Worlds Collide

The Best Actor category at next year’s Academy Awards is going to be one of the toughest vote of all for the members of the Academy. Adding to the already amazing list of actors that should be nominated, including Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale or Forest Whittaker in The Butler, are now Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi for their remarkable acting in Captain Phillips.

Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, two Bourne, United 93, Greenzone) has directed a very good movie, using his as-close-to-reality-as-possible style (including his signature hand-held cameras, much to this motion-sickness suffering movie fan’s despair). He has wisely gone beyond the real Captain Phillips’s memoir to give us a glimpse of the life of the Somali pirates that kidnap the Captain and has subtly yet convincingly dove into some very deep issues facing our modern world.

There is, to begin with, the clash of two worlds, the western first world, embodied in Captain Phillips and his crew, and the extreme poverty and violence that plagues much of the third world, above all places like Somalia, where war lords have absolute control over the lives of men and women. Those are fishermen violently turned pirates that take over the ship. They have no more control over their life than the men that they kidnap at gun point.

He also addresses the strife of the everyday people trapped in a world run by “bosses”. In the case of Captain Phillips and his men, it is the corporation that owns the ship, its cargo and its crew; the corporation that, knowing there are pirates in the waters where their fleets sail, don’t even bother to hire armed security guards, so a ship the size of city blocks, carrying millions in cargo, has less security than an armored truck. In the case of the Somali men, their lives are literally controlled at gun point by the war lords for whom they rob and kidnap. Muse, the character amazingly well played by Abdi, tells Phillips about the last ship they kidnapped and got 3 million dollars for, to which Phillips, seeing the ragged and impoverished state of the Somali fisherman responds: “So, what are you doing here?.” Both men’s fates have been determined for them way before they are trapped together in the claustrophobic lifeboat where we spend a good time with them as they come to realize each other’s plight.

It is the acting that tells the story. Tom Hanks is superb. So much so that I’m sure the real Captain Phillips wishes he had actually been like him (there are stories told by the real crew of the ship that he wasn’t as heroic as his memoir and the movie paint him to be). Hanks works with his eyes and every muscle on his face to convey Phillips’s thoughts and feelings, and he carries us through the ordeal, having us hold our breath along the way, up until we share his final moments of shock, panic and pain at the realization of what has happened. I truly feel this is his best acting to date.

Barkhad Abdi’s acting is no less impressive. This Somali-American actor was hired, along with his fellow Somali-American friends, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I lived near the Minneapolis Somali neighborhood in Minnesota for years and was aware of the thriving community there. It is a place so very far from the fisherman’s town shown at the beginning of the movie. Abdi, however, probably knows to heart the adversity many Somali people face in a country still run by war lords. And he brings that knowledge to the screen. His feat is doubly impressive because this is his first feature film. There is a heart-breaking moment in the film where Abdi’s character tells Phillips that there no going back for him, his is a world of extremes in which he has no control. This is another of Greengrass’s accomplishments, the “bad buys” are not the cardboard figures you need to hate; they are the complex human beings imprisoned in a world with such deep divides that their lives are worthless, not only to the navy ships, helicopters and seal teams that come to rescue one man, but to their own people back home.