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As tempting as it may often be to blurt out “What were they thinking?” as a movie’s closing credits roll, we all know the answer: they wanted to make something that would earn them enough money to enhance their power/status in Hollywood in order to procure better and more frequent sex. So the question might more appropriately be, “How did they think that this movie would ever lead to better and more frequent sex?” In the case of The Perfect Storm, they – and if the English language had, like many other languages, a way to assign gender to plural personal pronouns as well as singular, “they” would be masculine, since men still wield all the real decision-making power in Tinseltown -- figured that signing the recently reconfirmed most eligible bachelor face in the business to star in an action-packed true story about nature vs. guys on a boat would have sycophants and moviegoers alike swooning. Or at least forking over $7 apiece.
Don’t they have people to do research? Didn’t they realize that Ridley Scott’s 1996 true shipwreck film White Squall, despite being a compelling, well-told story, barely made back one-fourth of its budget? Or maybe they did, and figured the problem was that the -wreck part of the deal wasn’t big enough, and that Jeff Bridges was by 1996 no longer a big enough face. So the producers of The Perfect Storm got George Clooney to star, procured director Wolfgang Peterson (who in his WWII submarine tale Das Boot created what is arguably the greatest seafaring adventure ever), and hired George Lucas’s digital outfit Industrial Light & Magic to whip up on computer what they hoped would be the most memorable movie weather event since that twisted piece of muslin whisked Judy Garland off to Oz. And maybe they thought that Mr. Clooney would be so good-looking, and the digital hurricane so inspiring, that inspired plot and dialog would simply emerge fully formed from the lips of each cast member, so they neglected to procure a script.
Okay, two paragraphs and nothing about the actual movie yet. Point well-taken.
Clooney plays Billy Tyne, captain of the Gloucester, Mass. swordfishing boat Andrea Gail, which tried to make an ill-advised run through the middle of monstrous Hurricane Grace at Halloween in 1991. Well, as in Titanic, since the story has already gotten a fair amount of press, I hope you won’t be overly miffed to learn now that Tyne, crew (which includes Mark Wahlberg, whose character is ostensibly saving up to afford a marriage, but my bet is he wants some facial-hair plugs to thicken up a sparse goatee), and boat never made it back. (It might not have helped that the boat shared the first half of its name with doomed ocean-liner Andrea Doria, and the last half with a homophone for “dangerous windstorm.”) That means that nobody has any idea what actually happened onboard. So the fellow who wrote the script – yes, they did have one – had to make up a bunch of stuff so the movie could have something to be about other than a bubbling hole in the water. The way he tells it, Tyne, who goes out again so late in the season because his recent hauls have been uniformly paltry, ventures to the Flemish Cap, which sounds like a Renaissance birth-control device but is actually a swordfish-rich territory east of the Grand Banks – a veritable pointy piscine nirvana. The Gail takes on 30 tons of catch, but their ice machine breaks down (who knew fishing boats had ice machines? aren’t there any Pantry stores on the Flemish Cap?), so they have to come back quick or the fish will spoil. Meanwhile, a Boston TV weatherman (Christopher McDonald) is making grave statements in Charlton Heston tones while looking at his satellite photos: “Oh my God – it’s happening! A disaster of epic proportions!” Which doesn’t help morale of the crew’s pensive loved ones back in Gloucester.
When the ideal maelstrom finally hits, ILM goes to work and gives us a whole bunch of monstrous, but obviously computer-generated, waves. To keep things from getting too claustrophobic, the story spreads out to encompass what’s happening not only on the Gail, where a little digital Capt. Tyne – a Clooneytoon – is relentlessly snapped about like a wet towel in a high school locker room, but on a couple other apparently unrelated boats (was a big hunk of exposition edited out?) and some computer-generated rescue aircraft as well.
The Perfect Storm did truly give me fresh appreciation for what commercial fishermen go through to keep us in cheap protein. I’ll never take a swordfish-salad sandwich for granted again. But if I wanna watch a computer make waves, next time I’ll lob the old 8086 desktop PC that serves as a doorstop in my office into the Reedy River and save $7. C-
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