Ant, Boot

Abdi and Hanks are equally at sea in Captain Phillips.

««« Captain Phillips. Written by Billy Ray, based on a book by Richard Phillips & Stephan Talty. Directed by Paul Greenglass. At area theaters.

Before the killing of Bin Laden and the fall of Kaddafi, the happy story of the Obama era was the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips. After sailing too close to pirate-infested waters off the horn of Africa in 2009, Phillips’ freighter, the Maersk Alabama, was boarded by four armed Somalis. Following procedure, the captain and his crew frustrated the pirates’ plan to take the vessel and its crew for ransom. Phillips himself ended up on a lifeboat with the raiders, who were ultimately confronted by the Navy SEALs. For the sakes of movie fans who might be current events-challenged, I’ll say no more about the circumstances of the ending, except that it was met by widespread relief at home—if not so much in Somalia.

            Now we have Captain Phillips, a dramatization of the incident from Paul Greenglass. In addition to a couple of Bourne movies, Greenglass made United 93, another ripped-from-the-headlines dramatization. Greenglass knows all the tricks and tropes of the Hollywood action mill, but also has a way of bringing a clean, taut, unsentimental approach to portraying real events. Interestingly, Phillips doesn’t resemble United 93 so much as another hostage drama rooted in real life, Dog Day Afternoon. In other words, it’s not such a happy story after all.

            Lest you think the showdown-at-sea premise isn’t iconic enough, Phillips is played to Tom Hanks—a guy who pretty much represents America itself in films like Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, and Forrest Gump. With his character stuck between his blue collar roots and his white collar overlords, Hanks doesn’t play it iconic, going instead for a hard but sturdy dignity. He already knows guys like him are surviving on borrowed time. Putting a gun to his head seems almost a clarifying act, making refreshingly obvious the economic forces that compelled him to sail too close to Africa, just to save a few bucks for his bosses.

            The script by Billy Ray makes the very same point about the head Somali pirate, a wisp of guy called Muse (Barkhad Abdi). He’s smart, he’s dirt poor, and he’s got bosses too—the gun-toting kind—who force him to keep going farther out into the Indian Ocean, hunting for bigger and bigger pay-offs for the “company”. “I made six million dollars last year,” he boasts to his hostage. To which Phillips replies, “If that’s true, what are you doing here?”

             Therein lies the difference between Captain Phillips and the typical post-911 hostage drama. Abdi plays his character of such maniacal conviction that you know he’s equally a hostage, trapped by the circumstances of a national tragedy. If our country was made lawless by civil war, and other nations took advantage of our trouble by pilfering our resources at sea, is there any doubt the boat-loads of American crackers—sorry, “freedom fighters”—would be out in the water in speed boats, taking matters into their own hands?

            And so when the Navy arrives, it’s already intervening in something far more ambiguous then a “hostage situation.” Greenglass gives the SEALs all due credit for pure, efficient lethality—perhaps too much credit, as the real event was far messier than he makes out. Like at the end of Dog Day Afternoon, we’re left with the feeling that not all positive outcomes equate with justice. As Samuel L. Jackson says in The Avengers, it’s a case of “ant, meet boot.”

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro