Sunday Review: Captain Phillips

A tale of two captains: An asymmetrical conflict

By Jonathan Price

The 2013 film Captain Phillips (directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks) is the story of two captains, but its title tells us nothing of the story, for most of us already know it, whether from reading the papers or seeing the previews, where everyman Hanks-Phillips eventually succeeds in defeating Somali pirates who are trying to take over his ship. Or so it would seem.
    Hanks, we know, has won Academy Awards for playing two characters who don’t quite seem like heroes. In fact, whether he has been the hapless and intellectually challenged Forrest Gump, the resourceful FedEx executive abandoned on an island, the talented lieutenant who saves Pvt. Ryan after the D-day landings, or any number of other characters, it’s clear he doesn’t look like Brad Pitt, and he never plays the physically aggressive and resourceful character such as Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, protagonist of two other films directed by Greenglass. In fact, of course, his characters have far more range and unpredictability than these slightly-unfair hero characterizations by other actors. In Captain Phillips he is a decent guy who will try to save his ship and his crew.

We first see Phillips as he is leaving Vermont and a comfortable life, being driven to work by his wife while talking of their kids and random social topics. Almost immediately we witness the other side to the story and the other “captain,”—the life of those who become pirates, a group of semi-employed Somalis on the shore and always looking for their next job from the gatherers of the pirate skiff gangs. It’s clear these people are poor, but they are also angry and a bit nasty. Though they are frightening and perhaps even terrifying, we realize they are not Somali terrorists after bodily harm or vengeance. What they want is money, but not the $30,000 in the ship’s safe; they expect $10 million in ransom. (At the peak year, 117 ships were hijacked off the Somali coast, but concerted international effort has reduced those hijackings in the last few years to less than half; however, just recently there was a hijack-kidnapping off the Nigerian coast.)

    The film is the story of the confrontation between these two captains—and, to a lesser extent, between two cultures and two kinds of economies—between the American ship captain of a Maersk line container ship named Alabama and the pirate skiff captain with a crew of four. At one point they look at each other through binoculars, and when the skinny Somali with a lean and hungry look and an assault rifle enters the Alabama’s cabin he tells Capt. Phillips to look him in the eyes and informs him, “Now I am the captain of this ship.” Though he is bright and aggressive and the only member of his crew who speaks much English, he is clearly overmatched. Phillips knows his vast ship, the skinny Somali does not; the Somali and his crew have weapons, but they are vastly outnumbered, and when the Somali captain is alone, he is quickly overpowered, and a new tension begins.

Captains eye to eye, with Director Greengrass

    There is vast imbalance between the two sides, which, after all, is one of the reasons for the prevalence of hijack-kidnapping and ransom. This imbalance is made visually powerful late in the film, when we see the escape boat containing Phillips and the Somali, a tub-shaped yellow raft from the Alabama, surrounded by three gigantic U.S. naval vessels and confronted overhead by a helicopter and eventually attacked by the famed Navy Seals dropped by parachute from a plane flying from a more remote ship. We are introduced to two more captains, the commander of the U.S. ship supervising the rescue, and the man who takes over the entire mission and orders rescue/assassinations: the leader of the Navy Seals. Both the Alabama and the U.S. Navy have tracking devices to locate the Somalis and their other skiffs and their mother ship. They also have sophisticated intelligence and a clear chain of command, and when they first encounter the Somalis, they easily remind them that they know their names, previous employments, and home addresses. Still, with all this power, five Somalis in a rowboat with a powerful outboard motor have brought the Alabama to heel and been able to sue for ransom, at least temporarily.
    We know, at some level, that the Alabama represents the power and wealth of global commerce, not to mention a namesake state of the United States, the richest nation on earth. And it is pitted against a group of straggling serfs, former fishermen, who are widely known as members of a “failed state” with no central authority. The Somalis’ apparent only source of income left is piracy on the high seas, an ancient crime, at which they have been spectacularly successful until the incident detailed in this film. Phillips in the film argues with the Somali captain, “Surely there is something for you better than kidnapping”; the response is telling: “Perhaps in America...perhaps in America.”

We see Captain Phillips in a series of fashion and character transformations, from the father-husband of Vermont driving to his assignment in civilian garb, to the captain in white seagoing outfit with military bars and official bearing, to the casually dressed commander of the little seagoing community, to the half-naked prisoner of the Somalis in the Alabama’s lifeboat. Even in that last role, he is still compassionate, helping to dress the foot wound in one of his captors, remarking that the young man is probably only 16. In his final scene, as we last see him, rescued, he is nearly naked, stripped in the Navy ship’s medical bay and so traumatized he is virtually unable to respond. He is safe, but his sense of himself has been altered—even though he will eventually return to the sea. The Somali leader is the only member of his crew to escape physically unharmed, though he will spend a long time in prison.
    This is not our standard heroic ending, even though Americans have emerged seemingly triumphant. The ending leads us to ponder the various costs and outcomes and issues.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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