(Photo courtesy of Movieposterdb)
There are two realities in Captain Phillips that eventually converge. One is a blue-filtered portrait of Americana: a large white house and a minivan nestled in a happy town. The other is the yellow hued landscape of sand and sea in Somalia, inhabited by makeshift huts and poverty.
In Captain Phillips, representatives from each universe will meet on a floating ship on the open waters of the Indian Ocean. They will meet and open up a dialogue about their respective countries, about the inherent hypocrisy in a cargo ship’s mission and about justice. This dialogue will take place with yelling machine guns and yelling men. It will create heroes and villains, distinguish between honest shipmen and pirates and assert who really has power in the world.
But the beauty of director Paul Greengrass’s latest film is that these delineations never feel completely realized. In a certain respect, this is less of a patriotic embodiment of real life events than it is a geo-political critique about how we interpret a victory and who we consider to be our enemies. Greengrass, famous or infamous depending on how you feel about his shaky camera work, answered similar questions in the latter two films of the Bourne trilogy. His choppy, kinetic movement helped heighten drama before its arrival, often becoming a subversive style that mimicked the undercover, combative subjects his camera followed. Here, by nature of his backdrop, the camera settles down and rides the waves of the ship, some calm, others wildly nauseating.
The movie is thoroughly watchable, though. The story takes place in 2009 and is based on the story of Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama that was hijacked by four Somali pirates. Early on, Phillips (Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump) leaves home after chatting with his wife (Catherine Keener, Into the Wild) about how times are changing for their children in an increasingly competitive work field. He flies to Oman, inspecting the mammoth vessel on which stacks of cargo containing food and clothing are bound for Mombasa. It is not until a group of Somali men aggressively vie to be crewmembers aboard speedboats—like Mexican immigrants in the U.S. displaying their muscles to white contractors— that the competitive workforce is put into perspective.
The pirates are herded near the sea by militia kingpins and are told to hit the ocean to make money by boarding and holding ransom large cruisers in the area. They eat a plant called khat, consumed to suppress appetite, evident in their bony constitutions and severe glances. Eventually, one of the speedboats, led by the pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi), appears on Phillips’ radar near the coast of Somalia. The speedboat crew is undeterred by the captain’s false radio call to local sea patrol and approaches the ship’s stern, dodging the swells and swerves of the large vessel’s waves. They have crossed a point of no return. Only victory lies in front of them. This is their life.
This movie lives on conceptions of leverage, trust and loyalty. When guns are pointed in the cabin there is seriousness and grim weight in the Somalis’ intentions, but there is also the idea that Phillips is smart enough to not simply give in. He radios to his men in suggestive code and plays naïve in response to Muse’s demands. These men are here for millions of dollars, and you can see their faces brighten when they first find out the Alabama is an American ship. Phillips only has $30,000 on board in cash, but they demand more, boasting about how they’ve scalped millions from other ships before. “Why are you here, then?” Phillips bluntly asks.
The silence that follows describes their current situation better than any response.
Greengrass paces Captain Phillips in smooth strokes. The second half of the movie takes place in the Alabama’s lifeboat, where the four take Phillips hostage after their mission on board is disrupted. We consistently switch between its cramped quarters and the blue-lit interiors of U.S. Navy warships, which have quickly dispatched and begun to surround the small orange escape craft. We come to know these captors in their panic and desperation. Phillips does not experience Stockholm syndrome, but he does see their frightened humanity in the realm of imminent capture. They are not so much ruthless pirates as pawns of a system gone wrong.
