STILL MAKING WAVES

Peter Weir's take on English novelist Patrick O'Brian's 'Master and Commander' didn't set the box office afire in 2003, writes Geoffrey Macnab, but it's got emotional heft

- Geoffrey Macnab

Peter Weir's 2003 seafaring yarn Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is not at all the testosterone-driven maritime action movie audiences might have been expecting.

Yes, elements of the plot are deeply jingoistic. Grown men become tearful whenever the sacred name of Admiral Nelson is mentioned. On the eve of battle, officers make tub-thumping, Agincourt-style speeches. But alongside battle scenes and shots of sailors clambering up vertiginously high rigging are moments of great emotion. The blockbuster, adapted from Patrick O’Brian’s novels and showing at the Venice Film Festival next month in tribute to its Australian director, touches on everything from evolutionary biology to bullying, mental illness to suicide, superstition to classical music.

The film also features one of Russell Crowe’s finest and most underrated performances. He plays British navy captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey, who is in charge of HMS Surprise. Jack has a touch of Ahab-like fanaticism about him. Obsessed with the mysterious French ship Acheron that appears ghost-like out of the mist at the start of the film, he vows he will follow it to the gates of hell if necessary. The captain, though, possesses a softer side too. Crowe later summed him up as “a sailor with calluses on his hands, who has grown up in the navy and knows every part of his ship … and those same callused, thickened hands then pick up this delicate feminine instrument, the violin, and he will play from his heart the things he can never say”.

The Aussie star captures his very English character’s mix of boorishness, repression, courage and sensitivity. He’ll abandon a drowning sailor to death or have a man flogged – but remains endlessly loyal to his close friend, the physician and scientist Maturin (Paul Bettany).