United States, 2003. Starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D'Arcy, Edward Woodall, Chris Larkin, Max Pirkis, Jack Randall, Max Benitz, Lee Ingleby, Richard Pates, Robert Pugh, Richard McCabe, Ian Mercer, Tony Dolan, David Threlfall. Directed by Peter Weir. Available on DVD from Amazon.

Again, though Teleport City is best known (if indeed it is known at all) for scouring the globe for obscure madness or films that have simply been ignored by large swathes of the world's population, that doesn't mean we don't like a big film every now and then. Master and Commander is without a doubt one of my favorites. Russell Crowe once again brings the big screen a macho, swaggering old-fashioned hero who tempers his bravado with a sense of dignity, intelligence, and philosophy. Can anyone out there do this better than Crowe these days? Not that I've seen, and it's made all the sweeter by the fact that, by all accounts, Crowe is a boorish lout. I like him all the more for it, and I think perhaps some of the stories about him are blown out of proportion simply because the Hollywood elite is insulted by the fact that he couldn't give a rat's ass about them or see why he should treat them with reverence. He's a prick, it seems, and even if everything is true, I still admire a man whose basic reaction to fellow celebrities is to belch and say, "Fuck off."

This time around, Crowe is Captain - or Cap'n if you prefer - Jack Aubrey, commander of the ship of the line HMS Surprise in grand ol' 1805. I'm not at all familiar with the books upon which the movie is based (though I plan on becoming so), so I'll leave any comparisons between the two to people with some credibility in that field. I believe the major change between the novel and the movie is that in the book our heroic British crew is chasing after an American privateer, where as in the movie it's a French vessel they're after. As an amateur historian, I quite like the fact that this movie got us cheering for the Brits, when in fact they would have been villains to the Americans of the time, sitting as we were on the verge of the War of 1812, which flared up in large part because British naval vessels like the HMS Surprise were wreaking havoc with American shipping. But heck, that was a long time ago, and we all get along pretty well now, so let's let it slide.

As you should have gathered from that idiotic last paragraph, Cap'n Jack is taking his ship out in pursuit of a French ship called the Acheron. The French boat is bigger, faster, and better equipped, but the Surprise has a secret weapon: Russell Crowe's ability to climb up into the rigging and strike heroic, manly poses as his ship rockets across the wide open seas. His bold posing will lead the crew down the coast of South America, around the Cape, and into the Pacific in pursuit of the dastardly Napoleonic ship.


That's about it for plot. More of a situation really, but this is not a plot-driven film. Certainly it is an exuberant, swashbuckling sea adventure, but it is carried by personality rather than nonstop action (the action actually stops quite frequently) told with well-crafted intelligence. It is primarily equal parts character drama and historical examination. Where as Gladiator uses history as little more than a rack upon which to hang it's fictional drama, Master and Commander goes to great lengths to accurately recreate the realities of British navy life at the turn of that particular century. Almost the entire film is contained within the bows of the ship, making it in a way a slightly larger version of the film that kicked this journal off, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, only without all the insanity. At the focal point of the story are our two main characters. Three, actually. Captain Jack Aubrey, ship's doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany, one of the coolest actors in Britain), and young midshipman Blakeney (Max Pirkis). Together, they form a philosophical triangle. Aubrey is the career military man motivated by his love for king, country, and a wild day at sea. Maturin is the humanist; a man who fulfills his duties admirably as ship's doctor but sees a larger world than is defined by patriotism and the glory of battle. For him, the expansion of empire is less about military dominance and more about increasing the understanding of the world. Situated between the two is Blakeney. He is mesmerized by the firm but fair captain and admires the man's brilliance in battle. At the same time, he is equally enthralled by the world of the naturalist and of science as represented by Maturin. Both men want to guide him down their own path.


Although Stephen and Aubrey are opposites, neither man is a black and white caricature. The captain, for all his seafaring bravado, is also a man of culture. An enlightened warrior, if you will. And the doctor, despite his streak of compassion and humanism, isn't afraid or unwilling to whip out the pistol and sword and do some ass kicking when the time comes. Both men are friends, have been for quite some time, despite their differences. From what I understand of the books, they are equal characters, and Stephen has a particularly complex background as an anti-British Irish freedom fighter who joins the Royal Navy because he considers Napoleonic tyranny an even greater evil (a character revelation that makes the whimsical "lesser of two weevils" scene in the movie all the more meaningful). The cinematic version of Maturin gets slighted to some degree, and none of this information regarding his background is divulged. At the same time, however, it is his story that provides most of the film's philosophy, and to a lesser degree the story of Blakeney. Crowe's Jack Aubrey is charismatic, energetic, even fun to be around, but he is also the character who changes the least throughout their journey.

