Peter Weir, Aussie overboard.
Peter Weir works too hard at the wrong things. His latest film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,presents itself as a swashbuckler but gets bogged down and stretched out into something pretentiously lofty. Weir (and co-screenwriter John Collee) focuses on Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe), the leader of a British warship, the H.M.S. Surprise. Lucky Jack looms in this make-believe historical drama, set in 1805, as if his military commission brought the nature of leadership, heroism and humanity under analysis. He's contrasted to his good friend, the ship's surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), whose super-civility includes a longing to be a Naturalist. Maturin gets his wish when the Surprise pauses in its battle against the Acheron, the flagship of Napoleon's fleet, and makes a detour at the Galapagos Islands?an event unaccountably preceding Charles Darwin, thus making this film's story even more amorphous.
Some people take Weir too seriously simply because he always frustrates generic expectations. But even when his solemn practice adds tone to something as hackneyed as the 1985 cop drama Witness, it's never quite the same as adding depth. Weir is one of those Australian filmmakers who was first embraced in the late 70s when the renegade directors of the American Renaissance had alienated mass audiences with films that were thought to be too dark and experimental. Weir and his down-under clan represented a return to middle-brow values?artsiness as opposed to the vivid immediacy of New Hollywood. The Aussie accent was close enough to British to convince critics that banal movies like Newsfront, My Brilliant Career and The Last Wave were classy?especially preferable to the challenging, homegrown excellence of, say, Rafelson's Stay Hungry, Altman's Three Women and Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Since then, Weir has made a career out of not-quite-apt high-concept movies: the pious, classist Dead Poets Society, the enervating The Mosquito Coast, the tendentious Fearless and the watchable but ultimately trite The Year of Living Dangerously. Master and Commander is very much in the same vein?the product of a no-fun, quasi-intellectual. It displays competence without wit. Such professionalism can win prizes in the literary field, but it's an impertinence at the movies. You might expect a battleship movie to supply the derring-do of Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster, the sweep and energy once provided by Michael Curtiz, but Weir provides muted colors, chaotic action scenes and seascapes that nod to Goya and F.M.W. Turner.
This ostentatious approach would be acceptable if Weir provided a truly contemplative vision of the mariner experience as in Pierre Schoendoerffer's 1977 Le Crabe-tambour. There's only the ambition to be artful, as usual. Passionate moviegoers don't need to reach up to comprehend Weir's Aussie ambition; Fact is, they have to lower expectations bred by action-adventure films that carried the legacy of Conrad and Melville, films by John Huston (Moby Dick) and Steven Spielberg (Jaws).
Weir's tasteful blandness cannot touch the great vigor and insight of American action-movie narrative?a cultural phenomenon that can be localized in The Red Badge of Courage, once a grade-school staple that surely influenced the depiction of stress, courage, individual ambition and national identity in many of our 20th-century movies. Both Huston's fine 1951 film of Stephen Crane's novel and Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (which shows the derivation of Crane's ideas) got to the visceral and philosophical essence of masculine military experience. Weir swans around the subject. Master and Commander is full of images of heroism as fake as anything Ridley Scott might come up with (the first battle scenes suggest Black Hawk Drowned), because Weir avoids the emotionalism of American war films as vulgarity. (There is no denying that Weir's bracketing battle scenes owe their structure to Saving Private Ryan, but it's merely a commercial concession?same as the clamorous battles in Gladiator.)
Audiences won't feel anything at Master and Commander largely because the moviemaking doesn't seem heartfelt. I haven't seen any other Australian film that exhibited such fealty to the British commonwealth; it's like a hollow history lesson. "This ship is England," says Lucky Jack rallying his crew?calmly, as if reciting Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech under duress. The film is Loyalist yet with a general lack of patriotic conviction. Lucky Jack tells stories of serving under Lord Nelson but only to measure his own distance from the great man's shadow. (It's a drab point compared to the exclamations about Grover Cleveland in Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians.) Weir reduces the issue of character to his standard social-climbing contrasts. Between battles, Lucky Jack and Dr. Maturin play Bach, accompanying each other on violin and cello respectively.
Crowe injects an incongruous Aussie spunk into Weir's half-ass jingoism. Standing with his legs spread to lecture on "respect," strutting across the ship's deck or staring belligerently at his subordinates, he inspires periodic outbursts of "That's seamanship! By God, that's seamanship!" Heroism isn't quite the word for Crowe's loutishness; he's a man for an age without standards or principles?just self-interest. No honor, no beauty, no Billy Budd scrutiny. Crowe's Lucky Jack typifies movies that ignore the price of war?he's the conscienceless warrior that recent films have celebrated when imitating all but the ethics of Saving Private Ryan. (That also goes for the women in Kill Bill.) Previous generations of filmmakers knew the price of war?from actual combat experience or from the powerful effect of literature like Stephen Crane's. Master and Commander details the horrors of war-at-sea (including Dr. Maturin's absurd self-surgery), but it is fundamentally unconvincing.
Great filmmakers from Griffith to Huston, Kurosawa to Peckinpah to Spielberg have had the gift to convey battle. Even Roman Polanski's Pirates set high standards for framing clippers and frigates in awesome, imposing compositions. Weir's angles lack visual tension and excitement; scenes such as that of Lucky Jack planning strategy (a wine glass reflected across the map) are not animated or energized with a sense of immanence. And when the sea storms happen, it's the same roiling waves as in The Perfect Storm. Striving to be perfectly classy, Master and Commander is a blah epic.
Without the qualities of distinctive, minority characterization and background-revealing dialogue that made Stillman's films special, Shattered Glass can distract from the real issues of Glass' deception. Critics who weren't put off by the film's "dirty laundry" were suckers for its slant toward industry propriety that makes heroes out of the editors who were responsible for giving Glass such leeway (the late Michael Kelly, the publisher Marty Peretz and TNR's late-to-realize editor Charles Lane). Actor Peter Sarsgaard has received praise for playing Lane as an avenging angel?the spirit of Mencken no less?but Sarsgaard was more affecting in two movies last year, The Salton Sea and K-19: The Widowmaker, where he enacted depths of loyalty and fear. In Shattered Glass he's merely perturbed, a dweeb who matches Hayden Christensen's misconceived lead performance.
Both actors portray white-collar wimps (puppyish Glass disarms co-workers by constantly asking, "Are you mad at me?"). The entire New Republic staff suggests a wasp nerd ensemble. It's Chloë Sevigny's quiet fire as Glass' staunchest supporter that suggests how Stillman might have improved the film's depiction of an unquestioned coterie. The group of swarthy hackers (Steve Zahn, Rosario Dawson) who expose Glass weakly contrasts the evidence of cultural privilege that still infects American journalism?and Ray's psycho-flashback structure nearly exonerates Glass. Stillman would have gotten all this right with the proper, stinging satire.