REVIEW BY JOE ALLEN
Master and Commander: the Far Side of World
Directed by Peter Weir
Screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee
With Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany
At major cinemas
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has received overwhelming praise from critics for its attention to historical detail, its sweeping action and great acting. The film has also been embraced by many right-wing US columnists, most notably the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, for promoting such "morally serious" and "war-clarifying" notions as duty, honour and Francophobia.
There's no doubt that Master and Commander is an entertaining film. Russell Crowe stars as British captain Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as his friend and alter ego, ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. The film was directed and co-written by Peter Weir, whose many directing credits include the great anti-war film Gallipoli.
Based on the novels of British writer Patrick O'Brian and set during the Napoleonic wars in 1805, almost all of the film takes place at sea. The drama of the film is between Aubrey's HMS Surprise and the much larger and better-gunned French warship Acheron.
We never learn the name of the French captain, who remains a dark, ominous figure we see only through Aubrey's telescope. After a surprise attack on the Surprise by the Acheron off the coast of Brazil, Aubrey spends the rest of the film chasing the Acheron with the goal of preventing it from helping Napoleon establish an empire in the Pacific.
Master and Commander — both the novel and the film — is extremely conservative in politics and social attitudes, upholding as virtues the worst aspects of the British Navy and the British Empire. The British fleet and its captains are cast as the thin blue line between civilisation, represented by the British Empire, and barbarism, represented by Napoleon Bonaparte.
This comes out most clearly in the scene in which Aubrey, needing to whip the crew up for their final battle with the Acheron, asks: "Do you want Napoleon to be your king? Do you want a guillotine to be in Piccadilly? Do you want your children growing up and singing the Marseillaise?"
"No!", the crew loudly responds.
It's the Francophobia of Master and Commander, much in fashion among US right-wing circles at the moment because of France's opposition to the Bush gang's war with Iraq, that has Krauthammer and others bursting with bloodcurdling joy. The film "allows American audiences", according to Krauthammer, "the particular satisfaction of seeing Anglo-Saxon cannonballs puncturing the tricolor".
Master and Commander is a movie you will love to hate. There are many great scenes followed by a line or two of pro-British dialogue that makes you grind your teeth. Hopefully, when it is released on DVD it will have an alternative ending — a common feature these days.
In that ending, the British lose the Napoleonic wars, while there are successful rebellions in Ireland, India, Canada and Australia. There will be no carve-up of Africa or opium wars in China. Humanity will be saved from 150 years of the British gulag.
Go see the movie and barrack for the French!
[From Socialist Worker (<http://www.socialistworker.org>), newspaper of the US International Socialist Organisation.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 14, 2004.
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