Lost at sea

In February 1952, in a horrendous snowstorm with hurricane-force winds, boatswain’s mate Bernard Webber of the U.S. Coast Guard and a crew of three took a tiny motorized lifeboat into the 50-plus-foot waves off Cape Cod to the SS Pendleton. The tanker had broken in half in the pounding seas, sending the captain and eight seamen to their deaths and stranding 33 others in the foundering stern section. With his own boat badly damaged, Webber rescued all but one of the Pendleton’s surviving crew and brought them safely to shore. It’s a story made to order for Hollywood, and it’s surprising that it wasn’t filmed before now.

Now it has been, and the result is The Finest Hours, directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, from the nonfiction book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman. The book actually recounts two simultaneous rescue operations; the other was to the SS Fort Mercer, also snapped in two by the storm 12 miles further out at sea. The movie concentrates on Webber (Chris Pine) and his crew (Kyle Gallner, Ben Foster, John Magaro), and on the Pendleton and chief engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), who struggles to keep the stern afloat long enough to run aground to relative safety. It’s just as well that Gillespie and company didn’t take on the whole book, because they’ve made a pretty thorough botch of the half they did.

The script simply bristles with clumsiness. When Webber’s fiancée (Holliday Grainger) turns on a short-wave radio to hear the progress of the rescue, a seaman’s widow discourages her. “Better learnin’ t’live not knowin’,” she says, in a line that has never passed human lips before this poor actress had to say it. It’s the Arthur Miller Syndrome: real people don’t talk like that, even if pretentious writers think they do.

Craig Gillespie is a director who has spent his career missing the point. His clueless hand has sunk movies as relentlessly as the Atlantic does the Pendleton, including such flicks as Mr. Woodcock and Lars and the Real Girl. Here he seems to have been more concerned with making sure everybody’s Massachusetts accent is just right than with building any tension or suspense. It falls to the movie’s CGI and sound effects to do that, and they often overwhelm the dialogue—but then, considering the lines we do hear, that may be a blessing in disguise.

Nothing but misguided instinct and directorial malpractice can explain Chris Pine’s diffident, hesitant, tentative performance. Pine is a star who’s also a real actor, and we know he can do heroic—this is a guy who has played Captain Kirk, Jack Ryan and Prince Charming. Here he seems to have aimed at making Bernie Webber an ordinary guy who rises to the task—the banality of heroism. But like the writers who saddled an actress with that awful line about learnin’ t’live, he confuses ordinary with uninteresting. The impression he leaves isn’t that of an everyday Joe turned hero, it’s of an unknown actor who gets a shot at stardom in a big movie—the stardom Pine already has, in a movie no bigger than he’s made before—and can’t deliver the goods.

Pine will be back, and he’ll wow us again. For his miss here, I blame Craig Gillespie.