Dead Calm (2007, DVD)

"The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in a night sky." -- Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," (1911).

-----

In 1967, three years after prolific ex-merchant mariner hard boiled fiction writer, Texas-born, Charles Williams (The Hot Spot) published his finest novel, Dead Calm, peripatetic writer-director Orson Welles made a film of it. The adaptation, with a working title, THE DEEP, stayed fairly close to the book, and starred Michael Bryant, Laurence Harvey, Oja Kodar, Jeanne Moreau, and Welles (doing a parody of a drunken Hemingwayesque absurd hero, gone to seed). The death of Harvey, and other typical hang-ups in Welles' later career, prevented the release of the film.

Ten years later, Phillip Noyce (THE QUIET AMERICAN) procured the rights to Dead Calm, and shot his own version from a screenplay by Terry Hayes. They pared the plot down ruthlessly to create a 96 minute love story, eliminating several characters in the present, but giving the film a splendid economy, and a layered sensibility requiring intelligence and compassion from an audience. What we have in DEAD CALM now is nine-tenths of the most sensitive sea-going suspense thriller ever made.

Joseph Conrad (a model for Charles Williams) would have been proud of everything in DEAD CALM but its ending.

-----

John Ingram (Sam Neal), a senior officer on leave from the Australian Navy, has taken his young wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) on a six week second honeymoon. They sail their 80 foot gleaming white Saracen (actually, the Storm Vogel) northeast of Sidney into the deep water, off the shipping lanes, where they become becalmed a thousand miles from the Marquesas. There, they are seeking solitude and the replenishment of their marriage.

Another motive is present.

At the beginning of the film, Ingram learned that Rae and their small son Danny had been in a car accident. The boy was killed, and Rae suffered head injuries. Now in the calm of the open sea, in the sun and salt air, Rae is healing, but the couple have unresolved issues of guilt and grief. Like most married couples, they have almost reached that point where they can begin to wear each other's skins -- but not quite. Rae, haunted by nightmares of Danny being catapulted through the windshield, cannot sleep easily without the aid of sleeping pills which she tries to avoid.

One morning they awake, and as Rae takes a swim off the bow, Ingram notices a large black ketch-rigged schooner a couple of miles to starboard -- The Orpheus, out of Santa Barbara, he will learn. By the time, Rae is back on deck, Ingram has ascertained through binoculars that a young man, dressed only in shorts and a straw hat, is rowing a dinghy desperately toward them. The man is so driven that he nearly stoves a plank in the Saracen's hull on arrival.

The young man proves to be wild-eyed Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane), a kind of cowboy-beach boy much in evidence in the post-Vietnam 1970's and 1980's. He babbles nervously, under Ingram's calm questioning, that he had sailed the Orpheus from California with five companions on a course for Tahiti. They lost their way and became becalmed. His companions, he explains with appropriate horror and bewilderment, died after eating canned salmon. (Botulism, Ingram speculates.) Hughie has been alone with the bodies in the tropical heat for nearly a week.

In the code of all seafaring brethren, Ingram offers to row Hughie back to the Orpheus, and see if he can make her shipshape. No, cries the dark-haired young man, the ship is slowly sinking, and he has been long enough with those corpses.

Fair enough, agrees Ingram, and suggests that the exhausted, disturbed Hughie take a nap in the forward cabin. Rae goes to make him comfortable, as a sense of duty, curiosity and the slightest of suspicions prompt Ingram to row over to the Orpheus himself. Rae can handle the boat until he returns, and just as a precaution, he locks in the man suddenly sharing their vessel.

In this sequence, one of the few which brings the three principals together, Director Noyce establishes that releasing bond which people alone at sea feel when meeting each other. We also see that Hughie is needy -- a bit strange but under the circumstances, not unreasonably so; that Ingram is a generous man and an experienced, ethical sailor. Most of all, that Rae, his curly redhead of a wife, despite her innocent beauty, is both empathetic and competent.

We watch Ingram row to the Orpheus, framed in Cinematographer Dean Sempler's magnificent 2.35.1 widescreen shot of the vessels riding, almost like positive and negative images of each other, on an immense panorama of smooth blue water.

