Tactlessness

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2014)

20 yrs. after 'Gump', Hanks still plays the heroic average guy, struggling for his right to blandness. Nonetheless, is Hanks a good actor? Yes.
With his purple mean mouth, Hanks looks unsettling, he should have played at least a version of Douglas' William 'D-Fens' Foster, the psychotic citizen. That was Schumacher's day! Here, he impersonates at length a nasty, bearded, almost morose child; verging on sulky. (Meanwhile, 'Gump' has been conveniently forgotten, and I blame the fans from back in the day, for their neglect.) Phillips, called Irish, because he's a Yankee Irish, is Gump, Doe and Ulysses into one. This is the gist of the caper.
There's not much to tell about the story (Somali fishermen turned pirates climb aboard a commercial ship, etc.) or the characters, either barely sketched or even seen, or convincingly bland, average people.
Hanks acts like a blander De Niro, and intent on playing, among a cast who doesn't (the Somali do, perhaps, but that's different). Hanks' fans, if there still are any, will be shown plenty of him.
There is humor ('Do I look like a beggar?', retorts one of the Somali pirates, when being offered only tens of thousands).
The script's virtue is conspicuously one of restraint: it abstains from glamorizing its heroic average guy. I have read an interview with Greengrass, and he knew his trade. (The interview with Ryan Lambie, Paul Greengrass interview: Captain Phillips & crime stories—'I have had a wonderful reaction, but the few that haven't liked it tend to be evenly weighted in one of those two directions. I had one guy the other day saying that it's just a propaganda for the US navy. Then I have had others saying you're way too sympathetic to the Somalis.') Politically, the movie upholds a rather right—wing take (the union guy seems a bit coward, the military are portrayed as ruthlessly determined, but they achieve their goal, and we can't feel really sorry for the Somali pirates, though they got a rough deal).
It's a very interesting movie, and Hanks did a good role, he looks almost handsome; and take a look at his car and luggage, and pretty wife. Now Greengrass says he meant it as a caper; I disbelieve it.
'Phillips' indulges in this average decency and it takes its shape, it morphs into it: not without humor, since we are shown the generic triteness of Hanks' family talks and worded feelings.
He is Ulysses. Like with Gump, the movie is named after him, after its protagonist, to give the true impression of who this John Doe is. The Irish is another Doe. Yet, the script lefts him quite uncharacterized, except for a few essentials. I complained that there's too little of Phillips, not too much.
Hanks gives his Irish a glow, an aura, against the effaced play of the rest of the cast; a glow of acting. This is all the more conspicuous, since he has no character to begin with.
And so, the movie appears to be not neutral, but affected, the style feels affected and precious, a commodity, a merchandise. It all begins with Hanks' unconvincing glow, with the ostentatious hammering of the Irish's decent, endearingly trite ways, the talk with his almost unseen in the frame wife.
We are being lectured, and in a quite conventional style; this is not the movie ease (in front of a camera, there's no ease but a movie ease, a device) from some European, or '70s American movies, but a didactic one.
So, the movie feels cold, empty and didactic, boosting of the national sentiment, perhaps. There is a certain lack of tact, even meanness in showing the absolute triteness as decency, etc., there's a lack of feel on the director's part.
The heroic average people deserved a fairer, kinder, warmer, perhaps lighter movie; their very mentioning makes the template seem turgid, basically wrong, affected.
There's something heartless and rude in the way the movie was thought out; the job wasn't for Greengrass.
The script wasn't for a _techno—thriller or a drama; it was for a chronicle. Hence, Greengrass' directing seems uninspired and clumsy.
Against the intended meaning, the purpose, the style proves poor, clueless, harsh and turgid. The notion of this movie is wrong, as Greengrass mistook a chronicle for a _techno—thriller or an epic drama.