The Best Movies of 2013, #5: Captain Phillips
Paul Greengrass can’t sit still. From his two hyperactive entries in the Bourne franchise, to his nervy September 11 dramatization United 93, to his unappreciated Iraq War docudrama Green Zone, the filmmaker’s work is characterized most of all by a roving impatience, with frantic cutting and jittery handheld camerawork. It’s a kinetic approach that sacrifices cleanliness for liveliness, but if it often gets your blood pumping, it can occasionally feel jumbled and chaotic, as though the ravenous director is struggling to sate his appetite to cover as much spatial territory as possible. Yet Greengrass’ restlessness makes him ideally suited to make Captain Phillips, his gripping fact-based account of the war of wills and wits between an American merchantman and the Somali pirates who hijack his ship. Because the film transpires in a bare minimum of cramped locations—first Phillips’ lone freighter stranded in the vast ocean, then a tiny lifeboat floating even more helplessly amid the waves—it is necessarily claustrophobic. But rather than being hamstrung by such a constrained space, Greengrass finds himself liberated. Unable to overextend himself in terms of breadth, he opts instead for depth, continuously amping up the energy even though there is nowhere for his camera to go. Watching the movie, you won’t be able to escape either.
In one of the least showy and most powerful performances of his career, Tom Hanks plays the titular sailor as a brusque, inherently competent commander, a man who instinctively knows every nook and cranny of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama, even if he’s less adept at ingratiating himself with his crew. His assignment is to shepherd the Maersk and its unspecified cargo around the Horn of Africa. It’s a routine job, and Phillips’ terse professionalism—immediately upon stepping aboard, he instructs his first mate to tighten some of the ship’s security mechanisms without offering so much as a greeting—creates the impression that he’s prepared for anything. He’s not.
Slavery was horrible. This is not up for debate; it’s a fact. Yet our discussion of this wretched time in our civilization tends to feel removed and academic. How, we wonder, could society have countenanced the suppression of an entire race? What forces could have conspired to treat people as nothing more than property? Was nineteenth-century America motivated by economic gain, rationalizing that the ends justified the means, or did slave owners honestly believe in racial superiority? These are questions worth asking, lest such horrid history repeat itself, but they approach slavery more as an intellectual concept than as the actual, systemic brutalization of humans. 12 Years a Slave—Steve McQueen’s gripping, unapologetically savage account of one servant’s struggles—bucks that trend and instead takes a hauntingly intimate approach. It is not about slavery’s politics. It is about its mechanics.
As wonderful as it is to watch, American Hustle was assuredly a difficult film to make. It has a labyrinthine plot, replete with double crosses, false identities, fake accents, and cons nested inside other cons. Its structure is ungainly, with cascading flashbacks, multiple voiceovers, and repeated shifts in point of view. And its based-in-truth narrative, about the FBI’s ABSCAM sting in the 1970s, is laden with insider minutiae, ranging from the mechanics of organized crime to the breadth of political corruption to the egotism of law enforcement. You would think, given the need to balance all of these plates spinning on screen, that American Hustle would require a workmanlike and disciplined director, someone capable of streamlining the screenplay’s disparate elements and synthesizing its busy plot. Instead, it got David O. Russell.
Before Sunrise was never supposed to start a franchise. A touching, wondrous glimpse of two people meeting and immediately falling in love, Richard Linklater’s 1995 romance worked perfectly well as a standalone story of a single night, even if the tantalizing ambiguity of its ending—in which nascent lovers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) agreed to meet again in Vienna in six months’ time—left viewers speculating as to what happened next. But to our surprise, Linklater resumed their story in 2004 with Before Sunset, which reunited Jesse and Celine for a few fateful hours in Paris. As it turned out, logistical issues prevented the lovers from reconnecting in Vienna, but even after nine years, their chemistry still crackled, and Before Sunset concluded with the winsome suggestion that they might in fact live happily ever after. Did they? To answer that question, Linklater and his two leads (who, for this film and the last, are also his writing partners) have returned with Before Midnight, which shatters our fairytale expectations with stark realism and painful honesty. Jesse and Celine may yet find bliss, but as this movie makes ruthlessly clear, it won’t be easy.
Not much happens in Inside Llewyn Davis, the sixteenth—and arguably most soulful—feature from the inimitable Joel and Ethan Coen. Its narrative is elliptical, to the point that it ends literally where it began. It chronicles a week in the life of a New York folk singer (Oscar Isaac, extraordinary) who shuffles from one indignity to the next; he crashes at various houses (“Got a couch?”), scrounges for any gig he can find, and huddles to keep warm, lacking a winter coat to protect him from the city’s bitter chill. It systematically deconstructs its title character, establishing his talent and promise before methodically breaking him down through a series of humbling, escalating defeats. Not much happens, and yet for Llewyn, so much does.