Dead Calm

 

 

DEAD CALM            B+                  

Australia  USA  (96 mi)  1989  ‘Scope  d:  Phillip Noyce

An early film of 22-year old Australian actress Nicole Kidman that made her an instant international star, viewed as a natural redhead before she bleached her hair blond, even speaking with an Australian accent, though it wasn’t until Gus van Sant’s To Die For (1995) that people realized what astonishing range she has as an actress.  Perhaps more importantly, the film is adapted from a 1963 novel by Charles Williams about a couple enjoying a South Seas adventure on a yacht before they intercept a troubled ship in distress, retrieving the lone survivor, altering the course of nature, with none other than Orson Welles securing the rights to the film.  Welles began shooting his own film entitled THE DEEP off the coast of former Yugoslavia in 1968, but like many Welles ventures at the time, couldn’t secure financing, where he was forced to abandon the project after the death of one of his leads, Laurence Harvey, in 1973.  With the assistance of producer George Miller, using the profits obtained from his Mad Max Trilogy to build his own Australian Kings Cross studios, he was able to obtain the rights from Oja Kodar, the widow of Welles’s estate, so long as it was faithful to the original material and wasn’t a commercial Hollywood effort.  However, the film bears a striking similarity to Roman Polanski’s first feature film, KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962), almost entirely taking place on a yacht, exploring the changing psychological dynamic between two men and a beautiful woman, ultimately reduced to a battle of wills, achieving an escalating sense of dread with the wide expanse of the open water becoming an oppressive Shakespearean force that threatens to engulf them all.  Shooting off the coast of Hamilton Island in the Whitsunday Passage of the Great Barrier Reef, beautifully captured in all its glory by cinematographer Dean Semler, the film is a taut little thriller set in an exotic atmosphere of increasing paranoia and dread, becoming one of the better films shot at sea, thoroughly entertaining throughout, showing the deteriorating mental effects of being helplessly adrift, adding further instability from a claustrophobic world caving in on them, with an unusually provocative musical score by Graeme Revell, turning this into an astonishingly suspenseful drama. 

In what amounts to a prologue, we are introduced to John Ingram (Sam Neill), an intelligently reserved career naval officer who is twenty years older than his lovely young wife Rae (Nicole Kidman).  Both are in a state of grief following a car accident that results in the death of their young son, with Rae even more devastated, thinking she is to blame.  Heading off on a seductive expedition to revive their deflated spirits, they seem to have regained a certain equilibrium, with Rae happily swimming in the sea, where this idyllic undertaking seems to have done wonders for them both.   That is, until they eye a ship in obvious distress off in the distance, with the lone survivor rowing furiously towards their ship, where the stranger is Hughie (Billy Zane), supposedly the only survivor from an attack of food poisoning.  As he sleeps off his troubles, Ingram makes a beeline for the deserted ship to investigate, immediately discovering a video log (exactly like they do on Star Trek episodes) that shows their newly arriving stranger is none other than a delusional madman who has killed everyone onboard his mystery ship.  Returning as quickly as possible, he arrives too late, as the stranger has broken his way out of a locked room and taken command of his boat, sailing off in the opposite direction with his wife in tow, leaving Ingram with a broken down vessel and a flooded engine room, with the ship still taking on huge amounts of water, where his immediate goal is to reverse the water intake, pumping the flooded water out of the ship.  Rae, meanwhile, is used as a battering ram by her unexpected guest, knocking her out completely, leaving her unconscious on the deck of her boat, alone with a maniac in charge, who pretends to be normal but loses his patience whenever someone disagrees with him, becoming violently angry, erupting with an unstoppable force, leaving her bewildered about what to do, as she can’t convince him to turn around.  Told the ship is sinking, she’s afraid her husband has little chance of survival.  The cat and mouse psychological game between the two is a bit like Clarice’s prison visits with Hannibal Lecter, as she knows if she sets him off this abominable man is capable of doing anything.     

Meanwhile, back on the flooded ship, Ingram dutifully pumps out the flooded water, where his efforts to repair a sinking ship are remarkable, all done while witnessing a video stream of the former passengers as they squabble with Hughie, becoming especially volatile when they started to make fun of him and stop taking him seriously.  The inside of the ship is a bloody mess, with the dead bodies still floating around, a constant reminder of what Rae is dealing with, as the man is clearly insane.  Attempting to make radio contact with her husband, Rae is able to communicate with Ingram, but she can’t hear him, but can only hear button clicks, where they develop a language of one click means yes and two clicks means no.  She’s relieved that he’s alive and his ship is not sinking, but her troubles are only just getting started, and her panicked guest is overly suspicious of everything she does.  Still, she finds nautical weapons onboard, like a flare gun or harpoon arrows, keeping them concealed for the right moment, as he catches her in the act the first time, only to punch her to the floor, literally terrorizing her at will and seeming to like it, forcing her to accept he’s the man in charge, including raping her, where she’s forced to submit, while in the back of her mind she’s cleverly planning a counter maneuver.  This contentious battle of wills takes on a life of its own, becoming the centerpiece of the film, yet Ingram is facing his own demons back on the other ship, where a storm has knocked out all power, becoming victimized again by surging water intake, trapped beneath the water in a flooded cabin, as both are fighting their own separate battles with death, where Hughie becomes Jack Nicholson with an ax in THE SHINING (1980), an out of control killing machine.  Using a minimalist technique, the acting throughout is riveting, as Kidman’s mousy vulnerability is matched against a demonic monster, while Ingram is up against it in his own travails, beautifully interweaving both storylines, bringing them together by the end, where there is no rhyme or reason to explain why any of this is happening, but viewers are thrust into the middle of it, developing an obvious affinity for the woman in trouble, who is forced to maintain her wits against insurmountable odds, where there is no hope of any cavalry riding to the rescue.  With a perfect title, the harrowing psychological mind games are especially well-played, with long wordless sequences, where you can almost hear viewers yelling at the screen for all the mistakes that are made, yet it’s a compelling adventure that delves into the heart of horror, offering plenty of extravagant eye-candy.

