The FINAL Word on Master and Commander

Jason Epstein liked the book, hated the movie. His criticism—grounded in his knowledge of Patrick O'Brian's oeuvre—is devastating. Again, poorly read as I am, my meagre knowledge of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era is grounded in C. S. Forester's Hornblower series, not O'Brian twenty-volume series of novels. If this be (fair & balanced) deference, so be it!

[x NYTimes]
On the Far Side of Credibility
By JASON EPSTEIN

ADMIRERS of Patrick O'Brian's splendid story of a Royal Navy frigate pursuing an American warship around the tip of South America and into the Pacific during the War of 1812 may be disappointed as I was by Peter Weir's new film. They would be churlish however not to acknowledge the craftsmanship that lends the film, if not the feeling of truth — that this is how it must have been for these people on that ship in those waters — at least the feeling of truth's earnest, impoverished second cousin, verisimilitude: that this is how it may have looked.

The illusion is achieved, in part, by the "400 pounds of hair" glued realistically to the actors' heads and faces; the "Technocrane with a Libra head on three axes" (I am citing the publicity material) counteracting the ship's movement as it was tossed from side to side in the "nearly 20 million gallon" tank, built for "Titanic" in Baja California, where much of "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" was shot; the "Hydroflex water bags" that kept the cameras dry as millions of gallons of water were poured over the performers in their epaulets, gold buttons and braid and handmade caps (for the crew) knitted by a "lady in Wales" from "wool made by her family for the past 200 years." In all, the officers and crew required 2,000 hats and 1,900 pairs of shoes and were otherwise costumed in fabrics from "Pakistan, India, Scotland, Ireland, England and China."

This is not to mention the historically accurate surgical tools used with gruesome effect to amputate the right arm of the angelic, 13-year-old midshipman Lord Blakeney after the first violent encounter of Capt. Jack Aubrey's Surprise. But the battle, brilliantly filmed, is fought not with O'Brian's American frigate, Norfolk, in 1812, presumably for fear of offending American sensibilities (a motive that Tom Rothman, co-chairman of 20th Century Fox, "vehemently" disavows in a book "The Making of `Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World' " made to accompany the film), but with a heavily armed French privateer, the sinister Acheron, somewhere in the South Atlantic in 1805.

O'Brian contrived to send the Surprise across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn in order to bring Aubrey's loyal companion Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon, a sophisticated amateur naturalist who happens also to be a British spy and often the author's alter ego, to the Galapagos, where O'Brian, in the person of Maturin, can indulge his own interest in arcane life forms.

Peter Weir, who wrote (with John Collee), produced (with Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and Duncan Henderson) and directed the film, was also intrigued by the Galapagos (where no feature film had been shot before), but he could hardly have expected an American audience to cheer a handsome British commander with orders to sink an American warship that had been preying upon the British whaling fleet. Thus he invents the Acheron, sets the story in 1805 and, to heighten the action, lets it be known that should the Acheron enter the Pacific, Napoleon will have found a new world to conquer.

Why this most unlikely achievement should be so is never explained, especially since the Acheron's mission, like that of O'Brian's Norfolk seven years later, is only to plunder English whalers. Neither is it explained why the Admiralty sends the Surprise across the Atlantic in the fateful year 1805 when Lord Nelson needs every frigate he can muster to defend the homeland or why the French send the formidable Acheron to interfere with whalers when the combined French and Spanish fleets are preparing to gather at Toulon and Cadiz for the climactic battle that will end later that year, disastrously for them, at Trafalgar, ending as well any lingering French hope of a cross-Channel invasion. Can it be that Mr. Weir wants filmgoers to believe that by crimping England's source of whale oil, Napoleon can bring the British to their knees without an invasion and go on to conquer the world?

Audiences familiar with the vagaries of ocean navigation will also wonder how, with global positioning technology two centuries in the future, the Acheron pinpoints the Surprise in the vast South Atlantic and through an eerie fog sends, without radar or laser technology, a thundering salvo right onto Aubrey's gun deck. Amid the wreckage and bloodshed Maturin blandly explains that French spies are everywhere (presumably including Majorca, Surprise's home port) as a second French salvo rips through the rigging. But given the uncertain winds even Aubrey himself, much less a French spy on distant Majorca in telepathic communication with the Acheron, is unlikely to have known yesterday just where he would be today.

These absurdities could be ignored, even by O'Brian's admirers, if the movie were not structured around an anticlimactic succession of violent encounters graphically filmed. O'Brian, too, renders his battle scenes with great vigor and fine detail. But the reader's interest is engaged less by the bloody chaos than by the interplay of O'Brian's characters with their various political and social worlds and their nautical paraphernalia.

O'Brian's mastery of technobabble is poetic. Here is a passage from "The Far Side of the World" in which Aubrey, in a hurry to continue his journey, jury-rigs a contraption to raise the anchor since the usual device — the capstan — has jammed. "With scarcely a pause Jack called the midshipmen. `I will show you how we weigh with a voyol,' he said. `Take notice. You don't often see it done, but it may save you a tide of the first consequence.' They followed him below to the mangerboard, where he observed, `This is a voyol with a difference.' " Bonden, a fellow officer, brings the heavy sheaved block. " `Watch now. He makes it fast to the cable — he reeves the jeer-fall through it — the jeer-fall is brought to the capstan, with the standing part belayed to the bitts. So you get a direct runner-purchase instead of a dead nip, do you understand?' "

Not quite (especially since mangerboard and jeer-fall do not appear in the 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary or its several supplements), but enough for readers to see for themselves what O'Brian has left to the imagination: Aubrey bent under a hanging lantern in the dappled half light below decks surrounded by his midshipmen in their top hats, showing them with his hands how to raise an anchor when the capstan pawls are broken. And what are capstan pawls? Read O'Brian and see for yourself.

