Captain Phillips · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start at the end, because the film does. A Navy corpsman is asking Richard Phillips simple questions — where does it hurt, can you follow my finger — and Tom Hanks cannot answer. His face has come loose from its own command. The jaw works, the breath stutters, the eyes flood and refuse to focus. For two hours this man has been a competent professional doing a job, and now, finally safe, the body he held rigid through five days in a fiberglass box arrives all at once. It is the most famous thing in the movie, and it is the key to what kind of movie it is.

Because for most of its length Captain Phillips runs on what Deleuze called the action-image: the sensory-motor circuit at full power, where a person perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves the chain of cause and effect. Greengrass and his editor Christopher Rouse are masters of it. The boarding of the Maersk Alabama — water hoses, ladders, the real architecture of a real ship — is a global situation pressing down until decisive acts answer it. This is the large form: the milieu (geopolitical asymmetry, an unarmed freighter, a skiff of armed men) calls forth response, and Phillips responds, hiding his crew, stalling, lying, steering. Deleuze would notice the breathing rhythm of it — what he names respiration-space — the alternation between the vast ocean that lets the camera track and hold a horizon, and the taut line of the chase drawn tight across it. Room to breathe, then no room at all.

Then the film does something stranger, and better. It puts Phillips in the lifeboat.

The MK-V is roughly the size of a shipping container, two meters of headroom at its peak, and Ackroyd's cameras were genuinely jammed inside it. The result is what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever — a space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a pure affective fragment, walls of orange fiberglass crowding the frame's edge, faces shoved into the foreground, geography dissolving into disconnection. And inside it the action-image breaks down. This is the crisis Deleuze located at the hinge of film history: the moment a character can still perceive perfectly well but can no longer act on what he perceives. Phillips watches. He listens to the creak of the hull, the rasp of breathing, the radio. He endures. He has become what Deleuze calls a seer — a watcher, not an agent — caught in a pure optical and sound situation where looking is the only thing left to do. The thriller machinery is still running outside (the Navy, the snipers, the chain of command), but the man at the center has been reduced to time itself, five days of it, held with nothing to discharge it into.

Which is why the breakdown lands so hard. The whole film has been a body suppressing affect to do its job; the affection-image — the feeling registered but not yet released — has been dammed for two hours. When it finally comes in the corpsman's hands, it comes as what Deleuze called the gest: a posture, an attitude of the body, that suddenly exposes everything institutional and unspeakable underneath the role. No line of dialogue could carry it. Only the body, shaking, can.

There is a second person in that lifeboat, and the film's intelligence is that it knows it. Barkhad Abdi's Muse — "Look at me. I'm the captain now" — is not a cipher. Greengrass inherits this directly from Z, which granted its antagonists genuine procedural motive, and from The Battle of Algiers, which fused documentary and fiction to give political violence two faces instead of one. The pirates are men inside their own economic milieu, a force-against-force binomial in which both forces have reasons. The film won't resolve into hero and villain because it keeps gesturing at a whole it cannot show — the post-colonial economy off the Somali coast — an absolute out-of-field that presses on the orange box from everywhere and can be located nowhere.

The grammar that makes all this feel found rather than staged is a debt Greengrass pays openly. The handheld camera always slightly behind the action, always searching, is the camera of Bloody Sunday — inside the crowd, not above it — and behind that, the newsreel hand of Algiers. The casting is older still: recruiting non-professional Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis diaspora rather than trained actors is exactly De Sica's method in Bicycle Thieves, the Bazinian wager that a real face from the real world carries a truth performance cannot fake. Greengrass even withheld Hanks from the Somali actors until the cameras rolled, so the surprise on Phillips's face during the boarding is partly Hanks's own.

What the film did, then, was prove that the most disciplined documentary surface could hold a time-image at its core. It looks like a procedural. It is, in its last act, a study of a man with nothing left to do but feel time pass — and then, set free, come apart. Watch it again for the moment the action stops and the watching begins. That is where the real film is.