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A Fox release. Written and directed by Peter Weir; starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. Released to DVD on April 20, 2004.  Irish author Patrick O'Brian has a number of literary achievements to his name; he wrote a well-received biography of Pablo Picasso and was also known for translating Jean Lacouture's biography of Charles de Gaulle into English. However, O'Brian's crowning achievement was the twenty loving and precisely researched period pieces that he wrote that focused on the life and nautical adventures of two good friends in the early 19th century, British captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin. The appeal of the novels, much like with author Tom Clancy's books today, came with O'Brian's extreme and near fanatical attention to detail and the way his characters progressed in their careers. In the first book in his series, Aubrey has just been promoted to the position of captain. By the end of the series, Aubrey worked with Maturin to help Chile gain her independence from the Spanish. More interested in describing the minutia of the naval life of the time than dealing with story points and character arcs, O'Brian's work seemed a strange choice for the Hollywood treatment; precisely researched period pieces and tremendous box office success are not usually synonymous with one another. Logical or not, co-writer/director Peter Weir's film Master and Commander is just that, a blockbuster examination of the 19th century naval life. True to O'Brian's source material, Weir and John Collee's script is long on the tiny particulars and short on character development and any kind of rising/falling action. In Master and Commander, Russell Crowe stars as Aubrey, Paul Bettany as Maturin. Aboard the HMS Surprise together in the Southern Hemisphere, Aubrey and Maturin have orders from the crown to capture, or sink, the French frigate Acheron. The Acheron is a bigger shipper than the Surprise; bigger, faster, stronger and with twice the gun power. However Aubrey has cunning and out-of-the-box thinking on his side which effectively evens the playing field. After an initial battle between the two ships leaves the Surprise unable to sail, Aubrey oversees the repair of his ship and the chase is on.  While Master and Commander is a fantastically well produced film, Weir's decision to present the material in an almost documentary style occasionally pushed me away from the characters and their travails. By including little if any back story for the characters, including the pivotal roles of Aubrey and Maturin, Weir and Collee's script generated little in the way of sympathy for its characters. This was surprising to me because most directors work hard to include sympathetic characters in their stories, knowing that such characters often bring more dramatic tension to otherwise ordinary scenes; when the audience cares about what’s happening to the people they’re watching on-screen, emotions can be considerably heightened. I appreciated Master and Commander for what it was, a passionate and pointedly observant investigation into life in the Royal Navy of the time, but would have enjoyed this film far more had I been able to dive into the material on a human level as well.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Russell Crowe had one of his front teeth knocked out during a soccer game when he was ten. He didn't have it replaced until the director of the movie, The Crossing asked him to do so... fifteen years later. |
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