The boat collector

DEAD CALM

1989

Directed by Phillip Noyce

Written by Terry Hayes (based on the novel by Charles Williams)

Spoilers: moderate

I've seen, and felt myself, the temptation to look at 80s genre films and just say "Australians do it better."  That's probably far more a matter of selection effect—the Australian movies that even managed to bridge the Pacific in the first place are naturally weighted towards good movies—but if we really wanted to be reductive about national cinemas, I guess we could point to Australian culture's closer chronological proximity to a frontier mindset or to the famous peculiarities of Australian colonization (which isn't really that different than the source of white settlers in North America, anyway), or, more grandly, the very geophysical nature of the Australian continent, and find in these material foundations the reason why Australian genre film of the period does seem to tend more towards the elemental than its American counterpart, with a whole bunch of Australian movies across a number of subgenres that barely acknowledge that such a thing as "society" exists and come off as a mix of Westerns, barbarian films, and music videos.  Alternatively, we could observe that Terry Hayes, the screenwriter of today's subject Dead Calm, actually did co-write Mad Max 2 and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, so it could be as simple as that, handily explaining why Dead Calm, which as the somewhat-overwrought name suggests takes place on the open ocean, is arguably still a better Mad Max than Waterworld would wind up, despite the latter obviously trying much harder and more deliberately to be Mad Max On the Open Ocean.

In any case, while there's certainly a towering stack of worthwhile American genre films in the 80s to compare against the vastly smaller batch of Australian classics, it's not unreasonable to say that Australian filmmakers punched well above their weight, at least so long as they remained Australian: the talents that emerged from Australia and, inevitably, sought their fortunes in Hollywood—like Richard Franklin, Russell Mulcahy, and Dead Calm's director Phillip Noyce—never quite thrived as transplants, or at least there's a powerful argument that all of their best movies were made back home, so that the most notable flag-bearer for Australia's B+ genre movies is still just George Miller (who was, as it happens, a very hands-on producer here), though Noyce did make a solid go at it, with a pretty successful Hollywood run in the 90s.  Such was the fitting reward for his breakthrough film introducing the future superstar Nicole Kidman to a wider world, not to mention providing another piece of evidence to back up my own long-standing assertion that Sam Neill (though he's a New Zealander) is, like, just the best.

Make no mistake, then, Dead Calm is an absolutely great thriller and maybe even more of a great work of thrillmaking cinema, but I suppose the necessity of splitting hairs between such things also starts moving us in the direction of its problems, which have everything to do with Hayes's script—or at least Noyce's translation of that script into a cohererent set of narrative beats—and nothing to do with literally any other aspect of it, so you can see how it's actually a bit of a crazy-making experience to watch, kind of bounding up and down the scale of quality from "nascent masterpiece" to "what?"  That script, anyhow, is based on Charles Williams's 1966 novel of the same name, itself likely inspired by the 1961 Bluebelle maritime murders (an event that Dead Calm probably even gets a little closer to in its details than the novel does, but which, earnestly, deserves its own movie).  It was a book of sufficient interest at the time that its adaptation became one of Orson Welles's failed projects.  As for Hayes's much later adaptation, he takes a rather loose hand with his source, and from appearances, his instincts were unimpechable, leading him to delete unnecessary characters and superfluous psychologies, and, in proper Australian genre cinema fashion, boil it all the way down to its "a man, a woman, a monster, and two boats" essence, though this is where the problems come in.

Nonetheless, we begin with character material not contemplated by the book at all, with Royal Australian Navy Captain John Ingram (Neill) homeward bound with many of his crew, only to be confronted at the train station by two police who have a grim duty to discharge, a sequence which Noyce allows (not for the last time) to play out obliquely, largely wordlessly, and in a form tantamount to a nightmare's, until we arrive at the hospital to find his wife Rae (Kidman), battered from the car wreck, whereupon we learn that their son died in the same wreck.  An even keener awareness of it is immediately forced upon us by a disorientingly bombastic flashback, belonging to Rae, wherein the child is launched akin to a missile through the windshield of her car.  This in turn was a nightmare, and upon waking in shrieks and tears, Rae throws us weeks or months down the line, to John's yacht in the middle of the ocean, to which the bereaved parents have removed themselves as a matter of retreating as fully as possible from society to deal privately with their grief, with only each other and their faithful dog Ben for company.  Unusually—for a thriller, for any movie, for life—this actually seems to have done the trick, and Rae and John's mutual wound has taken substantial steps towards healing itself.  It is thus even more unfortunate, notionally, when they happen across a derelict, sinking schooner and a single man feverishly rowing his dinghy in their direction.

