November 14, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Gone with the Wind
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
Just who does Hollywood makes films for?
Is it the bland masses with their dulled taste and aesthetic standards? The mall rats who drift insensate from one bogus "thrill" to another? The TV viewers always easily upset by anything that deviates from the softened, bowdlerized fare they find on the tube?
Or are they making movies for true film appreciators? For viewers who want art and artistry on the big screen? The serious viewers who bring with them real knowledge of cinema, literature, and the arts? I'm afraid that the answer is obvious, and Peter Weir's adaptation of the late Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin novels only drives home this truth.
Who was the ideal audience for this film? In the view of the producers (four studios, in fact, Miramax, Fox, Goldwyn, and Universal) it appears that it was that bland old audience thirsting for a good old ripping sea-faring yarn, rather than the millions of readers who have read most if not all of O'Brien's book, readers who know the world of Aubrey and Maturin inside out. One has to think that because very little from O'Brien's book finds its way into the film.
Books, actually. Weir and his credited screenwriter John Collee, heretofore a TV writer, have adapted elements from two of O'Brien's novels, numbers 1 and 10, hence the bipartite title MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD. And if I were a rabid O'Brien fan and scholar, I would be bloody pissed.
MASTER tells a story confined in time and place to Captain Jack Aubrey's vessel HMS Surprise. It is off the coast of South America, for reasons explained in an opening crawl. The ship falls into a running game of cat and mouse with another ship, sailing under a French flag and of awesome dimensions. After a series of near misses, the smaller Surprise lures the bigger ship into a trap and defeats it.
 |
I refer to the ships as characters and agents of action because, when it comes to the people on board these ships, the ones presumably making decisions, you really can't tell one from another. Of course, Russell Crowe as Aubrey sticks out. And maybe people will remember Paul Bettany from a few previous movies, or from their own bitter jealousy over the fact that he is married to Jennifer Connolly. But he is kind of unmemorable, too, and it's possible that he was hired to play the part of Maturin because he, like all the other members of the unmemorable cast, would not distract attention from Crowe. This was also an old trick of Brando's, to surround himself with people blander, weaker, and less charismatic than himself.
 |
You can't really tell one character from another. You can't hear what they say. You think you see a Hobbit here, a Titmouse there, but soon they, too, are swallowed up by the waves of the tumultuous (CGI?) ocean and the rush of the overbearing if meticulous sound production. All to serve the greater glory that is Russell Crowe. The trajectory of the story is mirrored in the thrust of the film project itself. Follow this leader. He is famous and everybody is interested in him. If you work and slave hard on his behalf — make him look like a star — you may be rewarded in the end.
 |
At first Weir's approach to the harsh task of adapting O'Brien's unwieldy series of novels seems to be a clever idea. Drop all the complicated extra matter of the book — the shore life, the wives and lovers, the hierarchies and spite and jealousies of the British navy, the details of life in Britain and France in the Napoleonic era — and just keep the lads at sea. Concentrate on one basic adventure. Grip the audience. Dump anything that is extraneous.
 |
But within minutes this strategy proves to be a problem. Who are these characters? You don't know them. The story has begun in medias res. It's not like it is the first and 10th book, but the second and third. The viewer has a lot of catching up to do. But the film offers little to help that viewer along. What's worse, the film jettisons all that readers loved about the books, the growing relationship between the two central characters, the rigid social world from which they emerged, the strategies they each needed to survive in order to gain the success they think they needed. All you can wonder is, What the fuck were they thinking?
Would it have been that hard to make an accurate account of the source novel(s)? Lesser films, such as FROM HELL, have shown how easy it is to re-create the past — just go to Prague. Do they think that they have a franchise on their hands? If so, then introduce the fucking characters, in the manner in which O'Brien did.
