Watched: Captain Phillips
This was thrilling to watch, and painfully realistic - being a film by Paul Greengrass, it puts the source material front and centre and pulls the directing back as much as possible. Tom Hanks ceases to be Tom Hanks fairly early on, replaced by a man terrified for his life. There’s a point at the end, when he’s in the hands of his rescuers, where he’s overcome by shock and it feels visceral watching it. It’s a film defined by desperation, and how desperation can become the status quo, and by breaking that feeling at the end it diffuses the tension building up for the previous two hours in a way that’s utterly overwhelming.
All of the Somali actors are brilliant, but Barkhad Abdi in particular (who is already receiving a ridiculous amount of praise). In terms of performances, this is really his film - he runs the full gamut of being cold and ruthless to becoming a cornered animal, and never lets up. There’s a line he keeps repeating, “everything’s gonna be okay”, that starts out self-assured and by the end almost feels like he’s trying to will that state of being into existence. The line’s repeated by one of the navy medics at the end, and it feels no more reassuring.
The portrayal of the US navy is interesting - there is no posturing, but neither do they come across as inefficient. There’s a drawn-out sequence where it becomes clear that the operatives are highly-trained, but still rely on the right circumstances to be effective.
The closest this really comes to making a political point is a brief exchange between Abdi and Hanks, where Hanks asks Abdi if there isn’t anything better he could be doing with his life. Abdi thinks for a while, then responds with “maybe in America.” It’s not laboured over, but it lends the character a little more empathy. The military are never anything but the good guys, but that doesn’t make the Somali pirates uncomplicated villains. There’s nuance here. It’s a horrible, borderline-unresolvable situation first, and a story of characters second.