Movie Review
??½
THE FINEST HOURS
Directed by Craig Gillespie. Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson, based on the book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias. Starring Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Holliday Grainger, Ben Foster, Eric Bana. At Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs. 117 minutes. PG-13 (intense sequences of peril).
On Feb. 18, 1952, the oil tanker SS Pendleton broke in half during a powerful nor’easter off the coast of Cape Cod. Another tanker, the Fort Mercer, had suffered a similar fate earlier in the storm, and Coast Guard personnel from up and down the New England coast were dealing with that crisis when a plane spotted the Pendleton, which had lost its radio. A 36-foot motor lifeboat with four crewmen led by Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernie Webber headed into the storm and over a treacherous sandbar known as Chatham Bar to find the Pendleton.
I’m not going to say what happened next, but there’s a reason the event is called the greatest small-boat rescue operation in Coast Guard history, and there’s a reason it has now been made into a movie called “The Finest Hours,’’ filmed on Cape Cod and the South Shore.
A decent movie, too, in every sense of the word: stalwart and foursquare, it pits its plainspoken characters against all the 3-D ocean peril that modern technology can throw off a screen. It’s a movie made for the kind of audiences who feel that movies aren’t made for them anymore — you know who you are. If you go, you might want to bring a raincoat.
Chris Pine, Captain Kirk in the recent “Star Trek’’ movies, plays Webber not as a jut-jawed hero but as a capable, insecure local guy who doesn’t realize he has the goods. Director Craig Gillespie (“Million Dollar Arm’’) and his squadron of screenwriters, adapting a 2009 book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias, aren’t interested in psychological portraiture — it’s simply established that Bernie is a less-favored son of a judgmental father and that an earlier rescue mission failed when he couldn’t clear the bar (as it were) to save a Wellfleet fisherman.
“The Finest Hours’’ depicts the relationships on land: Bernie has a sweet, tough-minded fiancee, Miriam (Holliday Grainger, who really does seem to have stepped from an earlier era), and a taskmaster boss (Eric Bana) whose chief crime is that he’s from the South. Then it darts into the blow to watch the Pendleton spectacularly fall apart. How does half a tanker remain afloat for hours? Beats me, although the word “bulkhead’’ is mentioned more than once. With the half of the ship containing the captain at the bottom of the sea, the crew argues over how best to survive until help arrives. The natural leader is first assistant engineer Ray Sybert, played by Casey Affleck in the Gary Cooper tradition: terse, modest, assured.
Sybert’s the most interesting of a bunch that seems to have come out of a screenwriting 101 handbook: the blowhard coward (Michael Raymond-James), the trusted lieutenant (John Ortiz), the Kid (Keiynan Lonsdale), Pops (Graham McTavish), Cookie (Abraham Benrubi), and so forth. The four men of the rescue mission are more finely drawn, with Ben Foster’s Richard Livesey a tough brooder and John Magaro (“Carol’’) bringing notes of humor to the role of a lightship seaman who wanders by at just the right wrong time.
These actors turn what might be Norman Rockwell stick figures into living, breathing men (and women — Rachel Brosnahan is memorable as a fisherman’s widow with no use for sentiment), but “The Finest Hours’’ saves most of its energies for the rescue sequences, which are almost overwhelmingly powerful. By now, 3-D is a bedraggled concept at the movies, but here we have one of the very few films to use the technology in ways that improve the experience. The scene in which Webber’s craft crosses Chatham Bar is played for white-knuckle suspense; you emerge from the theater shaken, rattled, and moved by the extremities of human endeavor in the face of everything nature can muster.
It’s the Hollywood version, to be sure. The Cape Cod accents may pass muster everywhere but in New England (I’ve heard worse), and I’d be curious what some of our local salts will say about the film’s oceangoing realism. A trio of Navy middies in uniform coming out of a recent preview screening said, when asked, that everything seemed about right except for the bits when the Coast Guard boat submerges far below the raging waves for long, amphibious seconds at a time.
So be it. The heart of “The Finest Hours’’ is in its unfashionable belief that life is precious and duty is to be done. The best thing you can say about the movie is that it embarrasses neither the men of the Pendleton nor the men who risked their own lives to save them.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
