The Reel Critic: Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips is at its core a story about leadership – the weight that any captain or leader must bear to do their job. It is first about the titular Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) and his responsibilities on an American cargo ship: breaking in a new crew and then getting them to follow his lead in a time of crisis.  Paralleling Phillips’ story is that of the Somali captain Muse (Barkhad Abdi), who must likewise get his pirate crewmembers to follow his instructions in chaos, and then who must execute his own job. Muse’s job so happens to include stealing Phillips ship and taking Phillips hostage aboard a claustrophobic lifeboat.

The director, Paul Greengrass, spends a fair chunk of the movie giving us backstories for each captain directly before they go to sea: the first two scenes of the movie are Phillips with his wife driving to the airport, and Muse on a Somalian beach evaluating potential crew members. The story is obviously very much about comparison – to some extent it must be a story of comparison by virtue of these different starting points. But Captain Phillips does not turn into a trite portrait of the first world versus the third world. Whatever comparison that does occur on this level is included foremost to narratively engage the audience, not to make grand statements about what rich and poor mean or how to fix poverty. One of the four pirates cuts his foot on glass because he has no shoes, which dramatically shifts the strategy of the pirates. This is a less cumbersome way of telling us how circumstance shapes the Somali pirates, as opposed to having Hanks step away from the story to give us a politicized speech.

Instead, the focus remains on Muse and Phillips, both to some extent trapped by circumstance. Piracy is Muse’s trade; this is what he does and he is not going to stop. The crew on board of Phillips’ ship argue that they didn’t sign up to be hijacked, but Phillips tells them that of course they did – it also comes included as part of their vocation. The parallels are clear. The dynamic between Muse and Phillips is made markedly more interesting by playing the novice actor Abdi against the well-established Hanks.

The dynamic works; it feels appropriate for Hanks’ and Abdi’s respective characters. As the movie builds, Muse and Phillips increasingly share the screen together – near the film’s end, Phillips says to Muse in a grim tone: “we all have bosses”, which is more or less the guiding theme of the movie.

Greengrass restricts his scale to the ship and its immediate vicinity – there are almost no wide shots at all, just the crewmen, the ships and the sea. Like in Greengrass’s United 93, we are given the immediate action foremost, which elevates and gives power to that action. The director understands that there is a great satisfaction in simply watching someone do their job well; in following the minutiae of any job that leads to that job’s success. Phillips is nothing if not a respectable captain who follows procedure when in doubt, and who remains cool while everyone else panics. Hanks is great at giving this kind of performance – he really should be too, after 30 years of giving exactly this performance. For most of the movie, Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks – the likeable, empathetic everyman, whose primary dramatic delivery is a stoic monotone.

This is flipped entirely on its head in the last 10 minutes of the movie, where Hanks strips off every convention we are accustomed to from him, and when Hanks gives us a rare moment of decided vulnerability. This is a true story. It is not a surprise that Hanks is saved from his hostage situation. What is more surprising is Hanks’s response as a man who is completely disoriented, basically unable to process information, and totally unable to communicate his experience.

Hanks’ performance is a microcosm for the entire movie: Captain Phillips’ only dramatic mood is a building, yet restrained tension. The stakes are always impossibly high, every little movement is a matter of life and death, and Captain Phillips is engrossing throughout. But somehow the movie builds so long and intently that it fails to introduce new dramatic action on which to build. During Captain Phillips’ final 10 minutes, all of that tension is snapped and the movie moves from restraint to a necessary crazed emotion. It becomes something special when it reaches this place. The obvious problem is that the movie is 2 hours long, and its redeeming pinnacle lasts for 10 minutes. Still, it’s hard to be too hard on Captain Phillips. Paul Greengrass has painted his usual, measured portrait about a moment of terror, uniquely marrying chaos and patience, resulting in a film which feels both uniquely engaging and emotionally honest.