Captain Phillips is a near-perfect marriage of filmmaker and
material. Paul Greengrass began his career in the world of documentaries, and both
his subsequent fiction films and true-life tales have all shared the same
determination to bring a sense of ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy to the
story being told, to make us feel as if we are right there in the midst of the action.
The second half of Captain Phillips largely takes place within the cramped
confines of a small lifeboat, inhabited by five men – four of whom are armed –
and with the tension and terror escalating with every passing minute. Some
filmmakers might struggle to remain composed in such surroundings, but
Greengrass is in his element.
It does take a while for the picture to find its sea legs,
though. The opening scenes are clunky and expositional, and I'm not sure what
purpose is served by the conversation Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) has
with his wife (Catherine Keener in a bizarrely negligible role) about how tough
the modern world is. There's something rather lumpy and shapeless about Billy
Ray's screenplay in its early stages, but the film becomes a much more engaging
proposition as soon as the giant freighter ship Maersk Alabama sets sail for
Mombasa. This is the ship that was boarded by four Somali pirates in 2009,
leading to a tense hostage situation that was eventually resolved by the intervention
of US Navy SEALs, and Ray has smartly compressed the real-life events into a
gripping narrative that takes off as soon as the pirates appear.
The four pirates are led by a young man named Muse, who is
played by a first-time Somali-born actor named Barkhad Abdi. Gaunt and
watchful, Abdi is a mesmerising screen presence, exuding a sense of
fearlessness and menace as soon as he steps on board the ship, and engaging in
some absorbing one-on-one standoffs with Hanks. The film draws parallels between
these two captains, one young and one old, from vastly different backgrounds,
and both trying to gain the advantage in this life-or-death power struggle. The
first half of the film plays as a game of cat-and-mouse, as Phillips attempts
to improvise ways to distract the pirates, and to protect his crew who are
hidden in the tanker's various dark corners, while Muse's suspicion increases
and the anger of his fellow pirates grows. Hanks and Abdi make their
confrontations sizzle, but the film still lacks the sense of intimate danger
and urgency that I was anticipating.
Captain Phillips really finds the unpredictable explosiveness that defines
Greengrass at his best when the captain is taken hostage by the pirates in that
tiny vessel, and the hyperactive handheld camerawork of Barry Ackroyd makes us feel the desperation and knife-edge tension within that location.
Working seamlessly together, Greengrass, Ackroyd and editor Christopher Rouse
create a sense of chaos while never allowing us to lose our sense of what is
happening to whom, and where. In the second half of Captain Phillips, Greengrass
orchestrates action both within the lifeboat and on the deck of the warships
from which the Navy will launch their assault, and with each cut he ratchets up
the tension and emotion.
A lot of the film's emotion comes from Tom Hanks too. His
performance here presents Captain Phillips as a pragmatic, resourceful
individual whose mind is always racing to analyse a situation and work out what
the best course of action might be. Even when he is in a high-pressure
situation, with a gun pointed at his head and people screaming at him from
every angle, we can see Hanks' mind at work behind his eyes – looking for a
strategy, pondering the right words to say, figuring out how to survive.
However, all of Phillips' experiences gradually take their toll and the
cumulative emotional weight of what he has been through eventually spills over
in the film's final five minutes, in one of the most extraordinary pieces of
acting Hanks has ever produced. It is this climax that elevates Captain
Phillips from an exemplary piece of thriller filmmaking into something much
deeper and more resonant.
