director
Wolfgang Petersen
screenwriter
Bill Wittliff
based
on the book by
Sebastian Junger
producers
Gail Katz
Wolfgang Petersen
Paula Weinstein
cinematographer
John Seale
music
James Horner
editor
Richard Francis-Bruce
cast
George Clooney (Captain Billy Tyne)
Mark Wahlberg (Bobby Shatford)
Diane Lane (Chris Cotter)
Karen Allen (Melissa Brown)
William Fichtner (Sully)
Bob Gunton (McAnally)
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Linda Greenlaw)
John C. Reilly (Murph)
Allen Payne (Alfred Pierre)
John Hawkes (Bugsy)
Christopher McDonald (Todd Gross)
Michael Ironside (Bob Brown)
Cherry Jones (Edie Bailey)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 129m
u.s.
release: June 30, 2000
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other wolfgang
petersen films
reviewed on this website:
- air
force one
- troy
|
Sebastian
Junger's bestseller The Perfect Storm is a first-rate
piece of journalism -- compact and packed, loaded with
anecdotes about life on fishing boats, the effects of a hurricane,
and so on (he even tosses in a pretty frightening passage on
what drowning feels like). Junger assembled all this information
around a void -- the void left by the Halloween Storm, the October
1991 convergence of three volatile weather events that destroyed,
among other things, the Gloucester swordfishing boat the Andrea
Gail.
Aside from the basic fact that the boat was lost at sea (only
a couple of fuel cans were ever recovered), nothing is known
about what happened to the ship or the men aboard. Junger's account
is mainly informed conjecture about what might have happened.
The new movie version is conjecture, too, but it's informed by
Hollywood conventions. The Perfect Storm, competently
directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, Air
Force One), comes across like Apollo
13 without radio contact and with a downer ending.
The characters are defined chiefly by action -- what they do
under pressure tells us who they are -- but since they behave
more or less like generic movie people, what does that really
tell us? Despite its poignant basis in fact, The Perfect Storm
is only a small notch above Armageddon
and many other disaster thrillers. The real-life men are recast
as stereotypes: Captain Billy Tyne (George Clooney), the hard-bitten
veteran skipper who wants to go out for one last big haul; Bobby
Shatford (Mark Wahlberg), an eager rookie with a passionate girlfriend
(Diane Lane) waiting at home; loyal, fuzzy-wuzzy Murph (John
C. Reilly); shifty troublemaker Sully (William Fichtner, whose
features have doomed him to playing shifty guys); bedraggled
loser Bugsy (John Hawkes), who can't even get laid before he
ships out; and the West Indian Alfred Pierre (Allen Payne), who
has, I think, a grand total of three distinct lines of dialogue.
The nervous grouchiness of men at sea, dealing with a lethal
natural menace while rubbing each other's nerves raw, probably
couldn't be handled better than it was in Jaws, and The
Perfect Storm doesn't come close. (Twenty-five years later,
you remember Quint and Brody and Hooper a hell of a lot more
vividly than you'll remember Billy or Bobby after a week.) There
isn't a bummer in the cast, but all of the actors play second
fiddle to the elements, and Petersen has cast a variety of intriguing
actresses only to shove them into the margins. Diane Lane, for
instance, tries so hard to do something fresh with her stock
girlfriend-in-waiting that she overplays almost every scene she's
in. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as a nearby boat captain, has
a radio microphone grafted to her hand for most of the film (it's
easy to forget she's supposed to be playing Linda Greenlaw, an
author in her own right); and it's nice to see Cherry Jones (Cradle
Will Rock) and Karen Allen getting work, but why waste
them as two women trapped on an imperilled sailboat who have
almost no dialogue?
If you go to see bad weather, The Perfect Storm gives
you probably a good 45 minutes of it, as the Andrea Gail
is batted around the sea like a toy boat in the bathtub of a
sadistic kid. We feel batted around, too, and the effect,
cumulatively, is less overwhelming than overbearing. The movie
devolves into spectacle, a series of CGI shots for us to ooh
and aah at. If we know the story's outcome, all the strenuous
efforts the men go through seem like a sick joke, but the movie
works hard to ennoble them anyway. The climax is monotonous and
punishing -- after 45 minutes of waves hammering the boat, you
say, Okay, we get it. The grinding sameness of the violent
sea makes you appreciate James Cameron's handling of the chaos
in Titanic,
which had some incongruous visual beauty going for it. The only
hint of beauty in The Perfect Storm -- and it's a chilling
moment, and George Clooney's moment of glory -- comes when the
Andrea Gail abruptly enters glass-smooth waters and sunny
skies. Everyone on board is ecstatic except Billy, who knows
the worst is yet to come; they've just moved into a safe, small
pocket in between storms. Clooney's wordless horror in the face
of sunshine is more terrifying than anything the special-effects
whizzes came up with.
But The Perfect Storm isn't truly fatuous until the very
end, when it's suggested that sweet, saintly Bobby somehow contacted
his girlfriend in a dream before he drowned. Of course, we don't
clearly see any of the men die, presumably out of respect for
their families. But if you're going to respect real-life tragedy,
you don't make a much-hyped summer movie out of it. This empty
memorial to those lost at sea is really only about the realistic
mayhem made possible by computer imaging. For all its technical
advances, The Perfect Storm can't do what Junger did:
make you feel what it's like to work on the sea and die under
it. |