Captain Phillips / Parkland
DANGEROUS WATERS
by Anthony Lane
Octuber 14, 2013
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| Tom Hanks confronts pirates in a new movie directed by Paul Greengrass. Illustration by Tomer Hanuka. |
The British director Paul Greengrass makes two kinds of movie. The first kind is the thriller about people for whom life is already a cavalcade of thrills—Jason Bourne, for instance, a man so busy jumping through windows and driving head on into approaching traffic that it takes him three whole films to find out that his real name is David. The second kind is the thriller about people whose lives are, for the most part, extremely unthrilling, and who, given the choice, would prefer to keep it that way. In the case of “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” the choice is not theirs to make, and the mood of those emerging from the cinema at the end could hardly be more different from the joyous exhaustion of a Bourne fan.
The confusing thing is that both kinds of movie look the same. Editing, for Greengrass, creates a lung-bursting race against the clock, and the camera shifts and hops about like someone trying to get a better glimpse through a crowd. He started out in television documentaries, and the impulse to trap something—a gesture, a phrase—as it zips by, or at least to give the illusion of that capture, pervades his feature films. Hence the moment in his new movie, “Captain Phillips,” when the title character (Tom Hanks) and his wife (Catherine Keener) leave their house in Vermont and get into their car. We cut back inside the house and see them through the window; for an instant, we sense them being spied on, as if by the eye of fate. They then drive away and, in the movie’s weakest scene, explain to each other how dangerous the world has become. Thanks, guys. Our nerves already gave us the bad news.
Phillips is on his way to Oman, in order to take command of the Maersk Alabama, a giant freighter, bound for Kenya. This means traversing pirate-infested waters off the Somalian coast. Once out in the ocean, Phillips, wary of the threat, orders a security drill. Halfway through, it ceases to be a practice, as pirate boats, right on cue, approach. One of them is outwitted, but the other persists, and soon enough, thanks to a long ladder deployed like old-fashioned grappling irons, the Maersk is boarded. Its crew of twenty is pursued, and pinned down, by a mere quartet of armed men. Their leader, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), tells Phillips to relax, adding, “I’m the captain now.” A ransom of ten million dollars is demanded. The stage is set.
Throughout this, the Greengrass paradox is on display: how can so confusing a situation seem so clear? Only Spielberg can match him in the ability to lay out conditions and terms. At no point, as hunter and prey converge, do we fail to grasp who is where and what is happening. If the welter of closeups—of faces, maps, guns, and instrument dials—grows too intense, the camera retreats, for a few calming seconds, to an aerial view, allowing us to watch the Alabama, from above or afar, being shadowed and pestered by the enemy skiff. As the plot unfolds, the irony of that mismatch starts to grow. Help is summoned, and the full might of American power is brought to bear. Meanwhile, the action switches to one of the freighter’s lifeboats, which carries the attackers and a single, bewildered hostage. And thus we are granted the spectacle of an aircraft carrier, two warships, and a contingent of Navy seals parachuting out of the sky, all in pursuit of a little orange tub, which bobs like a cork upon the waves. If the crisis weren’t so deadly, it would be a joke.
“Captain Phillips,” which is based on real events, of 2009, poses a problem for Greengrass. Hitherto, his work has exuded a spirit of testy liberal complaint, scornful of cabals, coverups, and the darker arts of government. And what do we have now? Vermont Man versus the Somalis. To return to my opening distinction, the story begins as one kind of Greengrass film, about an ordinary joe, and then hardens into the other kind, equipped with unswayable snipers and stone-jawed commanders whose idea of a windy rhetorical speech is “Execute.” It’s the old Hollywood conundrum: how does a left-wing conscience find room to maneuver in a right-wing form? The screenplay, by Billy Ray, is not much help. The thinnest of backgrounds is supplied for the hijackers, who are said to be fishermen, and who talk of their crimes as if still plying that trade. (“We caught a ship last week.”) There is no avoiding the fact: these are desperadoes from a dysfunctional land, who terrorize in the hope of reward. And Muse—gaunt of frame and burning of gaze—is a seriously frightening foe.
