"Captain Phillips" Sails to Success

Pirates seem archaic and fanciful until one is waving a machine gun in your face and screaming for you to give him money that you do not have. This situation is exactly that in which Captain Richard Phillips, played outstandingly by Tom Hanks, finds himself. The 2009 capture of the tanker ship Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates is the perfect action film premise, and it may be said that “Captain Phillips,” the new movie documenting that capture, is nearly the perfect action film.

Viewers will by and large remember the facts of the incident. The Alabama, owned by Danish shipping company Maersk Line Ltd. and captained by Massachusetts-born Richard Phillips, was bound to Mombasa, Kenya from Djibouti with a cargo composed largely of American relief supplies. A band of Somali pirates, after a day of fruitless pursuit, managed to board the ship and hold the bridge crew hostage, eventually leaving with the $30,000 in the ship’s safe and Phillips himself, whom they intended to hold for ransom. “Captain Phillips” derives its power from the fact that writer Billy Ray and director Paul Greengrass show incredible restraint in their treatment of the story, seeking to portray the events with as much accuracy and as little comment as possible.

The screenplay is taken from Phillips’s own memoir of the events, and Greengrass does not attempt to impose an ideology or political message over it. There is none of the jingoistic glorification of American nationalism found in many biopics—the enormous, unforgettable American flag at the opening of “Patton” comes to mind. Nevertheless, the overt cynicism towards American institutions that has characterized some of Greengrass’s work—latent in the Bourne films, clearer in “Green Zone”—is also avoided. With this journalistic tone, the raw emotion of the events is communicated directly, without the interference of worries about character motivations. Indeed, motivations are left cryptic and unguessed at. Muse, the pirate captain played by Barkhad Abdi, is by turns sympathetic and genuinely menacing, but never predictable. Although he is complex, he is not explained, and so the viewer’s experience of him is like that of the ship’s crew—at the surface and no deeper, with little understanding and much fear.

This experience is enhanced by the camerawork of cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who is probably best known for his work on for “The Hurt Locker.” The most notable camera technique in “Captain Phillips” is the effective use of what is a cancer of modern cinema—“shaky cam,” which has seen an explosion of popularity in documentary-style productions. In most instances, shaky cam is a crutch used to create a sense of verisimilitude and excitement by directors and cinematographers. While it can accomplish this end, it also tends to distract and to mask an inability to use artful framing and smooth camerawork. In this film, however, the well-choreographed chaos conveyed by shaky cam is at worst inoffensive, and at best very powerful. Ackroyd skillfully uses the technique to capture the breakneck pace of action maintained throughout the film.

Although “Captain Phillips” on the whole is very successful, there are a few places in which it falters; interestingly, the most notable moments of this failure are near the opening and closing, when the film is least action-driven. The captain’s dialogue with his wife at the beginning of the film is uninteresting, too long, and thematically unrelated to the rest of the plot, in addition to being a segment where shaky cam is not necessarily the preferred camera technique. At the film’s close, Hanks’s portrayal of Phillips’s emotional distress dips into melodrama and bathos, failing to evoke empathy so much as detached, perverse amusement. Nevertheless, these lapses are small, both in the amount of screen time they take and in the influence they have on the film as a whole.

“Captain Phillips” is one of the most effective films of the year and will likely be in the running for a number of Academy Awards. Its simple presentation of a gripping story puts it on par with such thriller classics as the original “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and sets it far ahead of the overproduced action films that have come to dominate so much of American cinema. For a well-crafted aesthetic experience, “Captain Phillips” is probably unrivaled by any other film playing nationally at this writing. It demands attention like a pirate’s pistol in your face.