Shaun de Waal Not quite the movie OFTHEWEEK ‘This film is based on a true story,” we are told portentously, in white letters on a black screen, at the start of Wolfgang Petersen’s mari-time disaster flick The Perfect Storm. Such an announcement often serves to lend a little dignity to melodrama (life is so often melodramatic, after all), but in this case it is offering the viewer a guarantee of real-life information, the added value of a documentary element. Experience an oceanic nightmare!
In October 1991, off the east coast of the United States, three wild weather systems collided to form the mother of all tempests. As one character in the movie wails, “This could be a triple-header!” Whether that makes it “perfect” is debatable: the worst storm, maybe; the biggest, baddest storm ever recorded, perhaps – but then the movie wouldn’t have so catchy a title. Would you call a film The Perfect Avalanche? The Perfect Veldfire? Perhaps they mean it’s perfect for a special-effects extravaganza. And we get one. After a longish set-up, in which we are introduced to the characters and the issues in their lives, we get lashings of angry grey water, waves that look like moving Everests, lightning and a howling gale that means everyone has to scream at each other to be heard. Unfortunately, the gale doesn’t manage to drown out James (Titanic) Horner’s incessant and intrusive score, which rolls on even more relentlessly than the storm itself, making one quite seasick. After a while, I found it an impermeable barrier to any real involvement in the movie: it interposes a layer of swelling syrup between the viewer and the action. What involvement one can muster is gene-rated by the shading in of the characters; if we have no sympathy for them as people, all the computer-generated waves in the world aren’t going to make us care. Scriptwriters Bill Wittliff and Bo Goldman (drawing on Sebastian Junger’s bestseller, by all accounts an excellent book, whose meditations on the tragic romance of the sea have been omitted) make a reasonably credible go of it, assisted by a strong cast. They give us the angst of Captain Billy Tyne (George Clooney) over his low fishing quotas, the burgeoning romance of young fisherman Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), the sadness of post-marriage sailor Murph (John C Reilly), and so on, as they sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, one of the US’s oldest fishing towns, in search of a really big catch.
The heroism is laid on fairly thick. It is clear that this is a life-threatening job, and when the fishermen set out on the last trawl of the season they are shown striding toward their vessel like a team of astronauts about to blast off, accompanied, of course, by surging violins. Clooney’s Tyne is in debt to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, a grizzled seafarer on a mission, though Tyne is more macho and more megalomaniacal. He’s a tough man leading a bunch of tough men doing a tough job. And we know with the eerie precognition of moviegoers who have seen the poster and the trailer that this will be their toughest voyage ever. Yet, in a strange way, the storm itself fails to deliver. It is undeniably impressive, and the scenes echoing Rescue 911 have some oh-my-nerves tension to them. One fears vaguely for the characters’ lives, but I didn’t find the oceanic bombast scary or exciting at all – though, to be fair, other viewers did, and The Perfect Storm has been a huge hit at the US box office. Somehow the immensity of the sea, the 180 expansiveness of it, the sense of being isolated in a vast watery waste, can’t be captured on film: one is always aware of the frame. Or maybe it was just that damned music.