At Issue with Captain Phillips

This film, along with Gravity and Prisoners, easily gripped me on a long flight from the US to the Middle East last March, and kept me awake when I should have been sleeping.  But oh well.  You see what grips me, and scores of others, is the drama: story, acting, filming, script etc.  We know it's art, and in absorbing ourselves in it, we deliberately break from the reality of our lives.  The drama of course may have frank elements of fact in it, but on the whole it's a piece of fiction.  So there is a truly a Richard Phillips who wrote A Captain's Duty, on which the film was based.

Then the headline from the New York Post screamed: Crew Members: 'Captain Phillips' is one big lie.  To wit:

According to this crew member, during the first attack, as two pirate boats came into view, clearly chasing them, Phillips was putting the crew through a fire drill. In the film, it’s a security drill.

“We said, ‘You want us to knock it off and go to our pirate stations?’ ” the crew member recalls. “And he goes, ‘Oh, no, no, no — you’ve got to do the lifeboats drill.’ This is how screwed up he is. These are drills we need to do once a year. Two boats with pirates and he doesn’t give a s- -t. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

At first, Phillips maintains this is a lie. “No,” he says. “The mate called up and said, ‘Do you want to stop the drill?’ They [the boats] were seven miles away. There was nothing we could do. We didn’t know the exact situation.”

But is it true that he ordered the entire drill completed anyway?

“Correct,” Phillips says.

You see, it's one thing to fictionalize facts.  We may like it or not, and we may or may not be cognizant of it, but what makes any art so ennobling, even cathartic is its artistic license, that is, to create whatever it is that the artist wishes to create.

Consider the following exchange between the protagonist and his lady companion in another brilliant film - V for Vendetta:

(image credit)

It's another thing altogether, however, to factualize fiction.  Some people may be prone to believe what they see in a film or read in a book, even if they know it's fiction. That's something each of them has to reconcile on his or her own. But when the media steps in, and the President comes calling, then it truly is quite another thing indeed:

“We vowed we were going to take it to our graves, that we weren’t going to say anything,” Perry told CNN in 2010. “Then we hear this p.r. stuff about him giving himself up . . . and the whole crew’s like, ‘What?’ ”

“If you’re gonna shoot somebody, shoot me!” Hanks pleads in the film.

It didn’t go down like that, say several crew members: The pirates just reneged on the deal, grabbing their guy and making off with Phillips in a Maersk lifeboat.

While the remaining crew waited for the Navy to reach them, they sat and wondered: What just happened?

Four days later, Phillips was rescued by SEAL Team Six. He was hailed as an American hero. He met with President Obama in the Oval Office and wrote a memoir.

In the run-up to Friday’s release of “Captain Phillips,” [actor Tom] Hanks has appeared on the cover of Parade magazine with Phillips and the headline “The Making of an American Hero.” The film won the opening-night slot at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 28 and opened the London Film Festival last Wednesday. It has won raves, all of which note the film is based on real events. The two men have walked the red carpet together.

We may never know the real story of that pirate assault of Captain Phillips and his crew, but it bears investigation, as some media outfits have evidently done, if only to hear the multiple sides of the story (i.e., from crew members as well).  At best, then, hailing Phillips as an American hero sounded rather premature, and, at worst, it was a big oops, if not an outright lie.