Why, then, do we not feel bullied by the result? Partly because the camera, as I say, tells a subtler tale than the dialogue does, and lures us into a grudging respect for the bravado of Muse and his men; but mainly because of Tom Hanks. This most likable of actors deliberately presents us with a character who makes no effort to be liked. A warmer and wiser guy would have tipped the scales of the movie—we would have rooted for him, and for the triumph of American virtue, ahead of any ordeal. Phillips is brisk, to the point of rudeness, with his crew; he is pragmatic but easily spooked, and heroic by default; he is the anti-Bourne. The rubbery mug of the young Hanks is barely discernible behind spectacles and a badger-gray beard, yet that early comic training pays dividends in his extraordinary final scene. There is not a jot of humor in it—just the opposite—but his control of physical detail, as Phillips is buffeted by the shocks that flesh is heir to, has lost none of its force. Twenty-five years ago, in “Big,” Hanks gave us a boy who became a man overnight; now, in “Captain Phillips,” he gives us a man so shaken and sickened by adventure—by the high seas of adult experience—that for a while, despite himself, he turns back into a child.
The title of Peter Landesman’s “Parkland” refers to Parkland Memorial Hospital, in Dallas. John F. Kennedy was taken there after being shot, on November 22, 1963, as was Lee Harvey Oswald, two days later. Much of the movie—a feature film, though it uses scraps of documentary footage—takes place in the hospital, where Jim Carrico (Zac Efron), a first-year surgical resident, aided by a team that includes the emergency-room supervisor, Doris Nelson (Marcia Gay Harden), struggles in vain to save the President’s life. Efron has a good moment, near the start, when Carrico seizes up, immobilized at the gravity of what he is being asked to do; then he shakes himself, like a dog, and gets to work.
Other locations play no less a role. There are two important offices: one from which Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), grabbing his hat, goes out to film the motorcade, and another where Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale) first hears his brother’s name on the radio, after Lee’s arrest. There is also a Kodak lab, to which Zapruder is escorted by the authorities so that his film can be processed in a rush; the motel to which Robert and his mother (Jacki Weaver), a world-class fruitcake, are moved for their own safety; and Love Field, where the casket containing the body is loaded onto Air Force One, with a gasping effort that borders on black comedy. What we don’t properly understand—in contrast to “Captain Phillips”—is how these places relate to one another. The film feels like a parade of comings and goings, and you could be forgiven for thinking that Dallas was an oversized village.
Dramatically, that scurrying has an unfortunate effect. Landesman rarely allows himself to linger on one strand of the tale and let it take root. I always thought that Zapruder deserved a movie to himself: imagine his regular routines, gradually established in our minds, and then disrupted with such brutal suddenness that he is never the same again. Here, surely, was the chance for that movie, with Giamatti, a great screen actor, easing into the role as though he were donning a made-to-measure suit. And what do we get? Hurried scenes, splurges of information disguised as dialogue (“Eighteen frames a second!” Zapruder cries, camera in hand), and a closeup of his eyes as he watches his handiwork being screened. Only later, as he offers it to Life, adding, “You’re going to have to pay for it,” does the tautness of his character emerge. The pact may not be Faustian, but there is a definite squirm of the soul. How could an amateur make the most closely observed film of the twentieth century and stay sane?
“Parkland,” sadly, does not repay equal scrutiny. Kennedy specialists will glean nothing new, and those hoping for sobriety will flinch at the camera’s intrusions. The film seems tasteless in both senses—bland and impersonal as it searches for a core to the story, yet ready to home in on the portions of skull and brain matter that Doris Nelson hands to an assistant. Some of the actors project a genuine intensity, but many of them, like Billy Bob Thornton, who plays a Secret Service agent, and Jackie Earle Haley, as a priest, simply don’t get the chance. And so, as the solemnity of the enterprise is frittered away, you feel moved to ask: what is this film for?
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