Petrified Truth

Master and Commander

Saw Peter Weir's new movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Saturday night. It's a terrific dramatization of the seagoing, Napoleonic-era world created by author Patrick O'Brian. Although this movie -- like any movie -- must inevitably fall short of the totality of the highly detailed and nuanced world created by O'Brian, it does bring to visual life the world aboard ship in Nelson's navy.

Co-screenwriter John Collee dexcribes how the script was developed over a period of several years, and he is pleased with the result.

We had started writing Master and Commander three years ago. I can speak of it objectively now because I was merely one of this film's progenitors – I wasn't there when it grew up. I finally went to see the finished version two weeks ago and was moved to tears by the experience, like attending the graduation of a favourite, long-lost child. To our script the actors had added not just their voices but their personalities. Historical advisor Gordon Laco had added a wealth of period detail. Peter's wife, the costume designer Wendy Stites, and her team had given every man the grubby, salt-encrusted look of a 19th-century sailor.

Paul Bettany gave flesh and blood to Stephen in all his tortured compassionate complexity. Russell Crowe was Captain Jack Aubrey, investing him with a massively joyful zest for life which makes you think: "Oh, what fun it would be to ride the high seas with such fellows as these for companionship."

It's a film at once emotionally captivating and philosophically profound. A long meditation – to my mind – on what it means to be a man, told with all the passion and wit and leisurely digression of an O'Brian novel. A film that, once you have seen it, you immediately want to see again, just to re-inhabit that wooden world and spend another two and a quarter hours with the wind in your hair and the salt spray in your face and the scrubbed boards of HMS Surprise under your bare feet. I only wish O'Brian had been alive to see it.

via The Telegraph (UK)

I agree with Collee: I want to see it again as soon as possible. However, Brit writer Christopher Hitchens is in no mood to settle for anything less complete than what's presented in O'Brian's original works. I think he sets the bar impossibly high.

Posted by Alan at November 16, 2003 07:44 AM