Boyd and Sandi Sissel
is adequate, although not inspired. It may have been the print I saw, but the
color in several scenes seemed rather washed out. Perhaps Weir's intention was
to recreate the look of old sailing prints, but if so the result does not come
across as very convincing. (In his otherwise misbegotten adaptation of Moby-Dick,
John Huston quite successfully employed subdued colors to achieve this
effect.) Far more distracting are some really bad special effects shots.
Master and Commander is not at all a low-budget movie, so it is astonishing to
see shots of what are supposed to be the Galapagos in which the surrounding
ocean is as immobile as the surface of a porcelain platter, a visual solecism
painfully evident when a scope production is projected on a large screen.
As Aubrey, Russell Crowe reminded me of the late
Trevor Howard, but Howard had a grittiness that Crowe lacks. Nevertheless, I
wonder what any actor could do with such a mechanically conceived part. While I
am no fan of Gladiator, I would have to admit that Maximus is a far more
interesting character than the rock-like Aubrey. In the context, Paul Bettany
makes a far more favorable impression than Crowe; however, I think the disparity
between the two owes less to a difference in acting ability than it does to all
too obvious shortcomings of the script. Oddly enough, just as I had the feeling
last year when I watched The Gangs of New York that I should have been seeing
Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable in W.S. Van Dyke's San Francisco instead of Leonardo Di Caprio and Daniel Day
Lewis, I had the feeling as Master and Commander progressed that I should
be looking at Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone in Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935).
Henry Hathaway was by no means one of the great
directors in the history of the American cinema, but Lives of a Bengal Lancer
attains a pathos that Master and Commander never achieves--nor could it even
were Weir a great director like Martin Scorsese, and not just a reasonably talented one. In all fairness to
Weir, I should say I don't think the problem here is reducible to differences in
directorial ability. Old movies like Lives of a Bengal Lancer and San Francisco
owed a large part of their success to conventions that however artistically
dubious were accepted by film makers and audiences alike. Today, those
conventions are rotten props in the cinematic house of fiction, and it is beyond
the capability of any director to shore them up. Like Scorsese
in Gangs of New York, Weir is attempting to resurrect a
kind of historical picture that vanished decades ago, but all he can conjure up
is ideological ectoplasm. For people who don't mind turning off their brains for
a couple of hours, Master and Commander is reasonably entertaining. Anyone
looking for something more satisfying should think about renting Jean Renoir's
La Marseillaise, one of the greatest historical films ever made and a useful
corrective to the nonsense propagated by Master and Commander.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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