Sony Pictures
Hanks For The Ride
If I ever get to address a college graduation ceremony, I will tell them the truest thing I know: live in such a way that Tom Hanks will never be tempted to play you. You might make it home, you could get famous, but in the meantime you will suffer horribly.
And bad things will happen when you try to take a pee.
In Captain Phillips, Hanks doesn’t get trapped in an airport terminal, lost in space, left talking to a volleyball, or tossed into a volcano.
Instead he gets pirated, which involves a lot less rope-swinging than most movies would have you believe. As we discover in the first few minutes of Paul Greengrass’s movie, it isn’t much fun for the pirates either.
As scripted by Billy Ray (Shattered Glass), lead pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi of Blade Runner 2049) is basically a working stiff from a starving village who’s forced to kick back most of his takings to his bosses. This is the part of the movie that feels most true to life. Muse and his crew of Somali buccaneers aren’t greedy so much as seriously desperate, and they’re nobody’s idea of criminal masterminds.
If Greenglass and Ray had chosen to go another way, they could have delivered a Dog Day Afternoon in the Gulf of Aden. From the moment they board the Maersk Alabama, literally nothing the pirates do goes right. As we see them heading wide-eyed into the trap the U.S. Navy’s set for them, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of regret: Muse is the only one in the bunch with a cool head, and even he gets bamboozled.
But before we start rooting for the bad guys we should remember that this is a Tom Hanks picture, and the leitmotif of all Tom Hanks pictures is heroic suffering.
In true everyman fashion, we learn almost nothing about him before he steps onto the deck of the ship. He’s got a wife and kids, navigating boats through dangerous waters is how he earns a living—and yes, he does hit the head just before everything goes haywire. Probably because he drinks so much coffee (seriously: there are a lot of references to coffee breaks in this movie, mostly when Phillips is telling his crew to finish their coffee and get back to work). He’s just poured himself a cup of joe when the sonar shows two pirate speedboats and a mother ship on their tail and closing fast.
According to the movie, Phillips is both a highly disciplined skipper and a martyr to his crew.
He makes his guys shape up: locks all the gates, reminds them to hide their keys, puts them through invasion drills. It’s right in the middle of a drill when the pirates show up. He manages to trick all but one of the boats into veering off by letting them overhear a radio conversation in which he pretends to be a U.S. Navy officer sending relief. When the last boat stays on target, Phillips gives the order to turn on the fire hoses (meant to swamp any approaching craft), and the only reason the bad guys get through is because somebody in the crew forgot to attach their hose.
Once boarded, Phillips nobly sends the crew to safety in the engine room while he makes himself a hostage. The message is loud and clear: Captain Phillips did everything he was supposed to. It’s not his fault.
Except that it was his fault.
The real Richard Phillips did a lot of the things the movie credits him for but leaves out one important detail: he wasn’t supposed to be in pirate-infested waters in the first place.
Phillips had in fact received multiple email warnings of heavy pirate activity in the region, recommending that all vessels stay at least six hundred miles from the Somali coast. Believing that it was a matter of “when, not if” the ship would be attacked, and that veering off six hundred or even twelve hundred miles would make little difference, Phillips piloted the Maersk Alabama right through the danger zone.
His crew members later sued Phillips, saying that he was trying to shave off miles in order to save money. They also reported that they, not he, made the decision to shelter in 130-degree heat in the engine room; they, not Phillips, ended the crisis by taking Muse hostage and swamping the pirates’ boat by swinging the rudder. In fact, they said, if Phillips hadn’t insisted on making himself a hostage, there would have been no crisis requiring the intervention of U.S. Navy destroyers and Navy SEALS.
And thus no hero for Tom Hanks to play.
And that’s history.
As with most movies based on real life, you can’t judge a film solely on the basis of what the filmmakers make up. What gives Captain Phillips its emotional combustion isn’t the title character’s heroic devotion to duty, but his grace under pressure when confronted by Muse.
