The Finest Hours, while being a more than serviceable live-action Disney “rescue at the high seas” adventure, has a Chris Pine problem and a Casey Affleck problem.
The Chris Pine problem goes something like this: Pine, a perfectly fine actor (and a genetically blessed one, too), is simply too old for the part of Bernie Webber, the honorable young man who works for a tiny outpost of the coast guard in Chatham, MA. When we first meet Bernie, it’s 1952 and he’s wooing his future fiancée Miriam (Holliday Grainger), but he’s so diffident and awkward, you begin to wonder if he’s a simpleton. The point is, of course, we’re supposed to think that Pine—who is 35—is in his early twenties, but I’m not buying it. (Call it the Reverse J-Law.)
A year or so earlier, the earnest and dutiful-to-a-fault Bernie had lost some men during a failed rescue and he is determined that this will never happen on his watch again ™, so when two tankers split during a blizzard and most of the Massachusetts resources are dispatched to the first ship, it’s up to Bernie to take his tiny boat and his tiny crew to rescue the survivors on the second tanker. (Did I mention that this was based on a true story? Go, Bernie!)
The Casey Affleck problem goes something like this: Affleck, as the tanker’s engineer who is trying to keep morale high and the ship afloat on the slim chance they are rescued, is excellent. In a film filled with impenetrable fake Boston accents, his (actual) Boston accent is quite easy to understand, and we’re extremely invested in him, his bravery and resourcefulness and smarts, and the power struggle he engages in with the other, higher ranking members of the crew. But toward the end of the film, Affleck’s Ray Sybert is nearly abandoned in favor of Pine’s Bernie and the far more interesting Ray never gets the satisfying resolution he deserves.
Most of the film, which is directed by Craig Gillespie (Million Dollar Arm), is solidly sea-worthy, as it toggles back and forth between Bernie, Ray, and Miriam, who is helpless, of course, on the ground, but not taking Bernie’s fate lying down. In one cathartic scene, she chews out Bernie’s boss (Eric Bana, unconvincingly villainous) for ever sending her man out on this near suicide mission to begin with. You will cheer her on. (It helps that Grainger has a spunkiness and rosy-cheeked beauty that feels very period appropriate.)
The crew on the tanker is filled out with a bunch of character actors with distinctive mugs, which is smart because there’s way too much action for us to get to know these guys much beyond those glorious faces (and the aforementioned bogus Boston accents). On Bernie’s tiny boat we have a becapped and muscular Ben Foster (morphing into Robin Williams’s Popeye right before our eyes), Kyle Gallner, and the suddenly ubiquitous John Magaro as a young sailor, all good.
The special effects are so-so; you sense a lot of CGI, and Bernie’s boat seems to get impossibly tossed around in the waves. (If you are prone to sea-sickness, best steer clear.)
Earlier this year, I expressed surprise over the fact that Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea wasn’t more aggressively sentimental. No such worries here. This is old-fashioned, corny filmmaking, with all of the emotional beats and crescendos you would expect. In the end, I liked it well enough, but—like the cowbell before it—it simply Needed. More. Affleck.