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Sociopaths are the common coin of modern movie drama. Crowe sometimes finds gold in more remote parts. His Jeffrey Wigand, in The Insider, seems exhausted, neutered by the ethical choice facing him. Here is a man ready to implode, like a condemned building awaiting the dynamite. So his determination to air an inconvenient truth has the impact of a half-man willing himself to be whole. John Nash in A Beautiful Mind is many men--too many, for the film's conflict--and several of its characters are in his crowded, confused head. Crowe shows here, and so often, that the interior life is the most absorbing life there is, and the most frightening.
Master and Commander is in Crowe's burly heroic mode, like his Maximus in Gladiator. But Jack Aubrey has no bloodlust for vengeance. He wants to serve his country. It is his duty, in a distant corner of the Napoleonic Wars, to engage an enemy ship, the Acheron, off the east coast of South America. It is his inspiration to track this state-of-naval-art devil ship to the other side, near the Galapagos Islands. The film is full of inspiration too. Not since Jaws, or maybe Pinocchio, has there been a sea-chase epic of such craft, brio and good comradeship.
Like Crowe, Weir has often made films that seek the heart of darkness beneath the tough skin of the adventure genre: The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Mosquito Coast. But in the journey of adapting (with writer John Collee) and filming the Patrick O'Brian saga--in his long sail, figuratively, from Gallipoli to the Galapagos--Weir has reconciled a traditional war story with modern, mature film attitudes. He has done something daring for an intellectual director: celebrate military heroism.
Aubrey, of course, is one such hero--and a new kind for Crowe. Other Crowe film figures are renegades; Jack, who is sure of his own authority and of those above him, is a dedicated company man, a genius of a middle manager. Crowe plays him straight, flicking charm in a quick smile or, when wounded in battle, silently summoning the will to fight on.
But he is no solitary saint, fighting a balky crew. In a way, the crew is the collective hero. Four episodes reveal how sailors prove their mettle by risking or ending their lives. Two of these are the boy officer Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis, a child actor with a scary mixture of poise and beauty), who bravely bears having an infected arm sawed off; and Aubrey's closest friend, ship's doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), who astonishingly confronts his own dire surgery by heeding the medical dictum "Physician, heal thyself."
The film, which combines two O'Brian books, tells its stories with a wonderful efficiency; its briskly sketched characters have the detail of full portraits. Blakeney, for instance, is given two opposite role models: the warrior Aubrey and the intellectual Maturin. The boy is beguiled by the doctor's love of the natural world and the fantastic creatures in it. Yet after a great battle, when Blakeney visits Maturin, who is absorbed again in his books, we can tell that the boy has been matured by combat; he sees that his destiny is to be not a man of science but a man of war. All this is revealed, not by dialogue but in a brief shot of Pirkis' pensive face.