Dead Calm (1999, DVD)

Dead Calm (1989) is a classic psychological thriller. It was also the film that introduced Nicole Kidman to the world at large. Kidman is my favorite actress among those currently in their prime. There are some actresses from other eras that I would choose over her, but none currently. That aside, it is clear to me, after reading 15-20 reviews of this film, that I value this film more than do most other reviewers. I've been trying to understand why that is and have reached the conclusion that I'm responding mainly to the psychological aspect of this film, whereas most other viewers appear to be responding to it mainly in relation to its plot. The rap on the film, from those who denigrate it, is that the plot is sometimes either too obvious, too much in accordance with the clich s of thriller films, or too ridiculous. To me, however, the narrative choices in this film are only important for illuminating the psychological development for the two main characters, excluding the psychopath. The psychological processes explicated in this film are realistic and insightful and, on that level, as good as the best other films of this kind. So, be advised, as you read my review my opinion of this movie is a minority opinion. I've seen this film three or four times and my esteem for it has increased with each viewing, rather than declining. Dead Calm was the work of Australian director Phillip Noyce.

Historical Background: Phillip Noyce was born April 29th, 1950 in Griffith, Australia. At age 12, he moved with his family to Sydney and soon thereafter developed a fascination with home videos using an 8 mm camera. After seeing a program of independent films, he began making his own, beginning with a short entitled Better to Reign in Hell (1968). He started college studies in law, but quickly transferred into the fine arts. He managed a filmmakers' cooperative for a while and joined the first class of students in the newly organized Australian Film and Television School in 1972. During his school years, he directed two shorts and a 50-minute documentary, Castor and Pollux, the last of which won the Rouben Maroulien award at the Sydney Film Festival. Noyce's debut professional film was God Knows Why, But It Works (1975), a documentary about a Greek doctor working with the Aborigines. That led to his first fiction feature, Backroads (1977). Noyce had some success with his next film, Newsfront (1978) and even more so with his fifth film, the psychological thriller under review here, Deep Calm (1989), which soon earned him a trip to Hollywood. He had quick success with the bigger budgets of Hollywood, directing a pair of Harrison Ford action films, Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), both of which have Ford playing the role of CIA agent Jack Ryan. In 1997, Noyce directed The Saint, with Val Kilmer as Simon Templer, a role that Roger Moore played in the television series having the same name. Noyce returned to Australia to produce and direct Rabbit-Proof Fence in 2002 but returned to the U.S. to make The Quiet American in the same year.

The Story: As the film opens, John Ingram (Sam Neill), a naval officer, arrives at a train station, apparently having returned home from an assignment of some sort. The station is bustling with sailors being greeted by families and wives. John appears to be looking around for his party, but to no avail. After a few minutes, two policemen spot John and approach him, appearing to have identified him from a photograph they are holding. We see them conversing sympathetically with him and soon John is being driven in a police car to a hospital, where he meets with a doctor. The doctor advises John that his wife, Rae (Nicole Kidman), has been in a vehicular accident, she has bruises and minor injuries, but will recover fully. Their infant son, however, was killed. The doctor asks John to speak to his wife, who is semiconscious and emotionally devastated. Rae is hitched up to an intravenous drip, is covered with bandages, and has a mouthpiece between her lips. John stoically and calmly assures Rae that they will pull through this crisis together, pick up the pieces, and start over. Later, we see the accident in flashback with the unfortunate infant hurtling through the windshield like a projectile.

When Rae is released from the hospital, she and John decide to spend an extended period of time recuperating. They set out to find some calm seas on their mid-sized yacht, which has both sails and an engine. Obviously, they are hoping that some warm sun and calm waters will soothe their inner pain and help them to regain their bearings. John and Rae have a solid marriage relationship. They clearly love and respect one another, even if they are not especially demonstrative with one another, in a romantic sense. We observe that John clearly knows his way around a boat. We see him plotting his course, using radar and communication equipment, and maintaining the ship's log.

They've been out at sea for three weeks, when John spots a small black schooner at a short distance. The ship seems to be in some difficulty. Rae regrets having their solitude invaded but John, being an experienced seaman, understands the obligation of people at sea to provide assistance to those in distress. He tries contacting the schooner on his radio, but to no avail. Rae, using binoculars, spots something between their own ship and the schooner, obscured by the glare of the sun. As it moves closer, John identifies it as a dingy being rowed by a solitary man. The young man in the dingy is rowing ferociously, apparently in some distress. In fact, he rows hard into the side of the Ingram's yacht and scampers aboard. He introduces himself as Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane). He is agitated and his story is that he's been 32 days out of Bath. "There were six of us," he says, "the others died ten days ago." From the symptoms that Hughie describes, John suggests that it sounds like botulism, from food poisoning. The schooner is taking on water and slowly sinking. John suggests that they retrieve Hughie's gear, but Hughie declares emphatically, "I can't go back, ever." Apparently the bodies of his deceased shipmates have decomposed somewhat, after ten days, and the traumatic experience is more than Hughie can bear again.