The Way Back

THE WAY BACK                                                       B                     

USA  (133 mi)  2010  d:  Peter Weir

Peter Weir hasn’t made a film in 8 years, which is a staggering revelation considering the superb craftsmanship associated with his films, especially the breathtaking visualizations.  Perhaps he hasn’t been able to raise funds after the mixed reception of his last work, MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003), which played fast and loose with the historical facts, actually changing the storyline from the book upon which the movie was based in order to fit the gung-ho George W. Bush saber rattling war scenario that was taking place at that time.  This is a National Geographic funded project which allows him to film in some of the more remote areas of the globe, based on a 1955 book The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slawomir Rawicz, where he and several others escaped from a Siberian gulag in 1940 and in a year’s time walked 4000 miles from Siberia, finding and following Lake Baikal, trekking past the Tran Siberian railway to Outer Mongolia (also Communist), across the Gobi Desert, past the Great Wall of China (still Communist) into the Himalayan Mountains, initially finding refuge in Tibet, but continuing their trek into India where the British government at the time was staunchly against both the Nazi’s and the Russians, though the Russians were a war ally.  There has been some controversy about the book, as it was initially released as the author’s own story, but when it was revealed afterwards that he was released by the Russians under a 1942 amnesty agreement, Rawicz indicated it is actually the story of three Polish men who recounted their stories to him, one of whom is a former Polish soldier, Witold Glinski. 

Described as the first Hollywood film about the Soviet gulag, this overly detached and in the end unengaging film opens in Poland in 1940 when it was invaded to the West by Hitler and the Nazi’s, and from the East by Stalin and the Russians, opening with a Stalinest interrogation sending a Polish citizen to a Russian gulag for twenty years for making negative statements about Stalin.  The conditions there are decripit, with prisoners starving from lack of adequate food, housing prisoners with professional killers who run the inside of the prisons with smuggled weapons.  In reality, these were forced labor camps, something that was common in both Japan and China during this same time period, where the conditions were so brutal that escape seemed the only viable option.  In Siberia, however, the natural elements are so severe, and the distance so great, that chances of survival from an escape are rare to slim.  This film is reminiscent of the epic Japanese War Trilogy THE HUMAN CONDITION (1959-61), a three part drama by Masaki Kobayashi who documents similar conditions when defeated Japanese soldiers were simply abandoned and left on the mainland of Manchuria, China and had little hopes of ever finding their way back home, where the film follows the futile efforts of one soldier who escaped from a Russian gulag only to wander endlessly, starving for days on end without food, making his way alone through the vast emptiness of the barren landscape, eventually succumbing to weakness and starvation, left to die alone, frozen in the bleak emptiness of a desolate winter.  These exact same circumstances await the seven escapees, one of whom freezes to death the very first night. 

Featuring breathtaking cinematography by Russell Boyd, the humans are specks on the landscape as they initially make their way out of the Siberian forest before becoming engulfed in the immensity of the world around them, afraid to show themselves in Stalinest nations for fear they’d be turned back in to the authorities, so they instead have to creep around towns and hide where they could.  When they reach flat landscapes, it’s most treacherous, as it’s also harder to find food and water out in the open spaces.  One of the film’s failings is the inability to deal with the subject of starvation, which should have been everpresent throughout the journey, yet they somewhat nonchalantly find food all too easily.  Finding water in the desert was truly miraculous, but there was very little tension established about finding food.  Instead when people started to physically deteriorate, attention was paid to physical injuries or ailments, but no words spoken about food, which had to have been on their minds, perhaps even hallucinating about it.  Also, some of the arduous nature of their adventure is glossed over, as the seasons change from ferocious winter storms to spring pretty quickly.  The film also does little to delineate between the characters, where the audience never develops an emotional attachment to any of them, or understands why one is considered the navigator or leader, when he’s actually the youngest or newest prisoner, which makes little sense.  Who made him in charge?  In reality, it’s human nature for there to have been some dissension in the ranks over leadership, yet in this film there was no discussion whatsoever.  It was this lack of tension or screen intensity between the characters that left a feeling of vague disconnection with the audience, where the enormity of what was taking place rarely developed into an acute sense of awareness or personal triumph, never really becoming quite so intensely powerful as Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), which remains the definitive film on the subject, perhaps because the journey coincided with monumental social changes, so the epic adventure was superbly and dramatically placed in historical context.