On boarding, Ingram finds many disturbing matters. The ship has been trashed. It lugs, half sunk. The rigging is snarled. Much of its equipment, including the engine, is either smashed, or in need of repair. From the ship's sea-stained log, he learns that Hughie Warriner had signed onto the Orpheus in answer to one of those adventurously romantic ads of the time: "Wanted -- Young Men and Women to Sail 100 foot schooner to the South Seas." When Ingram manages to get some electricity out of the batteries, a video projector leaps to crazy life, showing him Skipper Russell Bellows (Rod Mullinar), an ex-Vietnam combat photographer, and four giggling, half-tight young women. Skipper Bellows banters with Hughie, who is presumably shooting the video tape footage, but even in the snippets we see or hear, it is evident that a macho jealousy exists between the two men.

A sense of smell leads Ingram to slosh deeper into the ship, which is awash and fouled with flotsam. The excellent use of sea sounds and creaking timbers on the back channel sound stage is now augmented by Graham Revell's moody score, utilizing Micronesian chants and the sobs of dead women.

Meanwhile, on the Saracen, Rae is performing her nautical chores as the young man sleeps on, until Benji, the couple's black terrier, begins to bark and wakes Hughie. He tries the door, but finds it locked, then calls to Rae to open the hatch, but she dutifully follows her husband's instructions -- until Hughie claims nausea and that he has to throw up.

As she allows him on deck, a contest begins between hostess Rae and guest Hughie. Neither she, Hughie, nor the audience can ignore that the pair are closer in age than she is to her husband. Rae is firm at first but friendly, starting the engine and beginning to motor toward the Orpheus, when the increasingly frantic Hughie, observing Ingram's preparing to return, knocks her down, and out, seizes the wheel, hoves the Saracen away to port. Ingram, seeing what has happened, rows faster, only to just miss catching the taffrail as his ship picks up speed and sails off.

Soon, the Saracen is far away, lost in the sun of a perfect day.

For Ingram, there is nothing to do but return to the Orpheus, to try in some fashion to restart her engine, get her under greater forward motion. He has already found one of the bodies, and as he swims. assessing the amount of rot in the ships timbers, through the flooded holds amidships, he finds others floating in the torpid green water. He seizes the great pump jack and, hour after hour, attempts to jettison enough water to pick up some speed.

Back on the Saracen, Rae awakes to see Hughie at the wheel, dancing to a rock and roll tape. Rae is nearly hysterical because she knows her husband is marooned on the sinking Orpheus. In the bipolar manner, observed in psychopaths, and lately, in modern American politicians, Hughie says, the ship has probably already sunk. "Anyway, he wanted to go aboard there, didn t he? It s his own fault. They must move on, stay the new course.

Hughie and Rae continue to engage in a deadly dance of their own, alternately flirtatious and in earnest. He fancies she admires him and becomes increasingly aggressive sexually. Over the rest of the film, Rae leads him on, or fights him off, all the time, thinking of ways to put him out of commission: with rope, sleeping pills, a spear-gun, or her husband's shot gun.

[A few initial critics, and inattentive audiences, expecting a purely conventional horror thriller, wanted her to simply kill the beast. They did not understand that, somewhere deep in her psyche, having been responsible for one death, Rae's maternal instinct will not allow her to be the cause of another.]

The wind has kicked up -- thunder, lightning, rain.

In a grueling respite, Rae attempts to contact her husband, or anyone, on the radio-telephone, but it is limited to a 50-mile line of sight radius. She keeps trying.

Ingram, still pumping, keeping the laboring engine at work, is trapped below decks when a spar falls to the deck, sealing the hatch. The Orpheus, the water winning her holds, has lived up to her name.

There comes a point, after she has managed to make radio contact with Ingram, when Rae must bring the Saracen 180 degrees about and by dead reckoning (which would have been Welles' American title) sail through the storm to rescue her husband.

[It is an incredible sequence, and we are assured that Miss Kidman is actually steering the Saracen in that heavy weather. She was barely twenty at the time, and this would be her first important picture, as it would be for Director Noyce, though the fact was not immediately recognized.]

DEAD CALM, in addition to referencing Orpheus in the Underworld, or Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and Typhoon, has a curious affinity with THE SHINING (1980) -- all that rolling-eyed action and splintering of wood. I must add, then, the producer, not satisfied with a very subtle, adult love story, and a superb thriller, as the film stood, insisted on tacking on a "horror" ending. That's why I say, DEAD CALM "is nine-tenths of the most sensitive sea-going suspense thriller ever made."

See it with that caveat.

-----------------

Director Phillip Noyce, like Nicole Kidman, Sam Neil, and Billy Zane, went to Hollywood, but after a stint with PATRIOT GAMES, etc, Noyce returned to form in his excellent adaptation of Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN --

http://www.epinions.com/content_89755258500