Aubrey begs comparison again to Aguirre, as both films are about obsessed captains in pursuit of a prize that seems out of their reach. The big difference, of course, is that Klaus Kinski's Aguirre was stark raving mad. Lucky Jack is obsessed, perhaps to a fault, but he's also a realist. He never loses touch with what's going on around him, and he never becomes abusive of his men (except for one scene where discipline calls for such behavior). For my movie-buying dollar, it's Crowe's best performance. He makes this captain someone you can admire, and it's easy to understand why his men are willing to follow him, as the title says, to the far side of the world. Would that Jeffery Hunter had this sort of charisma back when we watched King of Kings. You shouldn't find a British sea captain more charismatic and deserving of loyalty than, say, the Son of God.

As the doctor, Stephen Bettany has less to work with and a more difficult task. It's always easy to cheer for the gung-ho captain who climbs the rigging and does that "looking out across the horizon" pose. It's more difficult to get worked up about the guy with a walking stick who sets out to collect lizards on the Galapagos. But Bettany is one of the finest young actors working today, and he manages to make the doctor more than just an intellectual foil or irritating nag. Although not as strong a character as he is in the books, Bettany's Stephen Maturin is a man who is also easy to respect, and you can see why young Blakeney is entranced by the doctor's pursuit of the natural sciences. But this is no pansy, predictable sort of intellectual character, the ones who constantly bitch about everything. Maturin is, in his own way, every bit as tough as Aubrey, and just as the captain is no cannon-crazy buffoon, neither is the doctor a cowardly sniveler. When battle erupts, the doctor either goes about the grim business of sawing off arms and legs, or he picks up arms and joins the fray. When he is accidentally wounded, the man lies back and performs surgery on himself.

Fleshing out the crew is a stock of standard characters that are no less compelling because of being standard. There's the cranky cook, the crazy old salt, the incompetent officer, and a hobbit. Yes, poor Billy Boyd, destined to forever inspire the reaction, "Hey, it's that hobbit!" We spend a lot of time with the crew, drinking grog and dancing to folk medleys when we're not loading cannons, making Popeye faces, and shouting at the French. The depictions of the crew are as historically accurate as everything else. Contrary to what was sometimes seen in movies, British sailors at the time were the most skilled in the world and took great pride in what they did. And many of them were barely into their teenage years, if that.


When battle scenes do come along, and part of what I like so much about this film is that they don't come that often, they are made to count. Sound plays a major role in the film, from the classical duets for violin and cello the doctor and captain play together to the creaking of the ships. And when the cannons begin to fire the sound is appropriately thunderous. Making old style naval battles exciting is not an easy task, as much of it is simply two ships sailing past one another and launching volleys of cannonballs across the way as sailors peek out of cannon doors and snarl at each other. Master and Commander is wise enough not to rely on the battles themselves, but rather stays in close to make the battles personal in much the same was as was done in Gladiator. Still, they are explosive and exciting, partially because you actually care about a lot of the people who are getting blown up.

And I guess it's worth mentioning that there are no women at all. Well, there's one, who is on screen for a few seconds during a brief trading exchange with some locals. Other than that, this is a testosterone-fuelled film, but like Esquire, it's meant to show man at his best. Bravery, sacrifice, intellectual inquiry, philosophy, music - a far cry from what might be the first thing that pops into mind when you think of a manly movie. But then, it's not the men of old who are responsible for the modern man being such a simp.

In today's climate, Master and Commander was something of a risky movie. A film that uses action scenes sparingly and relies instead on characters? A film that is comprised primarily of two adventurous men playing classical music and debating the meaning of duty and the purpose of exploration? Not exactly what modern audiences seem to want, but then, modern audiences make some awful movies into gigantic hits, so you can't trust modern audiences. Peter Weir has put together one of the best movies of recent years, something that dares to make action an exclamation point rather than the entire sentence and relies instead on two of the best actors around (not to mention some incredibly polished young actors) to create an exchange of ideas and dialogue that sustains the movie as it rounds the cape for a final showdown with the French. Master and Commander is, to be short about it, an uncommonly great film.

Labels: Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 2003