“The Finest Hours,” a piece of chaste Greatest Generation pornography brought to us by Disney Digital 3D, opens with Tinkerbell’s fairy dust turning to snowflakes in a New England winter circa 1952.
One stormy morning, the crew of the SS Pendleton finds out that hot-glue-gunning a ship together and sending her out into a wicked nor-easter off Cape Cod is an unfortunate choice. The tanker splits in half, and the part with the captain in it sinks immediately, leaving Ray (Casey Affleck) from the engine room in charge by default. Affleck grinds his jaw and seems to be practicing ventriloquy rather than speaking as he tries to keep from going under.
Ashore in Chatham, Coast Guard Commander Cluff (Eric Bana) has all sorts of issues because the men don’t respect him – he speaks in a bad Southern accent and this film is about bad Boston accents. He calls on Bernie (Chris Pine, all eyebrows and studied pauses) to take a small rescue boat into the gale and bring back the stranded Pendletonians.
Bernie leaves behind his intended, Miriam (Holliday Grainger) – she’s short on agency and long on red lipstick, as American as the hamburger advertisement on the wall behind her when she first locks eyes with her beau.
A staggeringly dull film, “The Finest Hours” comes alive exactly once – when the small Coast Guard craft races to get over the sandbar in the Cape to even have a chance at rescuing the crew of the Pendleton. Working the boat almost like a surfboard, Bernie ducks it under the crashing waves to make it through to deep waters.
The film leans hard on Carter Burwell’s Sturm und Drang score – he must have been instructed to raise the stakes (or at least keep the audience awake) in every sequence.
The shots of the flavorless seadogs are numbingly repetitive. There’s a rotation between Cluff at the radio and radar, Ray monitoring the gauges on the crippled ship (this part of the film might have shared the same set as Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video), and Bernie squinting at the swells in front of his boat.
The emotional crux of the picture seems to be that Miriam asked Bernie to marry her and it was so confusing he had to sail a suicide mission to reaffirm his masculinity. The seamen are dead set on determining who went out the farthest and lasted the longest, the ultimate expression of virility. Affleck and Pine are so stilted it’s enough to make you think the acting in “Titanic” was pretty good after all.
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“The Finest Hours” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13. Running time 1:57. Visit www.cinemawest.com.
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