![]() So while an establishing scene grants us brief access to Muse’s life, and the film does not portray the pirates as the kind of racist caricatures familiar from a century of cinematic portrayals of evil as coming only from the exotic, what would it have cost to spend twenty minutes in Somalia rather than five? Would it have been too much to have a flashback to Muse’s childhood, or a dream of the life he yearns for, or some more illustration of the geopolitical context in which people with nothing but fear and hope and guns decide to hijack what they must see as depersonalized money machines, tickets to the irony of an American Dream that is really an American lottery, that, it should go without saying, rarely favors Somali pirates?ĭon’t get me wrong, Captain Phillips isn’t Argo, a presumably unwittingly Iranophobic film that ignores vast numbers of peaceful, fearful, repressed people in favor of portraying Iran as consisting only of rabid street mobs, secret police, and one innocent housekeeper, backdrops for the incredible journey of a well-groomed bouffant werewolf and his courageous white friends (friends whose terror was real, to be sure, but whose movie version doesn’t help anyone understand what Iran is really like any more than The Quiet Man gets Ireland). ![]() The critic Mark Cousins tweeted that he felt Captain Phillips was made with a microscope – such is the attention to forensic detail but of course, with Tom Hanks as the central figure, the audience is bound to identify with the captain, and his story will get more attention than that of the guy driven by circumstantial havoc to stupid belligerence. Having said that, Captain Phillips is only really half – or maybe two-thirds – of a good movie, or at least of the great movie it could be. (Need extra evidence that box office success can go together with artistic quality while avoiding titillating violence? Ask yourself when was the last time you saw Dustin Hoffman fire a gun.) I never met a Greengrass film that didn’t evince an attempt at serious critique of the powers that be mingled with some kind of evocation of why some people have less power than others.Ĭaptain Phillips may be his most accessible ‘historical’ film, and its blockbuster pedigree proves that audiences are willing to be asked to think for themselves while being entertained. And so Captain Phillips and Muse meet at the axis of globalization and militarism and materialism and racism, each of them accepting risk for money, each of them backed up by guns, each of them afraid.Ĭaptain Phillips is a compelling real-life thriller, directed by Paul Greengrass, the British former documentarian who makes the back and forth transition between factual dramatic reenactment ( Bloody Sunday, United 93), and action genre reinvention (two of the Bourne films) look easy. It’s tough times for everyone, of course, and Captain Phillips’ challenging circumstances compare very well to Muse, eking out survival on the Somalian coast, living in a metal hut, threatened with violence if he doesn’t pay tribute to the local master. “I’m the captain now” – words spoken with violent authority by a physically unthreatening Somali pirate to a moderate hunk of Americana, Captain Rich Phillips, ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances, slightly overweight decent bloke, man in charge of a huge container ship, navigating his way through newly treacherous waters, earning danger money because the economy’s broken. After seeing 12 Years a Slave, I think this year may be seeing the kind of contribution to cinema history that happens once in a generation, so that’s not to say that Captain Phillips isn’t any good, just that it’s out at the same time as a rare (for the multiplex) work of raw humanity that also has the potential to provoke social transformation.) (There were 189 films theatrically released in the US in 1983, and there will be 317 in 2013 – so when a film captures the public consciousness these days, we may assume that it really does indicate something important. ![]() “I’m the captain now,” says that pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi) in a moment that would surely become iconic had Captain Phillips not been released at a time when the easy availability of infinite content often makes it difficult to remember what film I saw yesterday, never mind the one I’m writing about now.
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