Crowe’s nest
Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World, dir. Peter Weir.
The queues—and they’re long—are about 70 per cent male. Interesting, because what they get for their money, apart from a couple of short, smoky sea battles and Russell Crowe’s (right) commanding swagger as Captain Jack Aubrey, is a fair dose of life before the mast. It ain’t all adventure: weevily food, hammocks that wreck your back and no workers’ comp; weeks in the literal doldrums, a lot of shipboard domesticity at close quarters—sail sewing, deck swabbing, rope coiling. And discipline—this is the British navy, 1805, under threat from Napoleon, and with much of the crew press-ganged into service. A man is flogged for declining to salute an officer.
It’s also a film about personal command—the charisma and integrity of leadership. (Maybe that accounts for its appeal at a time when leadership has become an event staged with a Thanksgiving turkey.) Aubrey has Admiralty orders to pursue a French frigate, the Acheron, a faster, better equipped vessel than Aubrey’s HMS Surprise. But by his own admission, he exceeds his orders from Brazil on, so the quest becomes a personal obsession as well as a test of his ability to carry men with him. There is more than a touch of Prince Hal Aubrey—even a version of the ‘Once more unto the breech’ speech. ‘This ship is England’, declares Aubrey. And his rhetoric works.
Weir is interested, as he has been before (remember Gallipoli?), in the whys of power and how men wield it. In Master And Commander he uses the pairing of Aubrey and his friend, the Irish ship’s doctor and naturalist, Maturin (Paul Bettany, exquisite in repaired spectacles), to examine the limits of power. As the pair improvise string duets together, so they question one another about war and personal ambition.
The questions linger, which is why this is an interesting film. They linger in the atmosphere that Weir conjures so skilfully—the sea, the French quarry in the mist. But, finally, adventure rules, and Russell Crowe’s implacably glamorous Captain Aubrey, sailing off to another daring encounter with the Acheron, embodies the film’s strength, but also its confining weakness.
Morag Fraser
Sharp edges
In The Cut, dir. Jane Campion.
Campion sure can direct. Whether or not she can subvert a genre and control a sprawling slasher plot at the same time is still up for discussion.
In The Cut is many things—both good and bad,