The Finest Hours, the true story of the US Coast Guard’s famous 1952 rescue of crewmen from a stricken oil tanker in a savage storm, is a strange hybrid of a movie. On the one hand, the rescue sequences are marvellously staged and truly gripping, but the parts set on shore are weirdly faithful to a clean-cut, PG-rated, overly nostalgic idea of 1952 that derives more from movies of the period than from contemporary reality.
On the high seas, we meet Casey Affleck and his beleaguered engine-room crew, nervous about whether a recent weld in their ship’s hull will hold together in these terrifying seas. It doesn’t, but that’s only the half of it, literally, as their entire ship is torn in two, the fore section sunk with all officers, radio, radar and tiller. On shore, meanwhile, we have Coast Guard captain Chris Pine – recently engaged to be married, and with some recent Lord Jim-type failure to compensate for – instructed to head out to sea with a small craft and crew of four and rescue the men aboard the tanker.
First Pine must make it over a vicious offshore berm, a genuine white-knuckle sequence that kills his comms, leaving him unable to locate his target. Meanwhile, ashore, his fiancee (Holliday Grainger) waits at Coast Guard HQ with a nerve-wracked gallery of wizened old salts and other wives.
The rescue material makes the movie, with some bone-chilling, ice-bound Joseph Conrad sequences, even though most of them are CGI-based. But the onshore scenes seem designed to recall 1952 in ways reminiscent of the most virginal, conservative pictures of that era. This is, after all, a Disney film.
Grainger has a great 1952 face – round, huge, lip-glossed mouth – reminiscent of all the forgotten, sweet, good-sport female leads of that era (Jane Powell, Jane Wyman, even the teenage Shirley Temple of Fort Apache) but is half feisty, half buttoned-down. Among the sea dogs, who fare better because they have more to do than sit and wait, Casey Affleck (seen at one point in a direct visual homage to Quint in Jaws) keeps his jaw so comically clenched you almost want to screw a big Popeye pipe into his face, while Ben Foster has a postwar bumpkin face straight out of The Trouble With Harry.
Pine, however, a plastic-looking 2016 guy – he looks as if he was born with a facelift – gives a performance so weedy he almost vanishes, taking a good deal of dramatic tension down with him. The onshore melodramatics – undernourished, short on honestly earned anxiety – reminded me, finally, of a clean-cut Disney live-action Fess Parker TV special from 1957.
The rest of the movie sails snugly in the digitally enhanced wake of Titanic and A Perfect Storm, but a droplet more 2016 knowingness in the interpersonal material might have put more iron in this picture’s soul.
