All Hanks on deck

Captain Phillips, the titanic new movie about the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking, is a case study in various forms of cinematic grueling. It opens with about a good half-hour or more of superfluous scenes littered with mind-numbing exposition. The titular Rich Phillips (Tom Hanks) and his loving wife Andrea (Catherine Keener, conspicuously underused) talk in the broadest Baw-stonian platitudes about the trials of raising children. The conversation is presumably meant to convey decades of intimacy, but it’s as though they just met. “Right now the world is moving so fast,” says the Captain. “You gotta be strong to survive out there!” Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean Somali fishermen-turned-pirates turn out to be human too. Even if they have to say stuff like, “You worry about yourself, skinny rat!” Once the Alabama is moving through foreign waters, there are numerous scenes in which the Captain keeps reminding everybody on board to take extra safety measures—there are pirates in Africa, don’t you know. That there is foreshadowing. It is also, perhaps, insurance: we are never to doubt Phillips’ preparedness. The script is by Billy Ray.

Once we get through that kind of grueling we move on to the sort of grueling for which director Paul Greengrass is celebrated. The Somali pirates eventually make it aboard, there’s lots of shouting and bulging eyeballs and rifles waved about. The handheld camera is suitably seasick. The Captain, who the pirates dub ‘Irish,’ sweats a great deal, and comes up with ways to delay the pirates’ discovery of the rest of the crew who, in accordance with protocol, are hiding in the engine room. There are many cutaways to engines and rudders. A teenage pirate cuts his foot and man, does it look bad. Eventually the pirates take whatever cash is on board and depart in a lifeboat with the Captain as their hostage. Things get claustrophobic. We are certainly engaged now. Eventually Navy SEALs come and, of course, it all ends badly for the pirates. Could it have been otherwise? “There’s got to be something other than being a fisherman or kidnapping people,” says the Captain. “Maybe in America, Irish,” says chief pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi, quite good in a pathetically underwritten role). “Maybe in America.” The film ends with the Captain getting treated for wounds and shock in a protracted sequence—the sort of thing that seems designed explicitly for the Best Actor roll call—with Hanks getting really, really into his role.

I mean no disrespect to the heroism or trauma of the real Rich Phillips or, for that matter, to the genuine desperation of the Somali pirates, when I say that Captain Phillips is kind of appalling. When the film sticks to conveying the events as tersely and matter-of-factly as possible, it more or less works as an unnerving docudrama thriller, but its meandering, over-simplistic attempts to make a grand statement about economic inequities or globalization or whatever boggles the mind and insults the moral intelligence of its audience. Watch the similar but much better Danish film A Hijacking instead. 

Breach and the delicious duplicity of Chris Cooper

He’s played a hard-ass retired US Colonel and ball-busting father choking with unfulfilled homosexual desires that yield murderous impulses. He’s played a hunter of rare plants, deeply unsavoury, a quintessential outsider, yet the secret lover of Meryl Streep. He’s played a candidate for the Colorado governorship, grammatically challenged, neo-conservative, seemingly modelled after Dubya. He’s got thin lips, fried egg eyes, and can easily embody the pappy who never hits you but wields the threat always. These facts beg the question: who is this Chris Cooper guy, and can we trust him?

Clearly, the answer is no, and that’s precisely why its difficult to imagine Breach working as marvellously as it does without Cooper. He can be anybody in a way that keeps audiences unnerved, thus he’s so damn good as Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent convicted of treason in 2001 for selling US secrets for $1.4 million, an expert on Russian intelligence for 25 years before becoming the biggest traitor in US history.

Our first glimpse has him clutching a rosary in church: an instant acknowledgement of culpability in a movie so loaded with suspicion. Hanssen’s a devoted Catholic who loves playing with the grandkids. He doesn’t like to see woman in pantsuits. “The world doesn’t need another Hilary Clinton,” he sighs. He also seems to have a fondness for porn, especially when his wife’s the star. It’s this little vice that allows the Feds to assign Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe) to spy on Hanssen without knowing the reality of the charges against him, thus becoming close to this conservative but weirdly charismatic man.

This is dream material for director Billy Ray, who explored another real-life double life with equal panache in Shattered Glass, his film about the boy wonder journalist who wrote dozens of fraudulent pieces for The New Republic before getting caught. Ray and co-writers Adam Mazer and William Rotko build suspense with tremendous confidence considering we know how it’s going to end.

Cooper is Ray’s biggest coup, but Laura Linney, as the Fed leading the investigation, is just as good. She’s tough: the way she slides a pager across a table at O’Neil when she could have easily handed it to him; the way she rarely moves a superfluous muscle. Phillipe is doomed to being less impressive in such company, but he keeps his performance clean and convinces, crucially so in the scenes where we see him develop reverence for Hanssen (O’Neil, schooled by Jesuits, had a soft spot for Jesus people). 

Breach opened last year, the same week as Ghost Rider, and it sort of vanished without making much of a dent at the box office. In any case, without a major star at its centre or shit blowing up, it probably never had much of a chance, and it’s a shame. It’s a very satisfying thriller.