MANLY IS NOT A PEJORATIVE:

RULING THE WAVES: Patrick O’Brian’s epic series comes to the screen. (ANTHONY LANE, 2003-11-10, The New Yorker)

The new Peter Weir film is called “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” and what a mouthful it is. There are sailors in this movie who can load and fire a twelve-pounder in less time than some viewers will take to pronounce the title. The reason for the ungainliness is that Weir and his co-writer, John Collee, have packed a brace of novels by the late Patrick O’Brian—titled, yes, “Master and Commander” and “The Far Side of the World”—into a solid lump of narrative, lasting a little more than two hours. Should sequels ensue, the choice of material may prove inexhaustible, for O’Brian left us twenty volumes of his naval saga, of which this movie plunders mainly from the first and the tenth. If the moviegoing public warms to the unpartable pair of friends around whom the series turns—Jack Aubrey, captain of H.M.S. Surprise, and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon—then, rest assured, there are plenty more tales for the telling. [...]

Be advised that “Master and Commander” is a men-only movie, although some of the men are boys. It is a shock to be reminded of the beardless age at which the sons of good families used to be pushed into the service. Early in the film, as if to confirm just how dour a life at sea can be, Midshipman Blakeney (Max Pirkis) loses his shattered right arm to Stephen’s saw. Pirkis looks as fair and unknowing as Mark Lester did in “Oliver!,” and the scene is salutary to a fault; it signals that we are in for a sombre trip, and the ensuing hours are marked as much by creaking unease as by flurries of derring-do. In fact, there is more derring-don’t in “Master and Commander” than one might have expected, and the earlier Weir film that it most resembles is not “The Mosquito Coast,” or even “The Year of Living Dangerously,” but “The Last Wave,” his ominous chiller of 1977. Moreover, some of Crowe’s line readings are so low and growly that you must strain to catch them; we have come a long way since the ocean was the province of lithe, laughing hearties such as Burt Lancaster and Errol Flynn, and I for one was relieved when this movie neared its climax, threw off its sullen mood, and allowed Captain Jack to cry, “Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action.” And sharp it is, too, kicked by the recoil of the cannons and the lunge of swords.

Young Blakeney is in the thick of it, assuming command of the Surprise while her master swings aboard another ship. With his remaining arm, the kid has literally become a half-Nelson, agog with the flush of victory, and we see in his exploits, as in those of Stephen and Jack, the thrust of O’Brian’s epic. What the novels leave us with, and what emerges more fitfully from this film, as if in shafts of sunlight, is the growing realization that, although our existence is indisputably safer, softer, cleaner, and more dependable than the lives led by Captain Aubrey and his men, theirs were in some immeasurable way better—richer in possibility, and more regularly entrancing to the eye and spirit alike. As Stephen says of the Iliad, “The book is full of death, but oh so living.” Just so; if you died on board the Surprise, it would not be for want of having lived.

Sounds far better than most feared.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 10, 2003 6:45 PM