Barkhad Abdi has the movie’s toughest acting challenge: he’s got to play Muse as a stone killer with ice in his veins and as someone who’s in way over his head, as his crew slowly dissolve into madness. Abdi does it flawlessly. The one moment that everyone remembers from this movie—the one that got quoted by your boss—was improvised by Abdi: when he looks a terrified Phillips in the eye and says, almost reassuringly, “Look at me. Look at me. I’m the captain now.” That the movie isn’t instantly retitled Captain Muse at this point seems a gross injustice.
But of course that’s not exactly how the run of dialogue goes, and it’s in the actual exchange that we see Hanks’s true brilliance at work. Because each time Muse says “Look at me,” Phillips breathlessly replies “Sure.” Sure? It’s not what you’d imagine John McClane saying to Hans Gruber, or Superman to Lex Luthor, or Jim Lovell to the oxygen tank that blew up in Apollo 13. You’d expect at least a “like hell” or “not on my watch.” Something good for the trailer. Instead, it’s that feeble “sure,” as if Muse just offered him a wet towel. And when Muse says “I’m the captain now,” Phillips says… nothing. Kind of like you really would if someone had a gun to your head.
This is where Captain Phillips starts to get seriously good.
I can’t think of many stories in which a character finds his heroism by doing nothing, but that’s basically what the second half of Captain Phillips is.
Once he’s been conned into getting onto a lifeboat with the pirates—becoming their one bargaining chip with the Navy—Hanks is no longer acting but reacting. And react he does. Watching the pirates argue, looking for any faultlines he can exploit; reading the agony of a wounded young pirate (Barkhad Abdirahman) and offering to clean his wounds; reading the rising psychotic terror of the most violence-prone pirate (Faysal Ahmed); trying to escape and getting dragged out of the water like a kitten, trying to fight back and getting the stuffing kicked out of him, and finally realizing that absolutely none of it is going to keep him alive if they decide he’s outlived his usefulness.
In his most desperate moment, he grabs a ballpoint pen: a weapon of opportunity? No, he just wants to say goodbye to his wife. Even that gets taken away from him. Rare for any action movie, the hero’s finest moments are his abject helplessness.
After his rescue, we see why Hanks keeps bagging Oscars: he knows how to hold it all together until the moment he completely breaks down.
As he’s treated by a Navy corpsman (Danielle Albert), Phillips keeps insisting he’s fine and she suggests that probably he’s not. The whole scene was improvised at the suggestion of the director, who told Albert—a real Navy medic—to treat Hanks as she would any patient. During the unscripted exchange, she asks him, “Did all of this blood come from your eyebrow and your head?” He answers twice: first numbly, “No;” then, when she repeats the question, it finally dawns that he’s covered in the blood of the guy he tried to bandage up and the guy who was half a second from killing him.
Having once been questioned by an ER attendant in a similar fashion, I can say that this scene is absolutely on the money. Survival instincts can get you through a lot. It’s when they start cleaning your wounds and talking softly that you fall apart.
Captain Phillips is a different kind of action movie, from an era when filmmakers tended to focus more on the ordeal than the moments of heroism: 9/11 and the Iraq War had reminded us too much of our vulnerability.
I give Billy Ray huge points for treating Muse and his crew as they apparently were in real life: not blood-drinking villains or pitiable victims of poverty but as guys who simply could not afford to come back empty-handed, and somehow convinced themselves they were going to get out of this alive (Muse’s most revealing moment was when he suggested that he might move to America someday; the movie’s final crawl offers the bitter irony that he’s now serving a long prison stretch in Terre Haute, Indiana). If only the script had given as much attention to Phillips’s crew. Even though their real-life counterparts saved the day, in the film they’re mostly hiding in engine rooms and waiting for Phillips to warn them of approaching pirates.
But when St. Thomas of Hanks is playing the lead, you can’t really expect more.
It’s his ship and you’re just along for the ride.
Extras include commentary, three part production documentary, and trailer.
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