REEL REFLECTIONS

THE FAR SIDE OF THE MODERN WORLD
A Review of "Master and Commander"

David Greiser

I didn’t see "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" because it promised to be a film filled with insights on philosophies and worldviews. This film has little to do with the postmodernism which my columns are supposed to address. I saw it because it looked like an entertaining two hours. I saw it because it is directed by Peter Weir, director of many great films ("Witness," "Gallipoli," "The Truman Show," to name a few).And I saw it because I’ve long been fascinated by naval history and warfare as well as warship life. At age 12, I devoured biographies of John Paul Jones and stories of Revolutionary War sea battles. I fantasized about pirate ships.

I recommend seeing "Master and Commander" because it is a well-crafted, well-acted, visually stunning adventure tale. It is an action-packed, entertaining piece of historical fiction—and only a little more. Still, the "little more" does invite some after-the-fact reflections on the worldview of the film’s time period, and I’ll get to those in due course.

First, the story. The year is 1805, and the context is the Napoleonic War between England and France. Captain Jack Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe) commands the H.M.S. Surprise, a smallish, aging warship dispatched to South America to hunt down a larger, newer, better-gunned French frigate seeking to control the trade lanes to South America. Hard-drinking Captain Aubrey is a tough-but-fair commander, a battle strategist rational to the core and bent on conquest.

Dr. Stephen Maturin (played by Paul Bettany, who was opposite Crowe as John Nash’s invisible friend in "A Beautiful Mind") is Aubrey’s best friend and foil. Maturin is the ship’s doctor, a man of science and reflection. As a surgeon he is supremely confident (in one scene he opens a man’s skull and plugs the hole with a coin; in another he digs a bullet from his own chest), but his real passion is biology. He has been lured onboard partly by the promise that the ship will visit exotic islands where he will observe animals, bugs, and birds unknown in Europe.

Aubrey and Maturin spend most of their time not in battle but conversation. Long lulls between battles offer them the leisure to play classical string duets and afterward debate issues raised by their contrasting personalities. Aubrey, man of decisive action, needs to dominate. Scholar Maturin needs to know and reflect. Both men seek to stamp their natures on a 13-year-old deck hand (played by Max Pirkis), who briefly becomes the ship’s captain while at the same time developing a love of natural science.

"Master" contains battle sequences as riveting and realistic as any I have seen on film. One gains a sense of the terrifying confinement the men feel during battle, as cannonballs smash through the ship’s hull at close range and the deck becomes slippery with blood. Those sailors who survive the artillery fire do so only to board the enemy ship where they try to hack the enemy to pieces in hand-to-hand combat. The brutality of battle is portrayed realistically and unflinchingly.

Both the battle sequences and the conversations serve as commentaries on the modern view of the world already deeply entrenched during this time period. Modernism was an age of conquest and the will to power; the war in which this story takes place was fought for control of that era’s world.

It was an age of reason. Aubrey uses reason to dominate, while Maturin exudes the excitement of discovery in pre-Darwinian science and Baconian research. Religion recedes. The Lord’s Prayer is recited at burials of battle victims; otherwise the divine is little recognized. In a subplot, some of the crew believe a comrade is Jonah, whose spirit brings the Surprise bad luck; their view is not shared by their commanders.

In both character and mood, "Master and Commander" reflects the era of conquest and its confidence in reason. It is also one great action movie.

—When David Greiser, Souderton, Pennsylvania, is not conquering (if in modernist mode) or deconstructing (if in postmodernist mode) his own worlds as a pastor and professor, he writes this column to justify his movie watching.