 |
Even worse, part of the point of O'Brien's series is how unglamorous and anti-climactic the life or warfare can be. The first volume ends with the main characters "watching" a major battle from the shore, unable to participate and unable to see anything but the occasional flash of light. Simply to adapt this series to the screen is to betray it. But the filmmakers don't stop there. They fiddle with the relationships. They dress the characters wrong. They substitute the boat of one country for another, in order to create more current political feasibility (I guess). At what point does a filmmaker cross a line when he or she is adapting a beloved series? What would you think if someone were to announce that they were going to make a movie of a book you loved, a British novel featuring an intuitive character that you have grown to love, but which the movie-makers were going to transpose to Chicago? Would you passively accept this? Or would you be outraged, and either demand to know what the hell they were doing or boycott the finished product? That's what they did to HIGH FIDELITY. They totally betrayed that book. What if a filmmaker, Jerry Bruckheimer, say, announced that he was going to start a new show, in which Sherlock Holmes was transported to modern day Los Angeles to solve crimes, and in the course of the show they dropped not only the deerstalker cap, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, 221 B Baker Street, but also the observational power that distinguished Holmes from all other detectives? How would you accept this? I'm a little irked at the way non-O'Brien fans are dismissing the concerns of avid readers of the book who are protesting the irrational changes that the filmmakers have made. I would hate to be a rabid O'Brien fan right now, knowing what the dense filmmakers blithely did to the source material in order to make it more "commercial" and more of a vehicle for Crowe.
 |
That being said, Crowe is engaging in the role of Jack Aubrey. He so enjoys himself that it is infectious, the way that Brando enjoyed himself, despite all the horrible conditions, on MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. You want to be on the ship with him and somehow win his respect. He is a man's man (there are only a few allusions to the concept of the opposite sex in the whole movie), and his character embodies that recognizable type who can feel emotions but cannot express them but in action, such as in the way he takes his wounded doctor friend back to the isolated island where he can heal and do research into evolutionary oddities.
 |
MASTER AND COMMANDER is more or less easy to follow in large part, but you are not sure why you are meant to care about these people, or the historical and political context in which they existed. Yes, yes, I know all of that is boring detail better left to books, but damn it, the movie is based on books, and if the filmmakers can't respect that, what is the point of adapting the books in the first place>
 |
As far as CGI and all the noise and bother of the film is concerned, well it looks real. It's like THE PERFECT STORM with oars. In fact, there is a short article in the recent "Hollywood" issue of THE NEW YORKER about the guy who developed the sound used for the cannons in the film. In a way how he accomplished that is more interesting than the whole of MASTER AND COMMANDER. But why? Well, you have to turn to the man in charge. Peter Weir strikes me as an over-rated director (GREEN CARD?). He was one of the first of the "arty" directors to come out of Australia, but his prestige is found on the bogus faux Antonioni style mysteriousness of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, the meaningful race meditations in THE LAST WAVE, and the strident anti-British and anti-war sloganeering of GALLIPOLI, all hollow. When he came to Hollywood, like many another foreign director who grabs the interest of producers interested in something new, he dropped all that serious intellectual mumbo jumbo at the foot of the Hollywood Hills and turned to high-class genre work (WITNESS) of which MASTER AND COMMANDER is only the latest manifestation. To end on a traditional film reviewer's note, MASTER AND COMMANDER needed more ballast, something of substance derived from the source books, and a lot less wind in its sails.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Five
KILL BILL VOL. 1
As KILL BILL recedes into the distance and newer, louder films take center stage for the holidays, many of us settle back and wait for the 20th of February, 2004, when the second film comes out. In the interim, we keep in touch with Web sites and chat boards, and pour through magazines, when I found the following image.
Yet, I am amazed at how often KILL BILL still comes up in conversation. The subject of other films seems always to lead back to KB. It's a benchmark by which to judge all the other new films we are seeing. As the autumn leaves slowly drop from the trees, leaving them barren, we reluctantly bid adieu to the this most perfect of fall films, and look forward to its continuance in the deepest of winter.
Annotations Watching ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST again for a review I was reminded that the opening scene of the film may have provided the impetus for the sound of the water toy in KILL BILL's final fight scene. In ONCE, a spinning wind wheel on a tower creaks as the three gunmen from Frank's team wait for Harmonica.
Also, incidentally, there is nothing wrong with Tarantino sifting through his favorite films to borrow moments. As commentators such as Bertolucci say on the ONCE disc, the film itself is an anthology of the writers and the director's favorite moments from beloved American westerns.
NEXT TIME: TIMELINE
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
