James Marsh (2018)
Perhaps Colin Firth, who plays the ill-fated amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst in The Mercy, doesn’t look his fifty-seven years – but he definitely doesn’t look thirty-six, the age Crowhurst actually was when, in 1968, he took part in the Sunday Times ‘Golden Globe’ event, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race, inspired by the lone circumnavigation exploits of Francis Chichester the previous year. James Marsh and the screenwriter Scott Z Burns haven’t made other adjustments to accommodate this large age discrepancy: the film’s Crowhurst has three pre-adolescent children. Since he entered the Golden Globe in the hope of winning a £5,000 cash prize (equating to around £60,000 today) to bail out his failing business, Firth’s maturity makes a difference. The entrepreneur Stanley Best (played here by Ken Stott) sponsored his participation in the Sunday Times race but Crowhurst mortgaged his home, as well as his business, against Best’s continued financial support. There’s a particular poignancy in the desperation of a man with a wife and young family to support who’s entering the twilight years of a normal breadwinning life.
A bigger problem for The Mercy is Firth’s temperamental unsuitability for the role. There are suggestions in what other characters say about Crowhurst that he’s meant to be driven and impulsive – a bit of a chancer maybe, but charismatic and plausible. These are not the qualities naturally associated with sound, conscientious Colin Firth. His specialty is playing men whose struggle with their weaknesses or demons is written on their faces. Donald Crowhurst was competing in the Golden Globe with big-name sailors, including Robin Knox-Johnston (who won the race and, as the film’s closing legends explain, donated his prize money to Crowhurst’s widow), Bernard Moitessier and Chay Blyth. Crowhurst secretly abandoned the race at an early stage of his aimless travels; unable to bear the burden of failure or face the financial music, he reported false positions – with the idea of claiming, without actually having achieved, a circumnavigation. With Firth at the helm, the prospects for Crowhurst appear doomed from the start: there isn’t a heady, optimistic height from which the protagonist can plummet. Firth seems more at ease when things start going wrong on board – as they soon do – but he’s not the right actor either for Crowhurst’s climactic mental breakdown, religious hallucinations, etc. Hard as he tries, Colin Firth always seems sane.
The Mercy seems miscast throughout – in the supporting parts because the actors playing them are largely wasted. As Crowhurst’s wife Clare, Rachel Weisz is effective in her silent expressions of emotion that go unseen by other characters but has very little to do until her last and worst scene. After Crowhurst’s disappearance and presumed death at sea (his body was never recovered), Clare confronts a pack of baying newshounds outside her front door and gives them what for. You get the sense that Rachel Weisz has been waiting the whole film to let rip with this big monologue, which, unfortunately for her, is more editorial than human speech. As the tabloid journalist Rodney Hallworth, hired by Crowhurst as his PR man for the Golden Globe, David Thewlis gives proceedings a bit of pep, though his acting is broad. Otherwise, James Marsh has signed up the likes of Ken Stott, Jonathan Bailey, Andrew Buchan, Mark Gatiss and Simon McBurney to play ciphers. Gatiss manages a bit of characterisation as the Sunday Times editor but I didn’t get who Buchan (‘Ian’) was even supposed to be. If you blink you miss McBurney’s cameo as Sir Francis Chichester, who appears at the Sunday Times launch of the Golden Globe. This is baffling: Chichester it was who publicly expressed disbelief of the daily distances that Crowhurst alleged he was covering.
As Clare Crowhurst’s final diatribe suggests, the narrative makes much of the heartless fickleness of a press that goes along unquestioningly with Donald Crowhurst’s desperate fictions because the plucky-no-hoper-defies-the-odds theme sells papers, then turns emphatically against him to sell even more. (A double-bill screening of The Mercy and The Post might be amusing.) The irony of this film is that James Marsh and Scott Z Burns are also thrashing around for an ‘angle’ on the material and keep changing their mind. The Mercy lurches from moral dilemma to family tragedy to survival epic but never gets close to integrating these aspects. Having given plenty of attention to the curiosity and excitement of the Crowhurst children during the race, Marsh and Burns chicken out of presenting their reactions to the double horror of its ending. (The filmmakers also ignore the fact that, in long retrospect anyway, the Donald Crowhurst story reads like a truly terrible joke.) I’d assumed the film’s title was the name of Crowhurst’s craft; in fact, his trimaran was the ‘Teignmouth Electron’ and the title refers to the last entry recorded in his diary, found in the abandoned boat. The film, in other words, implies that he took his own life and came to view the end as a release. The audience of The Mercy can’t be blamed for feeling the same way.
13 February 2018
