There’s a certain earnestness that I think ought to be commended when considering Disney Pictures’ latest – a retelling of a startling Coast Guard rescue in The Finest Hours.
However, I would say that the pluses of this movie never really rise above earnest. Everyone’s game (mostly) and it looks like the cast and crew together put their best foot forward, but it never really amounts to much.
The year is 1952. A massive nor’easter is building off the coast of Massachusetts. A group of sailors on an oil tanker – lead by a very serious and real-life Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) – have their ship literally split in half. It’s now up to actual hero Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) and his ragtag crew to save this group of 30+ sailors from certain death.
It’s a simple enough premise – almost a period version of Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm. But what director Craig Gillespie’s The Finest Hours lacks that Petersen’s film has is compelling characters.
Pine is, for my money, one of the American cinema’s few interesting action heroes.
In any movie he’s in, Pine has a wit, a charm and a likeability that few modern leading action men have yet to master. However, in the film in question he’s given virtually no character traits. We’re told he has a back-story involving a failed rescue attempt, but that’s about it.
Otherwise, he’s given no qualities that would make us think that he’s the least bit capable of pulling off the rescue that he’s about to embark on, so when the rescue finally happens and it’s never explained, you don’t believe it for one second.
Casey Affleck plays Sybert in a Henry Fonda-ish mode (for better or worse). Sybert is gruff, but not overly macho. But this character suffers the same problem as Pine’s Webber. We know nothing about him, other than that he’s good with machines.
Ben Foster plays Richard Livesey – a seadog that hates Webber for…some reason that we never understand. He’s the most criminally underdeveloped character in the whole movie for two reasons.
One: it would be interesting to have an antagonist of sorts on the mission that Webber is leading. Two: Foster is one of the great character actors working today and he has almost no lines. Holliday Grainger also appears in the movie as Miriam – Webber’s fiancé and the woman who worries while he’s out at sea. Miriam gets the most amount of character development: she’s feisty, assertive and afraid of the water. Too bad she’s sidelined for most of the movie.
The script was written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson. They’re the writing team behind a Massachusetts-set favorite of mine called The Fighter. That had a simple story, but somehow they managed to mine more out of those real world characters than they can here.
The production design is well done. The period is captured in great detail when we are on land and on the oil tanker. However, when we deal with Webber and crew taking on the waves, the CGI and scene construction is less compelling.
There are the obligatory monster waves that crash into Webber’s little boat – a natural David-and-Goliath-type situation, but they never amount to much. No one seems cold during what is basically a hurricane in February.
Snow and ice abound, but no one shivers. That could actually sum up the movie’s problems as a whole. All of the pieces seem to be there: a compelling true narrative, good actors, a rich period setting, a solid writing team and a perfect avenue to display killer CGI. But none of it ever connects. None of it ever finds a center. None of it ever quite hits the mark.
Should you choose to go see this in a theater, they will not be the finest hours you will ever spend in such a location (that joke, while painfully obvious, was inevitable), but it is a movie with admirable aspects done really earnestly. Make no mistake, while none of the elements of the film come together, it does seem like everyone is giving it the old college try. I just wish that meant something in the grand scheme of things.
The film ends with the best of intentions as well, showing the actor’s pictures side-by-side with their reality counterparts. The film clearly has a reverence for these people, but it sort of detracts from the film you’ve just watched when only a handful of the actors actually look like those involved in the real story.
That got me thinking: maybe the real Bernie Webber really was just a quiet, stoic guy. Maybe he wasn’t a movie action hero in the making. Which makes me think that they either should have just let this true to life story go or beef it up a little with some dramatic license.
P.S. It’s also worth noting that this movie begins in the strangest way possible. For a story set at sea, it takes us a long time in a relatively short movie to get there.
The first half of the first act largely takes place in a diner and then at a dance hall for no other reason than to set up the fact that Grainger and Pine’s characters are destined to be together. It’s a cute idea, but a gross misstep in pacing and another sign of things to come throughout.
Brian Laughran
Editor-in-Chief