***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D’Arcy, Edward Woodall
screenplay by Peter Weir & John Collee, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian
directed by Peter Weir
by Walter Chaw By turns brutal and majestic, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (hereafter Master and Commander) reunites the antipodean director with Russell Boyd, the cinematographer with whom he shot The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, and the two have produced a picture on par with those films: historically aware, but more notable for its epic beauty and scope. The effect of Master and Commander is rapture–it engulfs with its detail, finding time to flirt with the secrets of the Galapagos as parallel to the unfolding mystery of technology that finds the HMS Surprise outclassed by the French Acheron, stealthy and peerless enough to inspire speculations of supernatural origin. Issues of the old at war with the new (superstition vs. science, instinct vs. calculation) are nothing new for Weir, who is, after all, at his best when examining the dangers of individuals at odds with tradition, and the rewards for modern men able to assimilate the ancient into the new.
Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) is a revered British naval captain, ordered during the Napoleonic Wars to track French man-o-war Acheron to the coast of Brazil–the “far side of the world.” Ambushed and left to founder, Aubrey’s pride is wounded, leading him on what seems an ill-advised chase of the superior vessel up and down the coast of South America. As the conscience of the piece, Paul Bettany provides a convincing foil for Aubrey’s machismo as the ship’s doctor, Maturin, sharing surprisingly affecting chamber moments engaged in dialogue or music while himself biting the proverbial bullet as he performs surgery on his own body.
The battle scenes carry a sense of cataclysmic weight, recalling the smoke and blood of Gallipoli‘s trench warfare, but the seduction of Master and Commander is its sense of legacy. A dinner conversation revolves around Aubrey’s recollections of serving under Admiral Nelson, while a gift to severely wounded Midshipman Blakeney (Max Pirkis, who’s fantastic) reveals itself to be a recounting of the seaman’s exploits. The idea that runs through the piece is one of finding replacements and, on the other side, earning the right to be thought of as such–enough so that what marks the film more than anything else is an acceptance of the cycles of life and the importance of work and duty in defining a lifetime. The most eloquent moments of the piece are neither the military exploits nor Maturin’s naturalist endeavours, but rather moments where young men are entrusted with new titles and duties. Master and Commander is the most pleasingly masculine mainstream picture since Michael Mann’s exceptional The Last of the Mohicans, one that, more than the current Mystic River, identifies the cult of manhood as primal and, steeped as they are in tradition and rite, men to be grand, in their way.
Crowe is our most vital male cinematic presence, by turns sensitive and commanding here, and as utterly convincing in his moments of doubt as he is in moments of steely resolve. Weir, again, is most comfortable with palpably masculine actors, his best films with Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and Jeff Bridges (his missteps taken with Jim Carrey and Robin Williams), perhaps locating in them, latent, the conflict between the insensate “man’s man” appellation and the demands of romantic intellectualism imposed on them by the encroachment of modernity. Master and Commander is bracing because, while it presents its nautical swashbuckler in dedicated terms, it understands that the real drama of the piece is found in the struggle of boys to become men–and that there may be more than one path to that end.