This is Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane), erratic from his experience, but rational enough to explain that he is the only survivor of the boat, his fellows having succumbed one by one to food poisoning from canned salmon that he was lucky enough to have avoided, and he seems convincing enough, except that when his own vehement refusal to return to the ship to recover gear and bodies extends to screeching at the Ingrams that they mustn't do so, either, John becomes even more convinced that he needs to investigate the hulk.  With the exhausted Hughie seemingly out for the afternoon, John makes his worst mistake and does precisely that, leaving Rae on his yacht alone with a man he already suspects—and, wouldn't you know, he's quite right—is a mass-murderer, with only a rinky-dink bolt to keep him locked in his room, and that's not even how Hughie escapes it.  Though when he does, he knocks Rae unconscious, commandeers the yacht, and leaves John to take his pick between the dinghy and the sinking schooner.  And so the Ingrams' troubles begin.

Now, it doesn't really sound like it has too many "problems" in a summary, does it?  (Particularly one that cuts off at the first act.)  But to start with, we could circle back to that prologue that so cogently and effectively establishes such a specific crisis for the Ingrams, only for not a thing in the whole rest of the movie to be about it explicitly, and not even anything, so far as I can determine, to be about it implicitly, either, except—maybe—in the extraordinarily tenuous sense that Rae's struggle to save the husband she already loves is made all the more fraught by her desire to avoid another loved one's loss, and that her relentlessness is driven by, or serves as, a redemption for, well, flinging their kid through plate glass and out into highway traffic.  That's not by any means "bad," but it's so awkwardly weighted, that prologue serving more as a way to get it across, immediately, that the next 96 minutes might be "fun," but they're going to be a dour brand of it, tone-wise, whereas Noyce gets almost as much use out of it, with that nightmare flashback, as a way to subtly imply that this is substantially more Rae's movie than John's.  Much closer to bad is what happens after this thriller's particular inflection point: it is, obviously, not very mysterious what Hughie's motivations are going to turn out to be regarding not throwing Rae's body overboard, but there's a significant stretch of this movie where he's sort of, I suppose, hovering around Rae, making an oppressive nuisance of himself, without doing much to actually constrain her activity or prevent her from regaining the initiative.  Ultimately that results in a—shall we say, sexual ruse? "a feigning of enthusiasm for her rape, as a way of misleading her captor," is more accurate—that, leaving aside the propriety of using such sleazily sordid circumstances to exploit the opportunity they'd been given ("wow, we got Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane and they're both willing to get naked?"), also just doesn't have much propping it up, credibility-wise, so it has to be reckoned as a special and salient case of Hughie being an astonishing moron.

And even so, that's kind of the movie's... "point" might be going too far, but at least how it winds up functioning, as a study of how much damage even a complete dolt can do when you're trapped with him on an eighty foot yacht cut off from the rest of the world and the person you, yourself, always rely on in any crisis is out somewhere sucking air through a tube in an only temporary defiance of his impending exhaustion and death.  It's an interesting way to go about the 80s' penchant for ordinary heroes: Rae is, at best, of modest intelligence—she overlooks a good dozen improvised weapons and strategems that would probably work against her addled adversary, but what's important is that's she's indefatigable (Times critic Karyn James described her as "tough but stupid," which sounds right but I think I'm more forgiving of it), so that there's an enormous contrast—at first—between an Odysseus-like husband, who only did the one stupid thing, and single-handedly repairs an entire flooded ship (mostly via backlit shots of Neill vigorously pumping), and an Orpheus-like wife (the name of the wrecked schooner, and it's embarrassing how long it took me to "get" it just because it's gender-swapped), who frustratedly bides her time until she at last achieves an equally mythic stature, both as a matter of story and as a matter of triumphal visuals of the woman atop her ship.  It's a course that Kidman charts kind of amazingly well, and I wouldn't even accord her the best performance in the movie, nor Neill.  (Neill, probably the principal reason I watched this, even gets somewhat short shrift: he is able to very efficiently sketch a loving husband, but he's much more of an object for procedural cinema to be enacted upon than he is "a character," even by the standards Dead Calm sets for itself.  He is, however, very good at being that, the fraying determination and the nautical cleverness you'd expect of a naval officer brought to bear against a whole series of worsening problems, and, as noted, Neill's the occasion for some of the film's coolest, most self-consciously epic visuals.  Though I confess wondering if Neill should take it as a personal insult that nobody made him get naked.)

