Master and Commander (Peter Weir, 2003)

In the navy

Despite the rather dry title Master and Commander, Peter Weir's uncommonly good adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey novels is anything but, a grandly outsized lovingly detailed and authentic (as far as my landlubber eyes can see) recreation of 19th century naval warfare, from the point of view of a single British warship.

Based on O'Brian's The Far Side of the World (reportedly with borrowings from at least one other of his novels--O'Brian has written twenty), it follows Captain Aubrey (Russell Crowe with long hair tied behind in a ponytail, and a fringe of beard round the jaw), commander of the HMS Surprise, as he pursues a larger, much faster French warship off the coast of South America. Along the way the ship encounters a whole range of seafaring weather, from soupy fog and dead calm to the continually stormy waters round Cape Horn; its crew suffers extremes of heat and cold, low provisions, the never comforting turmoil of battle.

Battle, incidentally, isn't the mind-numbing kind we're used to seeing in the multiplex; Weir isn't Michael Bay (thank god) and this is not a Jerry Bruckheimer production. There's the furious detonation of naval artillery (more smoke and roar and splintering wood than actual fire), and the chaos of hand-to-hand combat (cutlasses and rifles instead of Uzis); Weir's recreation of this kind of fighting (which uses CGI as any contemporary Hollywood war epic must, but unobtrusively) is refreshing, a corrective to even the faux swashbuckling of the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Even better than the smoke and sweat are the tactics used in approaching or evading the enemy, the calculations of wind and wave needed to gain the advantage; Weir makes each move and their consequences clear, so that even with the opponent sitting miles away on the horizon everyone knows who has the upper hand, and why. This isn't your standard-issue cops in a Porsche blasting away at bad guys with gasoline explosions blossoming in the background but a game of cat-and-mouse between two ships, one slower and woefully outgunned, in a desperate struggle. Weir has brought blood, sweat, and well-earned tears (not to mention the British naval uniform) back into the action flick, and you can't help but be grateful for the change.

The movie isn't all chasing and fighting; perhaps the more interesting struggle onscreen is between Aubrey and his surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). Maturin is Aubrey's friend and confidante, an amateur naturalist, and the only man onboard who can question his authority without being clapped in chains; Maturin raises some of the darker issues about British naval practices, such as gangpressing hapless sailors into military service, and wonders aloud if perhaps Aubrey's pursuit of the French frigate has the taint of hubris about it (this last point draws the most blood from Aubrey). Bettany gives the finest performance in the film as Maturin, complementing Crowe's meat-and-potatoes performance as Aubrey (essentially Gladiator on a sailing ship) well with his scholastic demeanor and zeal for collecting unknown species (at one point the ship lands at the Galapagos Islands, and Maturin does the intellectual version of freaking out from all the unknown plants and animals around him). It's a nicely understated yet apparently complex dynamic: the two men couldn't be more different yet you feel that they depend on this difference, actually thrive on it, with Aubrey demonstrating to Maturin the virtues of military leadership and discipline (you almost feel he has to chase the French ship to prove his point), and Maturin gently reminding Aubrey of a world beyond his ship (one that can, on occasion, provide Aubrey with the unexpected advantage).

Raising the stakes is the presence of young Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis, looking for all the world as if his voice has yet to break), a young officer who shares Maturin's interest in botany and zoology, and Aubrey's pride as a fellow naval officer. Blakeney's is the blank-slate soul which Aubrey and Maturin struggle to mold according to their ideals; his embodiment of both officer and scholar is, I suppose, O'Brian's way of saying that Britain's naval supremacy in the near future (at least until the Second World War) is assured.

Master and Commander is possibly one of the finer examples of its genre, the naval epic (due to the expense of mounting one, there aren't very many), and it's perhaps churlish of me to complain that the picture doesn't burst the boundaries of the genre--the fighting may be bloody and the crew grumble, but military discipline is maintained, however precariously; Maturin may question Aubrey's decisions but always in private, where Aubrey's authority would never be jeopardized. Aubrey himself may at times be ruthless, even obsessed, but always in the name of a higher duty, to the British crown; in the end, he always comes out victorious and right (his eventual victory may seem questionable, but never his rightness in achieving it). It's a juvenile adventure story, but with graphic violence and meticulously researched period detail to appeal to the modern adult reader (the violence and researched detail assure the reader that the material is adult).

In a way, the genre the movie belongs to can't help but remind me of science fiction--yet another branch of pop literature with its own fanatical following and lovingly obscure technical language ("warp drive" instead of "mainsail;" "phaser" instead of "artillery;" "interdimensional wormholes" instead of "hidden shoals"). O'Brian's material, of which, I am assured, Weir's movie is a reasonably faithful rendition of, doesn't have the unsettling homoerotic subtext of, say, Melville's Billy Budd (at one point, Weir has Aubrey ogle a tropical beauty, presumably to prove he's straight), or the mystical and spiritual ambitions of his Moby Dick with its demonically obsessed captain in pursuit of a near-mythical white whale--Aubrey may be obsessed, even excessively so, but victory ultimately justifies all excesses. Which isn't such a bad thing at all (the lack, I mean)--one can admire and enjoy the skill with which this picture was made, while being aware of its ultimately limited nature.

First published in Businessworld 11.21.03