John and Rae help Hughie to one of their cabins so he can get some rest. John examines the passports of the victims that Hughie has brought along, some pictures, and the ship's log, and his doubts about Hughie's story begin to grow. He locks the cabin in which Hughie is sleeping and heads off in the dingy to check out the situation on the black schooner for himself. The schooner's name is the Orpheus, out of Santa Barbara. John boards it. Meanwhile, back on the Ingram's yacht, the dog's barking awakens Hughie and we wants to use the bathroom. Rae cautiously decides to start the ship's engine and move it closer to the black schooner. On the schooner, John finds blood seeping from an interior compartment. He opens it and water and bodies come pouring out. He realizes that there's been foul play on board, hurries into the dingy and rows as hard as he can for his own yacht. Hughie has smashed his way out of the sleeping compartment and seizes control of the boat from Rae. John makes a leap for the boat as it passes close to the dingy, but misses, gashing himself a bit in the process. He yells for Rae to jump. She's struggling with Hughie but gets thrown to the deck, bangs her head, and is knocked unconscious. John climbs back into the dingy as the yacht, with his wife and a psychopathic murderer aboard, moves off into the distance.

The rest of the film follows the separate efforts of John and Rae to survive and overcome the respective threats to their lives. John is an experienced and resourceful seaman and is not about to give up. He tries pumping the water out of the black schooner and works on starting its engine. Once he gets the electric power operating, the television comes on and it's playing a home video showing the activities of the six people who had been on board the schooner. There is one man besides Hughie and four topless young women. The nature of the discourse seems to confirm John's worst fears. The screening of the home movies also creates a spooky backdrop to John's efforts, because he's listening to the voices of the deceased as he works.

On the Ingram's boat, Rae regains consciousness and finds Hughie dancing frenetically on the top deck to some radio music. Rae pleads with Hughie to turn the boat around but he insists, "He's gone. That's in the past. Put it out of your mind." He warns her, ominously, "Don't get aggressive, Rae. That could be a problem on a small boat. I've seen it happen before." Then, he complements the bone structure of her face and Rae begins to recognize another kind of impending threat.

John is able to contact Rae on two occasions, using the schooner's radio. He can hear her but she can't hear him, except for a clicking sound when he activates the microphone. He uses two clicks for "yes" and one for "no" while she poses questions and options. Rae tries to stop the boat by taking the key from the engine and throwing it in the ocean, but the darn dog, Benji, retrieves it. Gradually, each of the two situations grows worse, as we watch the respective psychological struggles of husband and wife to overcome their respective challenges. The black schooner is gradually sinking and John gets trapped in one of the interior compartments as it is filling with water, yet he is able to draw on his years of naval experience to survive. Rae's resources include a shotgun, a spear gun, and the sedatives that she herself was prescribed, but Hughie is cunning and suspicious. She has to bide her time, waiting for opportunities when his guard is down. She's fighting not only for her own life but her husband's because if she is unable to return to him within a day or two, he'll be lost at sea. Keeping in mind that this was a woman emotionally devastated by the loss of her child, when she and her husband set out to sea three weeks earlier, it's quite an experience to watch her maintain her composure under traumatic circumstances as she struggles to find solutions.

Themes: The film's title, in my opinion, refers not so much to the calm seas, but to the ability of both John and Rae to find within themselves a focus of concentration, a centeredness, if you will, from which to draw the strength needed for their respective survival efforts. A lesser man or woman would have given up in either of their two circumstances. Even these two might have given up were they thinking only about their own lives, but they each had the other to consider as well. Each had to try to survive in order to find a way to rescue the other. Instead of panicking, each found a deep calm within the core of their personalities upon which to draw.

Production Values: This film's script was based on a novel published in 1963 by Charles Williams. Orson Welles had been fascinated by the same story and actually began to make a film on the topic. The film, begun in 1970 in Yugoslavia, was to star Laurence Harvey as the killer and Oja Kodar as Rae. The working title was originally The Deep and, later, Dead Reckoning. Welles had to suspend the project due to financial problems and later abandoned it altogether, when Harvey died in 1973. Deep Calm also bears some similarity to Roman Polanski's debut film, Knife in the Water.

One of the beauties of this film's script is that the isolated setting makes it fully evident to viewers that there will be no external agency to resolve the crisis that John and Rae are facing. Whatever transpires will be the result of the interaction of three people only. The usual safeguards of civilization have been rendered irrelevant.