But, you know, credit where it's due: Zane is great, maybe unexpectedly so, even for someone like me who has, in general, been a Zane defender for many years; it's hard to say it's exactly "against type" when most of his signature roles call on him to play a dope, albeit more affably, while his by-far-most-famous role, in Titanic, is indeed another cartoon sexual captor.  But that's the thing—he's not a cartoon here.  Which itself is odd, because taking any given thirty-second slice of Zane's performance, I'm certain he would come off as a cartoon.  But there's something legitimately unsettling and frightening about it, taken as an integral whole, and even some of those thirty-second slices would manage the same effect, like his arrival aboard the boat and his simultaneously furtive and feral expressions (sometimes pitched expressly towards the audience!), or Rae awakening to find Hughie dancing unconcernedly to some terrible beach music.  It's one of the most inexpressibly wrong performances I've ever seen, genuinely inhuman in its utterly disorganized psychopathy, Zane apparently creating an entire dreamworld we simply have no access to, where events appear to not have linear consequences and, sure, of course you can be "friends" with a woman whose husband you essentially just murdered.  (We get only snippets of videotape backstory, themselves principally there just to make John's venture into the bowels of the Orpheus an even jumpier horror-fied haunted house experience; but Hughie seems to have earned the dislike of, and so subsequently killed, his whole previous crew out of pure social awkwardness.)  It's what keeps the wonky midsection of the movie interestingly wonky, then, maybe even purposefully wonky, a dizzying orbit around a real-feeling but completely unpredictable lunatic; Noyce privileges this infinitely off-putting performance with a frequent return to assaultive POV close-ups, somehow turning Zane's otherwise-appealing face into a prompt for full-on stomach-churning nausea.

So it makes it difficult to even know what is "a problem" with this scenario, when its strengths are bound up so inextricably with its weaknesses; but a thriller is typically only as good as its thrills, anyway, and Noyce gets an astounding amount of varied thrills out of his very limited number of parts.  (One of those, incidentally, is Ben, the world's single worst Movie Dog, his incompetence as a protector of his masters reaching such startling levels that Noyce gets to play one of the most mordantly subversive jokes you'll ever see, regarding the subject of Movie Dogs, as he enters his movie's endgame.  In other areas, Miller had some input: he apparently personally directed a shark attack sequence that eventually got tossed, and you can see with unique clarity, at least for a movie that isn't chopped up or incoherent, exactly where this scene was supposed to go.  Kind of a shame, it would've emphasized what an impossibly bad day John's having.)

Anyway, it helps that Miller and his company sprung for a relatively plush physical production, affording Noyce a remarkable six-month shooting schedule so they could use the Whitsunday Islands and film most of it directly out on the open ocean.  That pays off in small ways and very large ones, as you might imagine (for a movie with just three cast members and two locations—I do assume the Orpheus is studio shooting—this is a one hell of a horizon-spanning motion picture), with Noyce using the limitations to their best advantage, not merely for the claustrophobia of it, but using the constrained geography of the yacht, alongside editor Richard Francis-Bruce, to keep you aware at almost all times of where both our cat and our mouse are, which works wonders for the suspense, but every so often they break the pattern to conceal just exactly where Hughie is, in order for him to burst out and shock you all over again.

Noyce likewise received a gift in the form of Miller's cinematographer, Dean Semler, who'd already made his trans-Pacific jump, but had one more swell work of Australiana in him.  Semler provides some sterling photography in what had to have been challenging conditions (conditions that, I assume, must have recommended him to Kevin Reynolds as much as his Mad Maxes had for, yep, Waterworld); it's even counter-intuitively good photography, somehow wrenching out of the subject of sun-kissed Pacific waters a sense of horror and gloom, with all this sunlight rendered too bright, uncomfortable and even a little painful in its omnipresence, which is before we even get into his god-tier use of some ("motivated," but just barely) demoniac keylights.  There's the curious case, also, of Graeme Revell's score, very sparingly used—the amount of movie that's just the nearly-blank soundscape of an oceanic desert and boat noises is overwhelming in its terrifying emptiness—but, accordingly, all the more effective when it is used, most impressively in the first act rupture where John very belatedly realizes his error and almost makes it back, where Revell's music roars into life, manifesting as something like "tribal" music, I guess, but if the tribe were sprinting after you and you could feel the breath on your neck.

It's not flawless and those flaws are mostly recognizable in real time—hell, it even sort of feels like it ends too many times (and I mean "even for a horror-inflected thriller," where you'd be justifiably annoyed if it didn't "end" at least twice), but that goes to how difficult it is to evaluate it in fine, quantified detail, because I don't know if I'd trade the imagery of that last ending (studio mandate or not) for the merely cleaner one, and this is much the case for every issue I've raised here.  It is, anyhow, imposingly perfect as a matter of craft, from any angle you'd care to approach it, and as there is scarcely any genre that benefits more strongly from a precision of craft than the thriller, I'm more afraid I'm underrating it than anything else.

Score: 8/10