by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the 2000 movie The
Perfect Storm, which I think we already saw
— when he was living on Manzanita Drive in City Heights, his then-roommate
rented a VHS tape and the three of us watched it together, I believe — directed
by Wolfgang Petersen, a German-born filmmaker who made his international bones
with the 1981 film Das Boot (“The
Boat”), about a German U-boat submarine crew in World War II, and got a
reputation for films that, as his imdb.com page puts it, “can best be described
as part action movies/part disaster movies.” He directed Clint Eastwood in a
1994 action thriller called In the Line of Fire — Eastwood played a Secret Service agent who saved
the President of the United States from an assassination plot — and in 1995
made a film called Outbreak in
which humanity’s continued existence is threatened by a new virus that causes a
pandemic (sound familiar?). The Perfect Storm was based on a book by Sebastian Junger that was
about a true-life incident: in 1991 the Andrea Gail, a sword-fishing boat out of Gloucester,
Massachusetts was caught at sea in a confluence of three huge weather events,
including Hurricane Grace, that meteorologists called a “perfect storm” and
sank with [spoiler alert!] all
hands down. Junger’s book was adapted into a screenplay by Bill Wittliff, and
the lead role of Billy Tyne, the Andrea Gail’s captain, was played by George Clooney after Mel
Gibson, Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, and William Hurt were all
considered and either rejected or themselves turned down the role. The other
crew members included Mark Wahlberg as Bobby Shatford, John C. Reilly (who’s so
good he threatens to steal the movie from the stars) as Dale “Murph” Murphy,
William Fichtner as David “Sully” Sullivan and John Hawkes as Mike “Bugsy”
Moran. One can pretty much tell what sort of movie this is going to be from the
characters’ nicknames.
The first 40 minutes or so are pretty slow going as Tyne
and his crew sail back into Gloucester with a disappointingly small catch of
fish (the fish are artificial models and look it —Charles joked, “These look
phonier than the shark in Jaws!”
— and there’s even a rather prissy credit that no real fish were used in making
the film, just to keep the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ thought
police off their backs; according to imdb.com, since Wolfgang Petersen is an
animal rights supporter, the caught fish were rubber and the moving fish,
including a shark the crew catches and hauls on board their boat by mistake,
were animatronic replicas; had this been made now it would have had to have another prissy credit apologizing for depicting the
characters smoking). Tyne — looking way more grizzled than I think I’ve ever seen George Clooney — gets chewed out by the boat’s
owner, and so he’s determined that on his next outing (the film takes place in
October, not long after the start of storm season) he’s going to go past Sable
Island (both Charles and I thought of the same joke, only I beat him to it:
“This is after they’ve already successfully navigated past Mink Island and
Chinchilla Island”) and the usual fishing grounds to the Flemish Caps (after
they passed the Belgian Caps and the Dutch Caps?), which is dangerously far out
at sea, especially in storm season, but also has large schools of swordfish the
other captains have been afraid to go after. They actually catch quite a large
haul of swordfish — I had assumed they would use nets and catch them en
masse the way most commercial fishermen do,
but perhaps because the long beak-like noses that give swordfish their name
could rip through a net, they have to catch them one at a time with big poles,
tackle and bait, then wrestle them onto the deck — but then the ice-making
machine on board conks out.
We get a mildly anti-capitalist comment to the
effect that the man responsible for maintaining it had wanted it replaced, but
the boat owner had just had it “overhauled” instead, but the fact that they
can’t make any more ice to preserve the fish (presumably the machine makes ice
from the ocean’s salt water since we don’t see any evidence that the boat has
any fresh water on board other than what’s needed for the crew’s own hydration;
I’m guessing they flush their toilets with salt water as well) and therefore
they have to race home before the
ice they have melts and all those laboriously caught fish spoil and become
useless. (Clooney as Tyne even gets to growl out a line — since he’s trying to
be butch Clooney speaks almost all
his lines as growls — about how he didn’t come all that way to feed the birds.)
