Craig Gillespie (2016)
Craig Gillespie’s drama begins with a leisurely description of a young couple’s first date, followed by a briefer summary of their courting, and a rush into the coastguard mission that occupies virtually the rest of The Finest Hours. This is the true story of a coastguard rescue – the ‘US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue’, according to the subtitle of the book by Michael J Tougias on which the film is based. In February 1952, the oil tanker SS Pendleton sheared in two in a gale south of Cape Cod. Four men from the coastguard station at Chatham, Massachusetts braved appalling weather and sea conditions to go to the tanker’s aid. Their motor lifeboat, designed to carry a maximum of twelve people, brought thirty-two crew of the Pendleton safely to shore.
Gillespie, working with a screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, aims to do more than simply reconstruct events of more than sixty years ago. He also wants to reanimate action-packed Hollywood human drama of a bygone age – a tale of heroism featuring familiar types, dilemmas and the discovery in adversity of who-you-really-are. But the SS Pendleton isn’t the only thing in The Finest Hours split down the middle; so is the film itself. CGI visual effects that soon dominate and Gillespie’s attempts to revive old-style moral certainties operate mostly in parallel, in spite of a resourceful score by Carter Burwell that tries to bridge the gap.
Until the rescue vessel reaches the Pendleton, the narrative switches between the crisis on board the tanker and events at the coastguard station and on the lifeboat during its journey out. In charge of the lifeboat is the young man at the centre of that slow-moving romantic prologue. Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) reports for work expecting his major challenge on the shift to be securing the station commander’s approval of the date on which Bernie plans to marry. Commander Cluff (Eric Bana) hasn’t time for that: with most of the Chatham station’s crew already involved in another rescue attempt, Cluff assigns Bernie to the Pendleton mission. His three volunteer companions on the lifeboat are bolshy, unsmiling Richard Livesey (Ben Foster), eager rookie Ervin Maske (John Magaro) and Andrew Fitzgerald (Kyle Gallner). (I’m afraid the last-named didn’t register strongly enough to earn a descriptor.) The immediate loss of life caused by the accident to the tanker leaves engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) the surviving senior officer. Despite repeated opposition from other crew, Sybert organises them to steer the Pendleton‘s sinking stern onto a reef, where it can lodge until help arrives. A subplot involves Bernie’s fiancée Miriam Pentinen (Holliday Grainger) who, when she discovers Bernie has been dispatched on what she considers a suicide mission, marches into the coastguard station and demands unavailingly that Cluff instruct the lifeboat to return to base.
He makes Bernie excessively unassuming at first but Chris Pine is competent and likeable. Those adjectives apply even more to Holliday Grainger in what is essentially the familiar action-picture role of the woman who waits back home fearfully but feistily. Miriam’s visit to the coastguard station goes on too long but Grainger gets excellent variety into her repeated ‘Please call them back’ appeal to Cluff. What’s detectable in Pine’s and Grainger’s playing, however, is an attempt to recreate stock characters from old movies while breathing some kind of new life into them. As a result, both actors sometimes come across as over-deliberate. The same thing happens in some of the minor parts – though not in the case of Ben Foster. Although Livesey seems excessively grim in the early stages, Foster makes increasingly expressive use of his eyes to build a richer characterisation. But it’s Casey Affleck’s performance that’s outstanding in more ways than one.
The man Affleck incarnates – and he physically inhabits the role so thoroughly – is credibly of the period yet effortlessly modern. At first, Ray Sybert is, as he himself says, unpopular with most of the crew: he’s a lone wolf and, as such, mistrusted. On board, he keeps himself to himself; on land, unlike most of the others, he has no wife or family. Affleck is reliably good at giving the viewer clues to his thoughts and feelings that go unnoticed by others on the screen and just the right actor to play, with an occasional flash of quiet sardonic wit, a solitary, low-key hero. Sybert knows what needs to be done and gets on with doing it – urgently and with undemonstrative authority. When the lifeboat has made it back home, Sybert takes his leave of Bernie with a laconic ‘Good job, captain’. Casey Affleck seems to have a gift for making you want to know how his character fared after the film ended – especially in Manchester by the Sea but in Lonesome Jim too and again here. Both the other films mentioned benefited from fine, individual screenplays. It’s remarkable that Affleck achieves something similar in a smaller part and in generic material like The Finest Hours.
Snow is thick on the ground and so are the clichés. There are repeated references to an earlier rescue mission that went wrong and left its mark on all concerned. Commander Cluff invites suspicion because he’s not a local man. (Eric Bana can’t do much with the part.) Despite the freezing weather, Miriam, when she storms out of coastguard HQ, is too angry to remember to put her coat back on. It’s a surefire bet, as the men of the Pendleton jump off the tanker and into the arms of the rescue party on the lifeboat, that the one who won’t make it will be good-hearted, fearless ‘Tiny’ Myers (Abraham Benrubi), his reward for singing ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’ and encouraging a timorous younger seaman (Beau Knapp). I sighed in exasperation when Miriam’s car crashed on a dark and icy road but at least this didn’t generate a subsidiary will-she-be-reached-in-time suspense element. Miriam soon gets a lift from a hard-bitten, good-hearted young mother (well played by Rachel Brosnahan). It would take a heart stonier than mine not to be emotionally stirred by the climactic rescue and journey back to safety. Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography includes some splendid images of winter landscape and lights in darkness.
10 July 2018
