Captain Phillips (2013)

One of the most incredible and chilling moments in Paul Greengrass’ United 93 comes near the end, as the film cuts between the prayers of the passengers in the back of the titular flight and the hijackers at the front. In that one haunting moment, Greengrass unites the two groups and depicts how their respective faiths drive them to take the actions that they do. One of the great triumphs of that film is that it explores the motivations of the September 11 terrorists. It does not sympathize with them, obviously, but in the midst of the chaos Greengrass is able to create a transcendent moment that brilliantly draws one parallel between two ostensibly opposite groups of people. Greengrass’ new film Captain Phillips feels like a two-hour extension of that one moment, as he brilliantly explores the circumstances that lead a group of Somali progress to attempt a hijacking that will inevitably end in their defeat. The film may be named after the American protagonist, but Greengrass’ fascinations seem to lie elsewhere.

Phillips himself is played by Tom Hanks, and the film begins with a couple superfluous scenes of conversation with his wife (Catherine Keener), who never appears again. She drops him off at the airport, and he goes off to take charge of the Maersk Alabama in Africa. The film then jarringly takes us from the green, rainy lands of New England to the dry, barren beaches of Somalia. A group of warlords drive into the village where veteran hijacker Muse (Barkhad Abdi) resides, and they demand that another ship be taken hostage immediately. Muse puts together a crew, and they venture out into the ocean to find their next target. They quickly set their sights on the Alabama, and eventually Muse and his underlings find their way onto the ship and take Phillips hostage. The Somalis’ plan is to collect a ransom of millions, but circumstances eventually force them into a claustrophobic lifeboat with Phillips as their only leverage. As they drift back to the Somali coast, they slowly realize there is no way the United States Navy will allow them to succeed.

Both a suffocatingly tense recreation of these events and an examination of two completely different worlds clashing in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Captain Phillips is an extraordinary showcase for all that Greengrass does well and almost none of what he doesn’t. His “shaky cam” style hasn’t gone anywhere, but he has always had a gift for making the chaos an asset rather than a liability. When other filmmakers try to emulate Greengrass, it winds up feeling incoherent and unpleasant. His films are like two-hour adrenaline shots, and the thrills can occasionally be so overwhelming that they have the potential to mask any higher ambitions. There’s a reason Greengrass devotes a good chunk of the setup to the motivations of the pirates. Other, lesser filmmakers might have held them off until the hijacking itself, at which point they would have been villains and nothing else. Captain Phillips uses these opening scenes to develop parallels between the two ships, and in particular the two captains. Both have been chosen for a potentially dangerous job, and both are constantly trying to control an unstable situation, but once the Navy shows up in the third act it becomes clear just how unbalanced the playing field is.

Greengrass has a history of hiring nontraditional actors for films like this, and that strategy pays off once more with the use of Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed and Mahat M. Ali as the pirates. This effectively removes all potential distraction while adding his signature layer of verisimilitude. Of course at the center of it all is the traditional actor in the form of Tom Hanks, but his brand of charisma could not be more perfect for the role. Especially in the early going, his character is trying to accomplish several goals at once: keep his ship right where it is, protect his crew hiding in the shadows of the engine room, and ensure that the kidnappers do not become violent. For the first two-thirds or so of the film, Hanks’ Phillips is the picture of calm under intense pressure. Only when faced with probable death in the lifeboat do things begin to unravel.

What’s incredible about what Greengrass accomplishes is how effortless it all seems. Like the best filmmakers, he tackles his themes visibly but subtly, and he is always focused on making it an absurdly thrilling piece of entertainment first. The final sequence, in which the Navy coordinates their final attack to free Phillips, is a masterwork of tension made all the more impressive because most of the audience likely already knows how the story will end. Greengrass is no stranger to well-known events, of course, but that he’s able to pull this off time and time again shows how remarkable a filmmaker he really is. There’s nothing particularly flashy about what he does, but Captain Phillips is a truly great film brimming with life from first frame to last.

Grade: A