In the Flesh: Master and Commander (Patreon)

I ’m on the sea! I’m on the sea!
I am where I would ever be;
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe’er I go;
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

The Sea, Bryan Proctor

A man atop the mainmast sights an enemy sail, or thinks he does. The ship’s drummers beat to quarters, mustering the men from sleep, and the quiet foredeck becomes a seething anthill in the space of a few minutes. The spotter gives chase, her sails billowing full, and as the gap between ships tightens, life continues. The ship’s grousing steward serves captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) his coffee. Able seamen holystone the deck and in the steam-filled galley the cook and his boys dish gruel and biscuits onto plates of beaten tin. Hours pass. Night falls. Shanties ring out over the forecastle as the helmsman wrestles through a change in course. The pace of these encounters — too tense to be properly referred to as sedate — is naturalistic, decompressed in a way that heightens the enormity of the processes involved as thousands of tons of oak, rigging, gunnery, and sailcloth cut the fickle sea in an attempt to come to grips with or to evade one another. Thousands of years of naval innovation and engineering prowess, hundreds of men bent to the same simple task, and the end result is no more significant than two motes of dust drifting through the stillness of a vast cathedral.

The sea itself is a dynamic presence in Weir’s film, trackless and serene one moment, claiming its pound of flesh with dark, inexorable menace the next. It cannot be governed, bested, placated, or outwitted; the best the crew of Aubrey’s Surprise can hope for is to move with the current and the wind, dancing along the razor-sharp line between mastery and instant destruction. When it comes, death is sudden and confusing, wood and scrap iron flying through the air, muskets discharged by mistake, even a moment which could be construed as a sort of voluntary human sacrifice in which a man believed by his shipmates to bear a kind of nautical curse jumps overboard with a cannonball in his hands and plummets down into the depths. The film’s battle sequences are disorienting in the extreme, making no effort to clarify who’s shooting or stabbing who as Weir’s precise, painterly framing dissolves into a whirl of tan and dun and vivid red, blasts of smoke and bright lances of gunpowder burn erupting from the tumult to tear at ship and flesh alike. Seldom have the physical functions of a ship and her crew felt so near-organically enmeshed onscreen as they do in Master and Commander.

These moments of chaotic violence provide savage punctuation to the film’s lively yet serene examinations of masculine emotional bonds under the pressure of close confinement, war, and ideological strain. Aubrey and his lifelong friend, ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), embody the film’s twin spirit of reckless, ingenious adventure and awed curiosity. Their conflicting ideals place their friendship under frequent strain, allowing the film to meditate with fiery clarity on the hellish cost of war not just in death and destruction but in beauty left unexamined, secrets left undiscovered, music left unplayed. The sequence in which Aubrey abandons his single-minded pursuit of the French frigate Acheron and brings the wounded Maturin ashore on Galapagos, the fauna of which the surgeon had marveled at previously, is one of its decade’s finest explorations of wonder. We see Maturin moved to tears by the sight of undiscovered species, alive with the thrill of measuring the dimensions of giant tortoises, and war’s bloody toll becomes all the more terrible for it.