Richard Curtis finally made the leap to directing his movies himself in 2004 with Love Actually. But what is a Richard Curtis-directed feature like? Obviously there’s a greater degree of control –the three films he directed feel like unconstrained visions. There’s a maverick wildness with certain ideas and characters and plotlines not present to such a degree in the movies he wrote for other filmmakers. With Love Actually and The Boat That Rocked we see his enthusiasm for ensembles, inspired heavily by Robert Altman. But mostly there’s a more pronounced style, a greater emphasis on music, a cheekiness, and occasionally stand-out editing choices. The sharpness of the script remains the same.
The quality of the story: not entirely so. And that brings us to what’s probably one of Curtis’ lesser films, certainly his weakest as a director. But it’s also a movie I do quite like in some regards. The Boat That Rocked was his first movie since Bean (that one not particularly good itself) not to be a romantic comedy. Rather it was meant as a comedy love letter to the pirate radio stations he no doubt consumed as a child in an era when BBC Radio refused to broadcast much in the way of popular music. These stations, operating in the grey area of legality from ships in international waters, played rock and pop hits twenty-four hours in defiance of government regulation and radio censorship; and Curtis recognized how cool an idea this was for a movie, as well as the opportunity it offered to indulge in his counterculture, anti-authoritarian impulses. I mean, he made the villainous government suit played by Kenneth Branagh cartoonishly obtuse and out-of-touch (at least until Jacob Rees-Mogg proved those cretins are in fact real) in a characteristic manner not unlike his former writing partner Ben Elton might conceive. By contrast, the motley gang of Radio Rock, the titular ship based largely on Radio Caroline, are a liberated, eccentric, and mischievous pack of underdogs –laddish in that very innocuous kind of way often seen in male-oriented comedies. Their lifestyle is generally just another frat boys club, albeit a weirdly semi-responsible one where we never see them ingesting drugs as they surely would have been in 1966, and everyone makes sure to have protected sex. Though they are much more fun as characters (owing almost entirely to the cast, which I’ll get into), in some ways they’re just as thin as Branagh’s smug minister.
None more so though than the lead character Carl, played by Tom Sturridge, an exceptionally dull teen sent to live on the ship after being expelled from school. He’s not much more than a pretty boy, is by far the least funny character -you really get the sense Curtis didn’t relate to him, certainly not near as much as his other protagonists. In a way though he’s emblematic of some of the movies’ greater issues. He’s the straight man, an observer, and while he has a plot thread about finding his father on the ship and is involved in a couple sexual shenanigans, he’s still our blank slate, our outlet to experiencing the world of pirate radio. And he’s not much excited or invested in that world. There’s no indication he’s much of a music fan and so to cater to that, the music aspect that supposedly defines the lives of these characters doesn’t play much of a role. There’s plenty of pop music in the soundtrack overscoring scenes and montages, but in addition to a lot of it being anachronistic (playing The Who and Cat Stevens songs years before they were popular artists), it has no more or less relevance than the musical accompaniments of Notting Hill. The most conversation about rock and pop music we get is ironically from Branagh and his subordinate played by Jack Davenport, amusingly called Twatt (in perhaps a nice homage to Darling in Blackadder). The DJs are much more concerned with when women or fans are going to be visiting the ship, or the power struggle between Philip Seymour Hoffman’s bombastic The Count and Rhys Ifans’ popular yet scummy Gavin Kavanagh. In fact in the case of these two, it’s their personalities that are higher commodities with their fans than the music they play. I know it’s not easy to keep focus on the power of rock ‘n roll when none of the characters are musicians, but Gurinder Chadha did it with Blinded by the Light, so why couldn’t Curtis?
