It is October, 1991. A disgruntled captain of a
fishing boat ported in Gloster, Massachusetts, Billy Tyne (George Clooney)
frustrated by a run of bad luck returns to sea in hopes of a better catch, goes
far afield of his usual fishing grounds, makes a huge haul, and on the way home
encounters the product of several converging hurricane force storms. Such was
the simple but enthralling saga which provided the subject for Sebastian
Junger's phenomenal bestseller, and, in turn the plot of this movie directed by
Wolfgang Petersen (Das
Boot). It is easy to imagine how once upon a time this
factually based story could have supplied the plot for a modestly budgeted 1.33
black and white production that would have gripped audiences. But this being the
year 2000, Petersen and his collaborators, unwilling to take any risks, have
inflated a straightforward seafaring yarn up to the imperial dimensions of Gladiator. The
Perfect Storm is far from
perfect, but it is a perfectly constructed device for making money, and it
almost perfectly illustrates everything that is wrong with American movies these
days.
The film has a more or
less tripartite structure, opening with a leisurely exposition which introduces
us to the captain, his best hand Bobby Shatford (Mark Wahlberg), who is having
difficulties weaning himself from the sea and settling down with his girlfriend,
Christina Cotter (Diane Lane), other crew members, and an assortment of
colorful local types. But this is only a prelude to the main part of the action,
marked by such incidents as a shark flopping on deck and a fisherman getting
pulled overboard when a hook tears into his hand, even before Tyne's boat, the
Andrea Gail, runs into the titular storm.
This middle section takes up most of
the film and culminates in a tragic outcome for the crew as well as a Coast
Guard flyer who has tried to help them. It is followed by a final elegiac
sequence memorializing the victims, ending with a shot of the names of the crew
on a plaque that records the names of all the Gloster residents fallen to the
sea since the 1600's. Although the movie doesn't lack for action once the Andrea
Gail sets out on its fatal voyage, watching The Perfect Storm is like visiting a
theme park personally designed and supervised by Richard Wagner--even the
execrably boomy, overwrought musical score by James Horner features as many brass
flourishes as the Ring tetralogy--a park with armed guards posted at every exit
to make sure no one escapes without having toured the entire attraction.
Although
The Perfect Storm is far better job of filmmaking than Gladiator, Petersen's
aquatic adventure is just as pumped up to the max as Ridley Scott's Roman
holiday. Once the storm really breaks loose in all its fury, the movie inundates
the viewer with an unending deluge of special effects shots of boiling seas,
towering waves, and titanic sheets of water raining down upon the Andrea Gail's
bridge. Many of these shots are quite impressive considered individually--in
particular, the movie's pièce de résistance, the enormous wave that capsizes and
finishes off the fishing boat--but rapidly cut together and stretched out over
what seems an interminable period of time, they leave the viewer feeling as
waterlogged as the victims of the storm, and just as disoriented. If
The Perfect
Storm were interrupted halfway through its length, the lights in the theater
brought up, and the audience asked to recount what had been taking place on
screen the instant before, I wonder how many of them would be able to supply the
correct answer? What good are spellbinding effects shots when they carry any
semblance of dramatic continuity along with them down to the bottom of the deep?
It would be
an understatement to describe this as overkill, but unlike Gladiator's
gratuitous excess, the screen equivalent of panem et circenses, The
Perfect Storm's is ruthlessly
calculated down to the final millisecond of running time. Nothing in this
hermetically sealed creation has been left to mere chance--least pardonably, the
final exequies, which Petersen milks for all they are worth far more shamelessly
than a John Ford or Frank Capra at his most maudlin. In
spite of of the film's wheezy pretense at telling a "human interest"
story about sailors lost at sea, Petersen's principal interest is in using a
natural catastrophe as a pretext for subjecting the audience to the same beating
the captain and crew are taking at the hands of the storm--and he leaves no
cinematic stone unturned in order to achieve this end. At this rate, the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® will soon have to institute a new Oscar® category for the film making the most
obnoxious use of the pathetic fallacy.