The struggle of the Andrea Gail
to get home and the huge killer wave that ultimately does her and her crew in
is counterpointed by several other watercraft which also get caught in the
perfect storm, including a pleasure yacht called the Mistral whose captain is leading a tour for a woman and her
daughter, and when they want to turn back and seek shelter from the storm he
angrily snarls, “This is my
boat,” and insists he’s a good enough sailor he can ride out the storm (he
reminded me of the character Robert Shaw played in Jaws, and we all remember what happened to him!) until she overrules him, grabs the boat’s radio,
calls “Mayday!” (a standard international distress call that I’ve read is a
corruption of the French “M’aidez,” which means, “Help me”); a container
freighter called the Aeolis that
survives the storm but loses some of its containers, which slide off the deck
into the sea; and a U.S. Coast Guard crew consisting of a cutter and a
three-person rescue helicopter which saves the sailors from the Mistral but then runs out of fuel and, despite several
failed attempts from an Air Force jet to air-to-air refuel it, ultimately has
to be ditched, and the crew on the cutter are only able to rescue two of the
three people on the chopper.
There’s a lot of stiff-upper-lip masculinity and a
lot of pointless fighting — mostly between Murphy and Moran after Moran taunts
Murphy by saying he’s had sex with Murphy’s ex-wife (hey, she’s his ex — even if it’s true, why should he care?) — as well
as two key characters who act as voices of reason in this testosterone-fueled
tale. Not surprisingly, they’re both women. One is Linda Greenlaw (Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who gets way
too little screen time but manages to dominate every scene she’s in), captain
of a rival swordfishing boat, the Hannah Boden. Before the Andrea Gail’s ill-fated last voyage she’s asked Captain Tyne to
partner with her and co-captain the same boat — and it’s pretty obvious she’s
looking for more out of him than just a business relationship — but he tells her in the best
clenched-teeth manner Clooney probably learned from Clint Eastwood (one of
whose films, Pale Rider, turns up
here as the movie-within-the-movie the crew members watch on a portable TV in
the boat before the catastrophe; I didn’t know the movie but I spotted Eastwood
in it) that he really doesn’t need any partners, and the unspoken subtext is,
“Professional or personal.” When
the storms blow up she sends in a “Mayday” call for him based on the last
position he reported to her, and she frantically tries to call him on the radio
— which she can’t because the Andrea Gail’s radio has been wrecked by the storm.
The other female voice of
reason is Irene “Big Red” Johnson (Rusty Schwimmer), a relatively short but
heavy-set woman who apparently is the mother of Mark Wahlberg’s character
(though I’m not sure about that) — at least she makes some positive and
maternal-sounding comments about the woman Wahlberg’s character is partnering
with — and who also owns the Crow’s Nest bar (what else would a waterfront bar whose clientele fish for a
living be called?) where the characters do most of their drinking, pool-playing
and carousing before they set out to sea. One of Tyne’s crew members actually
seems to be cruising Irene — even though she’s not only huge but old enough to
have given birth to one of his colleagues — and it’s rare and nice in a movie
to see a “woman of size” actually treated as desirable and even alluring.
Irene’s bar maintains a retinue of customers who give appropriately
philosophical old-salt commentaries about the men at sea and the meaning (if
any) of their possible fates — of whom the most interesting is a character
described in the imdb.com page as “Quentin (The Old-Timer).” He’s got long grey
hair and a full beard but no moustache (there must be a particular awkwardness
in how you have to shave if you want a look like that) and is so perfect
visually as the stereotype of the Old
Mariner that the one slip-up director Petersen and his makeup and
costume designers made was not to
give him a corncob pipe. The Perfect Storm has its silly qualities and the exposition is a bit hard going, but once the storms kick
into gear they take the movie with it and turn it into a gripping tale of
surviving (or not surviving) against the odds, with Captain Tyne striking some
of the same combination of dementia and dignity of Captain Ahab in Moby
Dick (still the eternal model for stories
about men at sea pursuing an insane quest and threatened at any moment with
imminent peril).
