Captain Phillips – Film Review
Director: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi and Barkhad Abdirahman
Release Date: Oct 14
Miserably, for any aspiring sea captains out there, this probably isn’t the best recruitment video to reinforce your career aspirations. But hey, if you’re going to have your aspirations broken, at least there’s beauty in the broken when you have Paul Greengrass hoisting the puppet strings.
The plot? Simple. Plonk Tom Hanks (Richard Phillips), a few yanks and four gun wielding Somali pirates on a cargo ship and bang! You’ve got your setup. But since pirates will be pirates, they’d be demanding some booty and the ship to call their own. Oh, and it all be based upon the true story of the 2009 hijacking of the ship Maersk Alabama.
Of course my sweeping trivialisation of the yarn sells this film short. Striking facets about Captain Phillips includes its depiction of the pirate foursome. Scanning past reviews of Captain Phillips, there has been a criticism cluster of the film’s depiction of the pirate captors. In that, the depiction precincts into racism, casting poverty stricken black people as two dimensional vaudevillian villains. And when you face that off with our honest, white, three dimensional well-to-do American heroes, that’s just not fair.
On viewing Captain Phillips, these criticisms seem ill observed and a mean spirited jump of the gun, on part of the PC brigade. Quenching the whole “good guy” whites vs. “evil” black men debate. For the viewer that pays attention, it’s clear that several members of Phillip’s crew are in fact black. Accordingly, while the film is told primarily from an American perspective, the pirates’ character dimensions are still given life with their chronicled back story. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes through subtle hints of dialogue.
Via their pre hijack history Greengrass invites twinkles of empathy towards them. One can see and understand why these men are driven to piracy with the abject living conditions they stem from. It is also no aid that the pirates, themselves former fishermen, are victims of huge multi-national fisheries (some which I’d imagine to be American) have pressed the delete button on the local fish stocks. And when the only escape route from poverty is piracy, a pirate’s life it shall be for thee.
For painting the pirates in shades of grey, Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray should be commended. But before I start proclaiming that gun totting pirates should be showered in hugs, sentimentality shall be chaperoned. The pirate foursome are a fearsome band. One such pirate (played by Faysal Ahmed) is so short fused that, if a pinprick of dust descended upon him, his Kalashnikov fireworks display would be quick at hand.
Nevertheless, with such a virtuoso soaked in humanity performance from Hanks, the bull’s eye for one’s compassion resounds with Phillips. His character may be more well to do than the pirates, but whereas Phillips is no inventor of the Somali’s misfortunes, it’s easier to empathize with the man facing the barrel of the gun rather than the man behind it. Despite his star presence, Hanks never lets it get in the way of the character. Peculiarly, with his grizzled grey beard, Hanks looks more like a sea captain than the real Captain Phillips! But before breaking into a musical number of “Even better than the real thing” let’s take a gawk at Greengrass’s trademark shaky cam cinematography.
For anyone who was wishing that between now and Greengrass’s underrated Greenzone that someone might have bought him a tripod for Christmas, you may be disappointed. Yet those allergic to the charms of his shaky cam antics should be in for an easier ride compared to the typical Greengrass fare with the shakiness kept on the down low.
Other noteworthy commendations include the minimalism and subtlety of the soundtrack, in that Greengrass does not patronize the viewer with a large bombastic emotionally manipulative score.
Flaws? It’s unclear whether it be a misguided personal niggle, a fault of Greengrass or a fault of reality. Regarding the depiction of the trigger happy might of the US military, the film made me root for those gung ho macho men. And that somewhat disturbed me. Is Greengrass just visually articulating the absolute reality of the events, with the military truly being the messiah men to the hijacking? Or is there directorial manipulation at hand in making them look more flash? That’d be a matter of debate.
With all the above jargon on the film’s politics, one could easily forget that Captain Phillips is a rock solid piece of adrenaline inducing leisure with moments galore of breath clutching frenzy. So be wise, park your bum at your local cinema as you’re in for one of the best films of the year so far. And if you still feel the fix for some more Somali pirate action, check out the Danish film The Hijacking.
Score: 4.5/5
Written by Dylan Delaney
