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What was the fuss about K-19?
Directorial indecision reduces movie to sub-par level
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Prem Panicker
For the first time after coming to New York, I am beginning to feel better about Bollywood --- apparently, we do not have a monopoly on taking good themes and make a complete hash of them. K-19: The Widowmaker accomplishes that Bollywoodian feat with ease.
The film owes its existence to a word I am still not sure how to pronounce --- here, you try to wrap your tongue around 'perestroika'. In any case, it is a story that for 28 years remained buried wherever Russians tended to bury their secrets, and only surfaced in the era of openness.
The real story --- on which the film is based --- runs approximately thus: In November of 1960, at the peak of the Cold War, the United States sent the USS George Washington, its first Polaris missile submarine --- a sophisticated vessel capable of lurking undetected, with its payload of 16 nuclear missiles, off the Russian coast for months on end --- on patrol.
In response, the Soviet leadership rushed to place its own first nuclear ballistic missile submarine --- the K-19, 4000 tons and 400 feet long -- into service, though it meant risking the crew in an untried and unready vessel.
The K-19 was an invitation to disaster. Its three ballistic missiles used liquid fuel -- toxic, corrosive, tricky to handle. Worse, her nuclear reactor sacrificed safety margins for power and compactness. On July 4, 1961, while under way on exercises, K-19 developed a leak in her reactor cooling system, which in turn could have produced a radioactive explosion. And such an explosion close to a NATO facility --- which is where K-19 was at the time --- could have spiraled into a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers.
Faced with this, the crew of K-19 had to attempt to repair the leak. They did so at terrible cost --- seven men died of exposure to radioactivity almost immediately, and 14 died shortly thereafter. The Soviet Union covered up the fiasco --- and in the process failed to give recognition to the heroic efforts of the sub's crew.
Enter producer-director Kathryn Bigelow and producer Joni Sighvatsson, with a film that is 'a real human drama about people with enormous commitment to their country, and even more commitment to their profession, their peers and their fellow human beings'.
'The story had all the elements for a dramatic movie,' director/producer Kathryn Bigelow said. She was right on the money there. Plus, the recent face-off between nuclear rivals on the Indian subcontinent could have given the tale a prescient, 'straight from the headlines', feel.
Yet, the film, five long years in the making, with an international lineup of actors from Canada, Iceland, England, Russia and Hollywood, fails to inspire any emotion other than a huge yawn.
Why? The answer is a plotline full of holes.
The principal characters are Captain Alexi Vostrikov (Harrison Ford) and Captain Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson). In a bid to heighten dramatic tension, Louis Nowra (story) and Christopher Kyle (screenplay) introduce a Captain Blight-Fletcher Christian dynamic between the lead characters.
Thus, the plot tells us that Polenin is a considerate, crew-friendly captain who was not seen, by the Soviet military hierarchy, as tough enough for the mission at hand. Vostrikov therefore supercedes him and from that point on, it is Vostrikov versus Polenin and crew.
To heighten this tension and underline Polenin's character, Vostrikov is portrayed as a cold-hearted martinet who works the crew to exhaustion and beyond with drill after impossible drill. This aspect plumbs the depths, literally, when Vostrikov orders the sub to dive way below its safe operating depths, then reverses direction to throw it into a headlong dive at, and through, the surface ice.
"I took this boat and this crew to the edge because we needed to know where it was."
Yes, well --- who in heck asked him to? His job, clearly spelt out by the high command, was to take up station at a predetermined spot, then let loose a test missile to let the United States know that Russia was armed, and deadly dangerous --- the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. How does that brief fit with exercises that could have buckled the sub's hull and rendered it hors d'combat?
The idea here is to heighten the differences between the captain and his executive officer (and crew). There is a lot of macho posturing, a build-up towards inevitable rebellion. But surprise, surprise, when push comes to shove, when the crew is in danger and the official political officer on board formally relieves Vostrikov of his charge, Polenin reverses tack for no explicable reason, castigates the mutineers and backs his captain to the limit. And beyond.
Makes you want to ask --- what, then, was a good 40, 45 minutes of fussing all about? And whatever happened to Polenin's vaunted sympathy for, and affinity with, the crew --- which the director is at such pains to paint?
This logical flaw in turn leads to the film's biggest structural defect. The first act revolves around creating an aura of doom around the sub as the captain plays cold-hearted, pig-headed martinet, and the second act leads inexorably to the rebellion. But then that goes pffffffft --- and then comes a third act that is about the sub's reactor malfunctioning, and various crew members risking life and limb to try and rectify it. In other words, the first two acts are a mini film without a climax, the third act is a climax without a film.
Admittedly, there is some tension in the third act, as the sub flounders within sight of an American destroyer, and the crew fight to plug the potentially fatal defect --- but it is too little, too late, and too long drawn. A court martial, where Neeson makes the kind of tiresome speech so beloved of Bollywood, tops this climax. This in turn is topped by a graveside get-together, many years later, of the crew and captain. The result being that the film stretches a good 20 minutes beyond the logical climax.
Marit Allen's costumes work, but the strident, ear-splittingly martial music (composed by Klaus Badelt, performed by the Kirov Orchestra), is another negative.
Performance-wise, Harrison Ford in fur cap and faux-Russian accent goes grimly about his work, while Neeson --- who does not even bother to try an accent --- induces sympathy until that moment in cinematic time when he faces down the rebels and, in doing so, trashes the character that has been constructed for him. After that, you just don't care.
Ultimately, it all boils down to the direction. Bigelow piles it on thick in an obvious attempt to layer drama upon drama, rather than build to a gradual peak of suspense. There is the odd good scene --- my personal favourite is a football game on ice. But such 'look-at-me' moments are too few and far between. Overall, this is one submarine flick that forgets the course it set out to chart, and finds itself adrift on a sea of directorial indecision. In other words, most definitely sub-par.
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