At Sea With "Captain Phillips"

2013 may go down as the year of the survival film, with many of the biggest prestige films of the fall featuring individuals placed in extreme situations. "Captain Phillips" is based on the true life hijacking of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship by Somali pirates in 2009. This is easily the kind of film that could have been turned into a gung-ho, bombastic action fantasy with slick set pieces and black and white morality. Fortunately, the movie was put into the capable hands of Paul Greengrass, former documentary filmmaker, and the director of such films as "United 93" and "Bloody Sunday," as well as the latter two Matt Damon "Bourne" films.

"Captain Phillips" takes us step by step through the hijacking, from the ship and the pirates departing from their respective ports, to the attack on the ship, to the hostage situation that results, and finally to the inevitable resolution. It certainly doesn't lack for intensity and thrills, and the central performance by Tom Hanks as Phillips is a good one. However, what really gives the film its power is the decision to give equal attention and character development to the four hijackers. We first meet Muse (Barkhad Abdi), Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman), Najee (Faysal Ahmed), and teenager Elmi (Mahat M. Ali) at their village, and get glimpses of their lives. This provides vital context for everything that follows, and much of the film is told from their point of view.

The commitment to a high level of realism is noticeable all throughout the film, and elevates it. Some incidents and much of the dialogue were clearly invented, but the script by Billy Ray is full of technical and military terminology that no one stops to explain. The Somalis all speak English to some degree, but among themselves they converse in Somali, and they do so at length. In your typical action spectacular, the threat of four armed men in a speedboat would seem to be too small, but in "Captain Phillips," it is carefully established that no one on the ship is armed, the shipping company has failed to provide adequate security, the safeguards and procedures to thwart such an attack are limited, and though military aid is eventually dispatched, it takes a long time to get to there. By the time the pirates manage to board the ship, the seriousness of the threat is clear.

The Somali characters were played by actual Somali actors, a key detail that really helps to sell the story. No one is saying that Samuel L. Jackson is not a great actor and wonderfully intimidating, but he could never play the leader of the pirates, Muse, the way that Barkhad Abdi does. We would never be able to experience the same, gradual humanization of the character the way that we do with him. As good as Hanks is, it's Abdi who gives the most memorable performance here, a wonderful mixture of naive optimist, who keeps trying to reassure us that everything will be all right, and world-weary cynic who has been lied to too many times.

The fly-on-the-wall approach puts the viewer in the thick of the action, which makes the tension all the more terrific. However, the director at the helm make a lot of difference. I've seen an awful lot of films with bad shakeycam recently, but Greengrass all but started the trend with the "Bourne" films, and he knows how to use it better than anyone. The camera bobs up and down with the speedboats and the life rafts, peeks through gratings and binoculars, and when the characters are plunged into darkness, so are we. More importantly, it's all very restrained, controlled, and the action remains perfectly coherent. No motion sickness warnings this time.

The Maersk Alabama story was all over the news when it happened, but I suspect that few in the American public knew the details of what went on during the hijacking, aside from the fact that Phillips survived. And surely there can't have been many who knew the fates of the four Somalis, which the film gives equal narrative weight. Cynics might wonder what the point of dramatizing the event in a film would be, and "Captain Phillips" provides a very good answer. It shows you parts of the story in a way that the news reports never could. It demystifies the Captain even as it celebrates him. And it reminds us that the pirates were human beings too.

I'm not particularly inclined to call "Captain Phillips" one of the best films of the year, though I think it's tremendously entertaining, a technically impressive pieces of cinema, and successfully addresses some tricky issues surrounding Somali piracy head on. It's about the best dramatization of the hijacking that we could have hoped for, but at the same time I don't feel I understand what was so compelling about this story to warrant the film being made. The characters are all a little too idealized, and the plotting is often terribly thin. There are a lot of true life stories that I'd have rather seen Paul Greengrass's talents applied to.
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