Film Review

The Finest Hours Review

Published

10 years ago

February 24, 2016

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All At Sea?

♦ Tripwire sent senior writer Andrew Colman out on his life raft to review Craig Gillespie’s maritime disaster drama The Finest Hours

The Finest Hours

Director: Craig Gillespie

Stars: Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Eric Bana, Holliday Grainger

The Finest Hours is certainly not cinema’s finest hour – a throwback of a movie in every department, this “B” picture with high production values harks back to the post-Hayes Code era of straightforward, clipped virtuosity – a 1940s study of human decency minus subtext and melodrama. Nevertheless, despite its undemanding Boys Own tropes, it’s not entirely without its merits.

Based (to an atomic level) on a true story, the film, set in and around a Coast Guard station in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1951, details the plight of young crewman Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) and his attempt to rescue the crew of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker broken in half by a raging “nor’easter” off the Chatham coast . There isn’t much of a build-up to the conflagration – the only plot point underpinning his arc being that he has met a girl he wishes to marry (Miriam Pentinen, played by Holliday Grainger) but needs the permission of the station commander, Daniel Cluff (Eric Bana) to go ahead with this. Needless to say, the ensuing disaster interrupts matters, and Webber chooses his shipmates for what appears to be a suicide mission, much to the dismay of Pentinen.

It’s very much a curate’s egg of a piece – the sort of film that Disney used to make (and one of the few films in recent years that might have benefitted from a narrator), spliced with immersive special effects and pared down method acting. Indeed, Chris Pine’s role is so underplayed and monosyllabic, you worry that he lacks the intelligence to man a lifeboat, let alone navigate turbulent waters. Amidst the rough and tumble, the timeworn rites of passage and almost parodical cast of archetypes (Ben Foster does the honours as Webber’s nemesis, doubting him every step of the way while Casey Affleck plays the doughty, put-upon tanker’s captain Ray Sybert) there are the action sequences, which are more or less the movie. The rescue mission is handled with immense aplomb – a painstakingly delineated woodcut, which details the film’s true engine – the grandiose, merciless sea and the hulking, battered tanker. The monochrome nightmarish tableaux take you into the heart of the action, deftly showing the extent of the rescuers’ heroism.

In the end, despite the verite, the film has an antiquated, otherworldly feel to it – like a remarkably well-preserved museum showreel or sepia photograph. The characters are so servile to the mise en scene that there’s no room to breathe, but that obviously isn’t the point, which is the rendering of a snapshot of a distant time, the people within merely ciphers. The end credits, designed to create an emotional connection with these forgotten heroes, are only an addendum to this.

ANDREW COLMAN