Movie Mahal

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Peter Weir is both a skilled craftsman and great storyteller. Now retired, Weir’s last film was back in 2010. His body of work is water tight and encompasses films made in Australia expressly the classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, and later in the US when he made the leap to Hollywood in 1985 with Witness, an unusual thriller staged in the Amish community, that starred Harrison Ford. Weir understands the sophistications of traditional genre cinema yet his early films in Australia also evidence political engagement with history.

It was off the back of The Truman Show (1998), Weir’s most commercially successful film, that Weir would go on to make arguably his best American work – an old Hollywood tale of adventure, friendship and heroism, and one that should have done so much better at the box office. Master & Commander feels like an anomaly in terms of Hollywood’s narrow artistic sensibilities yet it wasn’t a risky venture in that Russell Crowe was the main lead and still riding high on the back of Gladiator. The film did reasonably well at the box office but it seems to have been completely forgotten about today. Not sure why though. Perhaps the throwback to the old studio epics doesn’t quite fit with the contemporary fixations with comic book films.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the story is relatively slight – two ships chasing each other, one British, the other French and duelling across the oceans in a series of extended manoeuvres that details the obsessive strategies of Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe). It is an old-fashioned adventure film minus all the pretensions that nicely comes to the boil but you have to give it time. Perhaps the point at which the film truly comes to life is the drowning sequence and Weir’s inspired and spectacular deployment of Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. It is in the camaraderie, friendships and rituals where Weir finds an emotional depth specifically the bromance between Crowe and Paul Bettany, the ship’s level headed doctor. There is a lot to treasure in this epic including Russell Boyd’s sublime Oscar winning cinematography.