|
|
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
|
After a single narrative frame setting time and place, Far Side of the World opens as it will close: on the deck of HMS Surprise, a British 28-gun frigate sailing in deep blue water. Surprise is searching for the heavier French frigate Acheron, with orders to "Sink, Burn or take her as a Prize." But Acheron, bigger, faster, and throwing a greater weight of metal, is also hunting her …
A fighting ship is an agate of a world whose brilliance is all on the inside, in the complex economizing of space (during a single day the same room will serve as galley, gun deck, and sleeping loft) and people (the surgeon is also a naturalist, the captain also the chaplain). Director Peter Weir (YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY), most at home with the bonding of men in times of war (GALLIPOLI), makes a wise decision to stay entirely within Surprise's microcosm. "This ship – is – England," says Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe, L A CONFIDENTIAL, A BEAUTIFUL MIND) with patriotic relish in a speech that is not from O'Brian but of him.
O'Brian's idiosyncratic genius lies in his uncompromising immersion in the world of Nelson's navy, where his precisely anachronistic language rolls like the vast swells of a deep and shoreless ocean:
In the hushed ceremonial procession that followed Jack saw exactly what he had expected to see – a vessel ready for inspection, holding her breath in case any of her beautifully trim rigging with its geometrically perfect fakes and perpendicular falls should be disturbed. She bore as much resemblance to her ordinary self as the rigid bosun, sweating in a uniform coat that must had been shaped with an adze, did to the same man in his shirt-sleeves, puddening the topsail yard in a heavy swell; yet there was an essential relationship, and the snowy sweep of the deck, the painful brilliance of the two brass quarter-deck four-pounders, the precision of the cylinders in the cable-tier and the parade-ground neatness of the galley's pots and tubs all had a meaning. (M&C, page 30)
And if you seek for explanation of the language, sir, then be damned to you for a lubberly scrub.
O'Brian's twenty novels (really, one continuous evolutionary universe) are unique, complex interactions that violate all normal rules of story telling: intertwined narratives with mulish refusal to conform to three-act structure, with prestidigitating staging indirection, and with deliberately obfuscatory narrative tricks. Weir, necessarily, simplifies – most of Far Side of the World is a compacted gloss on O'Brian. For O'Brian, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany, A KNIGHT'S TALE) is crabbed, sallow, Irish, Catalan, surgeon, botanist, intelligence agent, purest landsman; for Weir he is half these things, and handsome to boot. Aubrey, though a fox at sea, is bluff, fat, cheerfully philandering; in the role Russell Crowe is good (Stephen Fry would have been a casting stroke of genius) but limited, stopping down his brio into a restrained English accent and in the process losing some of Jack's seafaring verve. No matter – even in its telescoped display, O'Brian's detail is so rich that tiny characters like Barrett Bonden (Billy Boyd, LOTR), Preserved Killick (David Threlfall), and thirteen-year-old midshipman Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis) step fully to life, as do some of O'Brian's richest scenes, including the trepanning of Joe Plaice.
The movie's portmanteau title (it has the longest Web site name I've ever seen: http://www.masterandcommanderthefarsideoftheworld.com/) is a clue to Weir's intention: by straddling both the first book (Master and Commander) and the tenth (The Far Side of the World), Weir clearly leaves open the possibility (hope?) of a sequel, quite possibly one that picks up precisely where Far Side leaves off, with Surprise in the mid-Pacific. Certainly, if the love and care that went into this film were once again to sail up over the horizon through down-scrolling opening titles, I should like it of all things.