One of the raps on the film's script is that Hughie is all too obviously demented from the moment we first encounter him. John and Rae should have recognized immediately that he posed a danger, according to this line of reasoning. The problem, I think, is that some viewers and reviewers are approaching the film with assumptions that they acquired from experience with the horror and thriller genres. Hughie is "obviously" deranged only because viewers of such films know that there has to be a psychopath, sooner or later. When Hughie climbs on board the Ingram's yacht, he is certainly frenzied, but who wouldn't be after being lost at sea for ten days, sharing a boat with only five corpses? Moreover, John is sensibly suspicious right from the beginning and makes an effort to investigate. Many times in my own life, I've encountered people that made me suspicious or nervous or who made me begin longing for their absence, but one also has to respect the eccentricities of individuals. You can't simply handcuff or kill someone because they seem suspicious. If you knew that you were in a horror film, you might take bolder action, but Dead Calm is realistic precisely because it doesn't have John and Rae behaving as though they were characters in a psychological thriller.

Several reviewers accuse Rae of making foolish mistakes. Quite the contrary, she acted more resourcefully than 98% of people could have under the circumstances. She is faulted for merely tying Hughie up at one point and locking him in a cabin, rather than killing him. In real life, murder is frowned upon. Once you have an assailant subdued, killing him is murder under the law. You're not entitled to kill someone because they were previously posing a threat to your life. It's only self-defense if the threat is active. Then, Rae is faulted for hogtying the guy and placing the knots in front. Do these viewers imagine that an average woman has experience with tying up psychopathic killers? These characters aren't supposed to be highly trained secret agents like James Bond. They're ordinary people having to draw on their psychological resources to survive in circumstances that are far more difficult than most people will ever confront.

The film's plot is designed expressly to create maximum psychological pressure on John and Rae, so that we can then observe how they cope with it. In John's case, we mainly have opportunity to admire his knowledge and experience in relation to surviving on the high seas. He's trained as a naval officer and we expect him not to crack under difficult circumstances. Rae, however, has no such training or experience and, furthermore, is in an emotionally distressed condition after loss of her child. So, in Rae's case, viewers are observing the gradual evolution of an emotionally fragile woman into a cunning cheetah, methodically stalking her prey, waiting for the right moment to strike. I, for one, found the psychological strength of both John and Rae compelling and gratifying.

Then, there are reviewers who complain about exploitation, pointing to the graphic car crash with the baby hurtling through the front windshield, the graphic death of a dog, and a sexual assault on Rae (Kidman's character). All of these episodes, however, are important to the plot and for establishing the psychological vulnerability and/or strength that the characters were able to muster.

This film is very nicely composed and shot. Considering that both crews and performers often had to occupy a confined space, shooting this kind of film is difficult business. The expansive ocean setting provided impressive vistas. There are some excellent underwater shots and a few cool special effects. The editing is brisk and effective. The soundtrack consisted of a mix of ethereal percussion sounds and occasional choral music.

Much of what's compelling about this film is attributable to the fine performances by all of the three leads. The freckled Kidman was just 22 years old, at the time, and had yet to meet Tom Cruise. Instead of long streams of hair, she was sporting a flock of red curls. One reviewer calls her performance flat, but I would instead call it folded but magnificent. Psychologically, she's coiled up like a cobra, just as her character requires. Kidman went on to work in such films as Flirting (1991), Batman Forever (1995), To Die For (1995), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Practical Magic (1998), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Moulin Rouge (2001), The Others (2001), Birthday Girl (2002), The Hours (2002), The Human Stain (2003), and Cold Mountain (2004).

Sam Neill was the only one of the three leads who was already established in the profession when Dead Calm was made. His character undergoes less evolution than Kidman's, but he plays the part with strength and appeal. Neill's other film work includes My Brilliant Career (1979), Plenty (1985), A Cry in the Dark (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Until the End of the World (1991), The Piano (1993), Sirens (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), and The Horse Whisperer (1998). Billy Zane was deliciously "in-zane" as the psychopath. He was believably scary, without going over the top. He later appeared in Orlando (1993) and Titanic (1997), in which he played Cal Hockley.

Bottom-Line: Psychological thrillers are my favorite films among the various subgenre of thriller or horror films. This film, in my opinion, is an excellent example from the psychological thriller category. I'd probably give in 4.4 stars were that an option. Other reviewers around the internet typically rate it from three to four stars, or the equivalent in some other rating system. You may be disappointed with this film if you're approaching it primarily at the narrative level. Its foremost appeal is the psychological struggle of the two positive characters.