There is something immensely satisfying about the power of such passages to create within the reader's own imagination the scene in question, whether the subject is nautical technology or Maturin's rare species or Admiralty politics — advancement is always on Aubrey's mind — or in hushed tones Maturin's main profession, spycraft.

Maturin spies for the Admiralty not because he loves the British but because he despises France with its barbaric revolution and its monster legatee Napoleon, a megalomaniac thug, in Maturin's opinion. Half-Irish, half-Catalan, Maturin is a separatist by birth. Here he is on patriotism: "With revolution in France gone to pure loss I was already chilled beyond expression. And now with what I saw in '98" — during the Irish uprising — "on both sides, the wicked folly and the wicked brute cruelty, I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind — it is my own truth alone — but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have — for what they are — are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone."

"Patriotism will not do?" he is asked.

"My dear creature I have done with all debate. But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either `my country right or wrong,' which is infamous, or `my country is always right,' which is imbecile." Paul Bettany's petulant, prim, hollow, school masterish Maturin, played as if he can barely wait to hand in his costume and go home, cannot begin to refract the subtle tints of this disillusioned spy for whom the moral world is split not between good and evil people and their causes, but among degrees of wickedness and folly of which Napoleon, at the moment, happens to be the worst case.

It may not matter to audiences who have not read O'Brian that the film provides none of the pleasure to be had from the novels. The film's crashing and banging, the feeling at all times of emergency, heightened by a pounding score, even when the seas are calm and with no enemy in sight, the huddled intimacy of a crowded ship under threat of attack by a powerful enemy or in a violent sea, may appeal to fans of action films for whom O'Brian's subtle characterizations, being out of sight, will also be out of mind.

That the script gives the gifted Russell Crowe little scope to develop his character may in fact be a blessing for the producers. He makes a credible, one-dimensional action hero if not a convincing violinist always ready to put his cutlass down and join the cellist Maturin in a baroque duet. Like O'Brian's Aubrey, Mr. Crowe's an instinctive commander, fair minded, pugnacious, shrewd, brave but also tenderhearted when possible and decent in triumph: it is said that he would happily have been a pirate had he not chosen the navy instead, but he chose the navy. There is also an inner Aubrey, a good-natured child, competent only at the game of war, a brilliant young warrior well brought up and good at math but helpless ashore. This Aubrey, Mr. Crowe is not permitted to become.

What the script lacks in characterization the filmmakers try to compensate for with authentic décor. Leon Poindexter, described in the publicity material as one of several "shipwrights and historians" who worked on the film, says: "We had access to the Admiralty deck plans and that gave us the deck height and . . . the location of the Brodie stove and . . . the cable lifters in the mooring cables . . . and details that we would otherwise be guessing at. I think Patrick O'Brian fans will be looking for these things, and I think they'll be finding them here."

I disagree. O'Brian fans will not look for cable lifters and Brodie stoves because they are not integral to the film's action as O'Brian's capstan pawls and mangerboards are to the novel. Nor will such otiose detail compensate O'Brian fans and perhaps others for the wild absurdities of the plot, especially the climactic scene in which the Surprise relies upon a ruse to challenge the more powerful Acheron. Maturin goes ashore on the Galapagos with Midshipman Blakeney and finds a phasmid — an insect that disguises itself to resemble a twig so as not to alarm its unsuspecting prey or become the prey of another predator. Aha! thinks Aubrey when he is shown this creature. So we shall disguise the Surprise and, like the phasmid, swallow the Acheron. The plan is for the Surprise to imitate a whaling ship by dressing the crew as civilians, painting out its name and contriving a smudge pot to billow black smoke from her deck as if she were rendering blubber. Then when the French ship comes alongside to seize its prey, the British will board and try to seize her instead.

Aubrey has depended on disguise before, often sailing under false colors, a legitimate tactic at the time. In "Master and Commander," the first novel in O'Brian's 20-volume series, he pretended to be a Danish ship under quarantine, an episode partly based on a real event, in order to deceive a larger enemy. Whalers have also been known to adopt disguises against predators. But Acheron and Surprise have been chasing each other for weeks, so that even the French captain's hat, seen through Aubrey's spyglass, is familiar to the Surprise, which must by now be no less familiar to the Acheron's crew. Aubrey's clumsy disguise does nothing to alter his ship's distinctive profile or to simulate the characteristic whaleboats that hang from davits above a whaling ship's deck. It is as if today a guided missile cruiser repainted itself so as to be mistaken for a shrimp boat.

Luckily for Aubrey, the Acheron proves to be manned by idiots, not one of whom recognizes the frigate they have been chasing throughout the film. As the French privateer comes alongside, the Surprise opens fire and prepares to board the mighty ship. But audiences who have remained in their seats to this point deserve to see for themselves what happens next.


Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books and other publications.

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