The film instead gets bogged down in subplots and vignettes, as though it were a channel for some of the bits that didn’t make it into Love Actually. There’s the highly problematic sex comedy escapade where Nick Frost’s bawdy “Doctor” Dave arranges for Carl to deceptively rape Gemma Arterton in the dark (it fails); and subsequently Carl’s infatuation with his godfathers’ niece Marianne (an equally dull Talulah Riley) being ruined by Dave, who is supposed to be a likeable character -though I will give credit to Curtis for not shaming Marianne for having sex with Dave, allowing her a sexual independence not common of one-dimensional love interests in comedies like this. The biggest of these is the brief engagement and marriage between Chris O’Dowd’s “Simple” Simon and a model played by January Jones using him to get closer to Gavin, as well as the subsequent fallout. Amid these distractions, which are neither great nor horrible (except for the rape one), you barely notice any reverberations of the progress being made and regulations going into effect in Branagh’s story. Branagh never interacts with any of the pirates and the only correlative points come when Twatt sneaks aboard at one point and is hastily caught, and when the Marine Offences Act finally passes rendering pirate radio illegal. Until they actually break the law by continuing to broadcast after the Act goes into effect, in a scene where the whole crew pledge a loyalty to rock ‘n roll that hadn’t been firmly established, they don’t come off all that radical -certainly no more so than average hippies. I echo Manohla Dargis’ comments that while the film is decent and easy viewing, Curtis “has nothing really to say about these rebels for whom rock n’ roll was both life’s rhyme and its reason.”
And yet I do still like them. They’re not great characters independently but Curtis really knows how to cast a movie, as was established by the gangs of Four Weddings and Notting Hill. And The Boat That Rocked boasts one of the best British ensembles I’ve ever seen! In addition to those previously mentioned (Hoffman, Branagh, Ifans, Frost, O’Dowd, Davenport, Jones), the supporting cast consists of the likes of Bill Nighy, Rhys Darby, Ralph Brown, Katherine Parkinson, Will Adamsdale, and Emma Thompson. I especially loved Darby’s eccentric New Zealander Angus “the Nut”, and Parkinsons’ soft-spoken Felicity, graciously performed despite her lesbianism being her sole, oft-mentioned character trait. Nighy’s station manager Quentin is exceptionally smooth and witty, even as he’s trying to hook his godson up with his niece. But of course it’s the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman who steals the show, playing his best Jeff Bridges character as the gangs’ cool, roguish American leader. The dynamic across the group is quite strong, the cast of mostly comedians has good chemistry, and in that Altman fashion that Curtis may have been going for, I could see these characters and their situation better realized in television a la M*A*S*H.
For its North American release, The Boat That Rocked was retitled Pirate Radio, and about a half hour was cut. It seems the U.S. distributor realized the movie was too long but didn’t actually know the right stuff to cut, resulting in a film even more choppy and unevenly paced. This, hand in hand with a grossly misleading marketing campaign that played looser with history than the film and implied Hoffman’s character (as the American) was the lead, meant North Americans had to settle for a lesser product. It’s not as bad as say, the American butchering of Y Tu Mama Tambien because The Boat That Rocked isn’t much a great film to begin with, but it is an insult nonetheless and a bad idea in any case.
Curtis can’t play off his usual sentiment, arguably his greatest strength, in The Boat That Rocked -not that he doesn’t hint at it. There are the sparks of good romantic comedies in the margins of this movie -not between Sturridge and Riley of course; but I would love to see a film about O’Dowd and that female fan he meets at the end, or more of Parkinson and Olivia Llewellyn (that instance where they lock eyes for the first time might be one of the most romantic moments I’ve seen in a movie). I feel Curtis really did want to put aside those usual devices though to honour a great monument of his youth that both embodied his love of music and his fight-the-power political sensibilities (which he doesn’t often get the chance to express); only he didn’t know how.
Still, I can’t say it’s not fun at times, that it doesn’t capture the spirit it’s going for. The cast and even the humour is delightful, it’s in love with the period; and I can’t fault any movie too much that ends with Bill Nighy soaked on a rescue boat in the middle of the North Sea proclaiming with absolute sincerity and solemnity, “rock ‘n roll” as he fist pumps the air.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment