briandfinley

I first saw Sometimes A Great Notion in the summer of 1972 at the Lorain Drive-In, in Lorain Ohio, with my best pal Gene Moore (shout out to Gene, wherever you are). We were both 16 years old, at a point in time in America where we were teetering between the post-WWII ethos of our parents' generation, and the emergence of a more ambiguous and self-centered way of looking at the world. This film is about that tension between the old ways and the new. I havn't seen it in 40-some years, so it's no longer springtime fresh in my mind, but it left an indelible mark on my young consciousness at the time. I can reflect on that time and pick any number of films which better articulate the struggle that was going on in our country, but this one always stuck with me, partly because of the setting; our families and our friends worked in steel mills and factories. Work was very hard, and full of consequences that could be violently life-changing. There was no such thing as self-awareness, selfcare, self...anything. If it had been made in the 80s or 90s, there might have been more in the way of verisimilitude and less in the way of Hollywood cliche, and the presentation would almost certainly have been more grounded in the real world it tries so hard to represent. But, I remember this film very fondly. On the other hand, I liked practically every movie I saw at the Lorain Drive-In.

Oh boy...well, let's see. It does have a great cast . Frank Grillo is always fun to watch, even when the material is dopey claptrap, as this is. A sort-of star-studded cast (if Mel Gibson van be still be considered a star) does little to advance the story; the actors are basically product-placement ads: Look! There's Michelle Yeoh! Hey There's Ken Jeong! And what in the hell persuaded Naomi Watts to join this mess? There's a lot of ass-kickin' and shootin' and car crashes, and stuff occasionally blows up, but there is nothing approaching a narrative that makes sense or even produces an occasional chuckle. And they clearly spent about a hundred million dollars in the process. Next time: hire a writer.

I saw another review that complained about "little effort at any sort of character development", which is accurate enough, but doesn't come close to capturing the essence of what this film is about. The source material, C. S. Forster's novel "The Good Shephard" is a third-person narrative that details what the Hanks character, Commander Krause, is experiencing in the moment over a period of three or four days. It is a tersely economical war story that focuses on the mechanics of how this part of the war is fought, and how command decisions have to be made deliberately and swiftly, with terrible consequences if errors in judgement are made. This is not "The Winds of War".

The film tells much of it's story visually, with the bulk of the dialogue being Commander Krause's orders given to his crew or to ships captain's on the other escort. Krause has a few confabs with Lieutenant Commander Charlie Cole (very ably played by the terrific Steven Graham) regarding their strategic and tactical options, but aside from that, the dialogue is all business. The viewer is left to observe behavior rather than being spoon-fed verbal cues in order to understand the characters. Hanks is brilliant, conveying his feelings of apprehension, remorse, anger and guilt with his eyes and pursed facial expression. It's a fantastic performance.

Like Hank's other WWII projects (Saving Private Ryan, Band Of Brothers, The Pacific) this is an homage to the ordinary people who undertook this extraordinary work under brutal conditions and the constant threat of horrible suffering and death. I think it's a fantastic movie.