The Perfect Storm

Written by: Bill Wittliff Starring: George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, William Fichtner, John C. Reilly, Diane Lane, Michael Ironside, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, John Hawkes, Allen Payne

As readers of Sebastian Junger’s superb 1997 non-fiction book upon which this movie is based know, swordfishing is a brutally difficult, horrifyingly dangerous, and only occasionally lucrative way to make a living. And that’s on a good day. When you add a freakishly powerful, once in a century storm to the mix, it is watery hell on earth. In 1991, the crew of the doomed swordboat “Andrea Gail” found that out firsthand when it ran headlong into the perfect storm of the title, and Wolfgang Peterson’s movie brings the story breathtakingly, viscerally to life. The challenge of these “men against nature” stories is to make the men as interesting as the nature. Though the extraordinary special effects clearly have the starring role in “The Perfect Storm,” the movie does a pretty good job of sketching its main characters. The men who do this kind of fishing seem to run to two types, young hellions out for a quick buck, and men for whom the sea--despite its dangers--is a way of life, and for whom any other sort of existence would be inconceivable.

Captain Billy Tyne (Clooney) is one of the latter, a rough-hewn loner who has swordfishing in his blood. In fact, it is his stubborn streak, and perhaps his ego, that sets the tragedy in motion. He decides to take one last trip of the season to make up for a recent fishing slump. He also decides to travel farther than might be deemed prudent to find the fish, and, in a final act of hubris, challenges the great storm in an attempt to get his catch to market. At first glance, this Greek tragedy-like layering seems a bit heavy-handed for a story about fishing, but it actually does manage to achieve a certain resonance that makes the movie more affecting than would have been expected. (After all, most people are going for the “money shot” of the preview, which shows the 75-foot Andrea Gail trying to claw her way up the face of a wave that looks to be about twice her size.) Tyne takes with him on the trip a crew that covers most of the requisite bases for melodrama.

There is the veteran fisherman Murph (Reilly) who is divorced and misses his son; the handsome young man Bobby (Wahlberg, and by the way, handsome is relative here, since most of the men are forced to wear rather unflattering facial hair--what, they can’t shave on a boat?) in love with the sweetheart (a still ravishing Lane) who doesn’t want him to go; the borderline psycho Sully (a surprisingly muscled Fichtner, doing an excellent job playing against type); Bugsy, the jokey eccentric; and Alfred, the token man of color. It is a measure of the success of the picture that it gets us to care about them at all, and perhaps a stroke of good fortune that the real-life crew members lent themselves so well to this kind of dramatization, since the story itself has its obvious limitations. The picture is beautifully executed, with a superb production design, crystalline photography and near flawless direction by Peterson, who demonstrates again his complete control of the visual medium. He is certainly one of the most reliable directors around in terms of establishing a sense of place on screen; the scenes in Gloucester and on the Andrea Gail have an immediacy and vividness that makes you feel like you are there.

During the storm scenes Peterson creates a sense of chaos and confusion appropriate to the events, yet we never lose our perspective or orientation; we know exactly what is going on at every second. That includes the terrible nature of the disaster that the men of the Andrea Gail are sailing towards. The cutaway scenes of a rather dorky meteorologist (who mutters awestruck observations about the magnitude of the phenomenon we are watching unfold) are slightly distracting, but help us understand (as Billy Tyne seems not to have) that the Andrea Gail is sailing into the maw of--not merely a bad storm, but a once-a-century monster. The cutaway scenes to a small private sailboat also caught in the disaster are somewhat less useful. We do not know its three occupants at all, so it is hard to feel much for them other than a generic sense that we hope they get out OK.

But these scenes do highlight the exploits of the Coast Guard rescue swimmers, men who jump into the ocean to save the crews of foundering vessels. Let me repeat that: these are guys who voluntarily jump out of a helicopter into fifty-foot waves to save lives. Now, that’s heroic (there should probably be a movie about them). It is startling enough to read about this; seeing it onscreen just makes your jaw drop (you also hope that some of them are around if you are ever on a sinking boat). The movie suggests that a similar rescue might have been attempted for the men of the Andrea Gail, but that the ferocity of the storm made it impossible for even these stalwarts to reach them, which in turn deepens the sense of tragedy and loss. As Junger’s book made clear, there are unanswered questions and some slight mysteries (as is usually the case with ships lost at sea) about exactly what transpired in the final hours of the Andrea Gail. The movie, of necessity, must fill in those blanks, and it does so most convincingly. Peterson knows that his greatest asset in the picture is the storm itself, and he makes superb use of the state-of-the-art special effects that create it onscreen.

No one will ever accuse “The Perfect Storm” of being a character study, but it does make clear that it takes a certain kind of man (or woman: Linda Greenlaw, played in the film by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, is a real-life swordboat captain; she also wrote an excellent book, “The Hungry Ocean,” about swordfishing) to do this work. Of the crew, the most vivid character is that of Clooney’s Tyne, who really does seem to fit that Greek tragedy mold. He rails against the storm, almost having fun at first as the boat surfs up and down the giant waves. His decision to drive for home without (or in spite of) adequate information is a direct extension of the ego that allows him to believe he can pluck the ocean’s bounty without paying a fearsome price. Perhaps such an ego is the only thing that would allow someone to make those trips at all. There are two moments in the film, rather close together, when Tyne’s ego falters, and he realizes he is beaten. The first is when he realizes that he can no longer battle the storm, that he must turn tail and run for his and his crew’s lives. The second, a short time later, is when he realizes that there is no escape.

In his words, “She [the storm] won’t let us out.” In those moments, Clooney’s face reflects the pain he feels at his failure to protect his ship and his crew, and his resignation. He knows that the jig is up, that he has lost the bet with the ocean that all sailors make, and it makes his last act seem almost inevitable. For a brief moment, the emotional storm is more powerful than the meteorological one, and that raises “The Perfect Storm” above the level of an ordinary disaster film. It’s as close as most of us will ever want to get to a swordboat at sea and reminds us that those dinners we eat come at a human cost far greater than we might have imagined. (7/1/00)