Flak Magazine: Review of Master and Commander, 11.28.03

With Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, director Peter Weir has done a masterful job not only of adapting Patrick O'Brian's revered historical fiction, but also of reinvigorating the Das Boot-class life-on-the-sea experience for the big screen. It's a straightforward tale — one boat, two men, one mission — and Weir, with stars Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, manages to take the entirety of the Napoleonic conflict and pare it down to one wickedly entertaining parable.

The full title is an elision of the first and 10th installments of O'Brian's series, and the script is drawn from across all 20 books. The heart of these novels is the familiar friend-and-colleague design of a risk-taking captain and a private, unrestricted doctor that Gene Roddenberry adopted for Kirk and McCoy. In Master and Commander, we're joining this relationship in medias res, with Captain Jack Aubrey (Crowe) firmly footed on the HMS Surprise and doctor Stephen Maturin (Bettany) with sea legs strong enough to perform surgery during cannon assaults. The ship has one order: Find the Acheron, a French ship rubbing out whaling boats for their oil, and take her.

And that's it. That's the totality of the movie. The entirety of Weir's nine-digit budget was spent on two boats and a trip to the Galapagos. This is the beauty of simplicity, with none of the odd politicking that mucked up Gladiator, none of the strange romance that sunk Pearl Harbor. In fact, the only time the story dallies on a woman is when the crew re-carves the siren on the Surprise's hull after the Acheron's first strike. In other words, the movie is devoid of distraction — even the every-soldier-has-a-story principle of Saving Private Ryan is largely missing here — leaving only an unabated sea adventure. And shiver me timbers, is it fun.

Aubrey (and Weir) have the Surprise in a cat-and-mouse game, precisely the setting where you'd rather serve a captain called "Lucky Jack" than Admiral Nelson himself. Aubrey isn't played as a legend; he's brought in by Crowe as the extrovert that his Bud White in L.A. Confidential always wanted to be. Aubrey jokes, smiles, sings and drinks enough to keep his men in good cheer. Crowe's work here recalls his role in Mystery, Alaska more than it does any of his stolid, award-nominated turns. That's fine — like the movie, Crowe works best (and can be quite the likeable chap) when he's not distracted. Crowe reportedly extended the bounds of fraternity well beyond the set, drilling deck hands off-camera and holding officer meetings with cast members in his quarters during the shoot.

Those same bounds of fraternity may be what brought Bettany into the project; he and Crowe were an unbelievably good duo in A Beautiful Mind. Look closely: Crowe may adorn the posters, but both actors have their name above the title. Bettany has endured roles as a naked Chaucer and an imaginary man to arrive at this point, and he gets his just rewards. Maturin is better than merely the balance of Aubrey's brawn; Bettany makes him a man who is deeper than the Navy, broader than the Napoleonic conflict and yet willing to serve where and when he is needed (at one point, he wields a sword to take part in a raid, then returns to the operating table to save its victims). That's not to say Crowe fails; like the cello-and-violin duets that dot the magnificent score, Crowe and Bettany both succeed because one plays to a higher pitch than the other.

Weir deserves credit for making this interplay, and the movie as a whole, harmonious. Without the director's attention to detail, Master and Commander could very easily have become White Squall 2. During battle, audience members try to duck the rain of splinters; they pulse in their seat sas a cannon blast rocks the carriage back in recoil. Both audiences and financiers have so often been burned by expensive, synergy-free assemblages of good actors, pretty pictures and nice music (cf. Pay It Forward, The Core, Attack of the Clones) that it can be hard to believe either party continues to take the risk. But then a film as rapturous as this comes along to make it hardly seem a risk at all.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)