The
Perfect Storm's main credits are preceded by the
declaration "Based on a True Story," affixed to the film like a
certificate of authenticity attached to a rare artifact. Much has been made
in print of the speed with which The Perfect Storm eclipsed its rival,
The Patriot, at the box office, but far more significant, in my opinion, is the way
its release fortuitously coincides with the obscene success of the CBS
"reality" series The
Survivor. According to an article by Brian Lowry
and Greg Braxton in The Los Angeles Times Calendar for 6/13/00, Mark Burnett,
the show's producer, has coined the word "dramality" to describe his
creation, a repellently muddy sounding neologism--may its inventor choke on it--which may involuntarily suggest
more about the fatal blurring of the boundaries between "drama" and
"reality" than Burnett had ever intended.
Like every other
cultural manifestation of advanced industrial capitalism, this one has two
sides. On the one hand, the preference for what is "real" over what
has been merely "artistically" --and by implication artificially--produced bears witness to the atrophying of the imagination under the pressure
of marketing forces that have brought forth since the end of World
War II a standardization of life guaranteed to make any overtly totalitarian regime
green with envy. On the other hand, productions like Survivor and The Perfect
Storm, the byproduct of a technology audiences can only vaguely comprehend if
at all, have the apotropaic function of keeping alive the belief that somewhere
out there islands of "real" life continue to exist, somewhere over the
increasingly monochromatic rainbow of digitalized America.
The
Perfect Storm exploits this dichotomy for all that it's worth. What is the
numbing barrage of special effects but a heavy dose of undigested
"reality," filmmaking reduced to unadulterated physical sensation? But
the film equally reinforces its claim to "reality" by means of its
drama. The extended opening has less the motivation of simply introducing the
main characters as in a traditional motion picture than it does that of
demonstrating that these sailors are "real" men who are unshaven like
"real" men, who drink like "real" men, swear like
"real" men, fornicate like "real" men, etc.--presumably in
contrast to a television weather reporter who nearly gloats over the prospect
of a natural disaster and has what looks like a vampire doll on top of his
computer monitor.
In the manner of certain kinds of old time travelogues,
The
Perfect Storm engages in the anthropological fallacy of presenting its
characters as if they were the vanishing specimens of
"real" humanity, happily preserved in a backwater of Massachusetts.
The greatest of all documentary filmmakers, Robert Flaherty, cannot wholly
escape the charge of having portrayed the inhabitants of more or less archaic
cultures as if they were the vestiges of a Promethean state of the human race.
But if Flaherty was a great director and a Rousseauistic visionary, Wolfgang
Petersen is no great director--at least judged by his work up to
now--and certainly no visionary. In a masterpiece like Man of Aran (1934),
describing the lives of peasants who eke out a miserable living from the sea
on remote islands off the coast of Ireland--a movie which would
still be a masterpiece if Flaherty had shot it on a studio sound
stage--the simplicity of the story and the means used to tell it are one. What
makes it great is not "reality" but the aesthetic limitations Flaherty
imposed upon himself by refusing the facile resources of commercial film
production--a highly modernist concept which belies the superficial
and ideologically dubious primitivism to which this kind of documentary
enterprise could easily lend itself.
But
what can be said about a movie that peddles "reality" while in hock up
to its ears to sophisticated computer technology? Like Gladiator, The Perfect
Storm is not a "bad" movie. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Mary
Mastrantonio--as Linda Greenlaw, the lady skipper of another fishing boat--all
give competent performances, as do the actors who play the other crew members of
the Andrea Gail. Nor should I overlook the important contribution of the visual
effects supervisor, Stefan Fangmeier. What in fact makes the experience of watching a movie like this
far more profoundly depressing than the experience of watching a certifiably bad
movie like Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is subsequently reflecting on how much talent, time, and money
has gone into its fabrication. The horrible thing is that The Perfect Storm by
current standards is a better than average motion picture, and one that deserves
all of its hard earned dollars. But it is also aesthetically depraved and
ideologically corrupt, a gadget whose wheels and cogs whir away
noiselessly without the least sign of intelligence.
Only a grandiose machine
like the one imagined by Franz Kafka in The
Penal Colony could foresee
and will its own destruction, but The
Perfect Storm's motor is
driven by a false dream of immortality, the perpetual motion of capital.
Titan
A.E.
IMAX®
Adventures in Wild California
Mission:
Impossible II
Gladiator
Home