This is part 3 of Benjamin Rybeck’s coverage of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees at the 86th Academy Awards. Full spoilers follow.
Richard Phillips’ memoir A Captain’s Duty needs nowhere near as much deconstruction as The Wolf of Wall Street, but the differences between the book and Captain Phillips, its film adaptation, are no less fascinating. The plots are, of course, identical: Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, is taken hostage by Somali pirates after a failed hijacking; Philips spends days captive in a lifeboat, until the U.S. military kills the pirates and rescues him. But the memoir and the film have different ideas about what this plot means.
In A Captain’s Duty, Phillips’ view of his own story is understandably narrow-minded: He only experienced the hijacking and his own captivity, thus cannot convincingly narrate the efforts of the military or the crewmen left behind on the Maersk Alabama. And, of course, he cannot find humanity in the Somali pirates—not when he begins his memoir with a gun pressed to his head. At one point, Phillips begrudgingly admits that the Somali leader is “a good captain,” but that’s as generous as he is with his captors. Otherwise, he justifies his desire to see them dead by quoting John Wayne: “Some men need killing.” See? It may be bloodlust, but it’s wholesome. All-American.
And Phillips is nothing if not all-American. The overall impression one gets from A Captain’s Duty is that Phillips is a man very much worth saving. He spends nearly half the book detailing his time before the hijacking, with special attention focused on his wife, Andrea. He even relates his endearingly cheesy pick-up lines, introducing himself to Andrea like so: “I’m Rich… as in filthy.” When Phillips does break his first-person narrative, it’s only to describe what Andrea is going through at home, dealing with the media and the family, worrying about the safety of her husband while also demonstrating tremendous New England resolve. After being rescued, Phillips asks for beer and then chats with President Obama on the phone “about Kevin Garnett’s jump shot.” Once home, Phillips strengthens his relationship with God, decides the world contains more good people than evil, and cries during “The Star-Spangled Banner” at baseball games.
I write this not to belittle the sincerity of Phillips, but to demonstrate what kind of film could have been made from his story—especially if the director was, say, Spielberg (i.e., overly inclined toward sentimentality). But Captain Phillips was directed by Paul Greengrass, whose favorite image shows bland company men watching a computer screen while trying to decide what to do about the lives depicted in real time thereon (e.g., the air traffic controllers in United 93; or the CIA handlers in his two Jason Bourne films, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum). Greengrass often works with non-professional actors; when he uses movie stars (like Matt Damon or, here, Tom Hanks), he beats them around and de-familiarizes them with cubist editing, in which few shots last more than a second and spatial coherence is (purposely) a nightmare.
One of the achievements of Captain Phillips—which is, to my mind, Greengrass’ first great film—is that no particular effort is made to portray Richard Phillips as being extraordinarily worthy of succor, and Tom Hanks plays him as a thoroughly average man. While Phillips’ memoir tells the story of a man who survives because he strengthens his mind and maintains agency in his situation, the arc of Greengrass’ film is that of a man preparing himself for his inevitable death; the vulnerability Hanks allows Phillips—blubbering, incoherent, unclothed—in the film’s final minutes is something Phillips guards himself against in his memoir.
Billy Ray wrote Captain Phillips’ screenplay, which is key to the film’s success. Ray wrote and directed a pair of terrific mid-2000s films—Shattered Glass, in which Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard play journalists; and Breach, in which Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillipe play CIA agents. Ray’s favorite narrative construction is to pit two men in the same profession against each other—one man corrupt (Christensen, Cooper), the other righteous (Sarsgaard, Phillipe). In this sense, Captain Phillips feels more Ray’s than Greengrass’.
Ray takes one sentence of Phillips’ memoir (about piracy “attracting desperate young men to the Gulf [of Aden] like bees to honey”) and uses it as a starting point for humanizing one pirate in particular: Muse, the other captain. By showing Muse’s fear and ambition, Ray makes him human, whereas Phillips’ memoir makes heartless villains of all the pirates (including the one who, at first, claims to be a negotiator and, therefore, not a criminal—an odd detail which Tobias Lindholm expands upon in his great film A Hijacking). Ray turns Phillips and Muse into mirror images of each other, which makes the film feel (frankly) heftier in its concerns than the memoir.
But there’s a great (but brief) moment at the end of A Captain’s Duty, when the naval ship bringing Phillips home receives orders to divert its course: A different group of hijacked sailors need rescuing. In Captain Phillips, this goes unmentioned. Surprisingly, a moment so rich in its bleak implications—that Phillips’ life means little within the larger scope of piracy and, at least obliquely, capitalism—didn’t appeal to Billy Ray and Paul Greengrass.
It would, however, have appealed to John Ridley and Steve McQueen.
