Captain Phillips

Whether they’re plundering peaceful fishing villages in search of buried doubloons or attacking shipping vessels off the coast of Somalia, it is generally agreed upon that pirates are bad guys.  What they do is illegal and immoral and dangerous.  Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, based off a true story of an actual pirate hijacking in 2009, does not dispute this.  But the pirates aren’t cast as snarling villains, either.  Captain Phillips is, first and foremost, an effective action movie, but it’s also a political commentary where the pirates aren’t always unsympathetic and the U.S government is just a little bit scary.

Richard Phillips is a middle-aged commercial sea captain.  He has a wife and a couple of growing children.  He is taciturn, steadfast, dependable and sort of destined to be played by Tom Hanks.  Hanks has always had a likable everyman quality to him, and as Phillips he projects a kind of grounded world-weariness that makes us root for him.  In early scenes we see him make the rounds of his ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, checking for wear and tear, making sure everything is ready for the voyage round the horn of Africa to Mombasa.  The ship is carrying food.  For Captain Phillips, this trip is just another job, and director Paul Greengrass’ focus on the mundanity of it effectively sets up the chaos to come.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, we’re introduced to Abduwali Muse, a wiry young man who volunteers to lead the hijacking of Phillips’ ship.  This is just a job for Muse as well.  After the pirates board the Alabama, Muse turns to Phillips, gun in hand, and says, almost apologetically, that this is “just business.”

Screenwriter Billy Ray draws parallels like this between Phillips and Muse early and often.  On one level, attempts to compare the two are strained, even in bad taste.   Phillips is the one shipping food to give to starving people in Monbasa, Muse the one hijacking his ship and demanding upwards of $30 million in ransom.  Muse and his crew are in the wrong, but the movie gives us little moments where we can empathize with them.  Upon learning that they’ve boarded an American ship, their faces light up like kids at Christmas.  This is a good haul, one that could keep their families fed for a long while.  They chomp a local root to keep their energy up, and you can’t watch them for long without thinking about how very, very young they all are.

But what endears them to us the most is how absolutely screwed they are.  Since the movie is based on a true story, few in the audience doubt that Captain Phillips himself will live, but we don’t know about the pirates.  As news of the hijacking spreads to the United States Navy, it quickly becomes clear that they are not going to be okay.  Greengrass depicts the military as cold, faceless, and merciless.  The Marine snipers crouching under the railings of an American battleship are drenched in shadow, the hulking, armed officers that surround Muse after he is lured onto their boat terrifying in their uniformity.   Muse’s storming of the Maersk Alabama is frightening for the crew, but the movie is more than a little wary of the U.S. government as well.

Hanks’ Captain Phillips is in the middle, a decent man who is unjustly kidnapped but still regrets what must happen to his kidnappers.  In the end, he doesn’t know how to react.  Neither does the movie, not completely, perhaps because there is no right way to react to impossible situations like this one.