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Back to the Feature: Dead Calm (1989)

Dead Calm is remembered as the movie that really launched the careers of both Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane. Yet my reason for finally watching the film has to do with its third star who, despite the movie’s fairly memorable premise and execution (enough so that it has been parodied a handful of times), is often forgotten was even a part of it. But as in just about every movie he appeared in, Sam Neill is compelling and singular here, and quietly excellent in a role that demands just as much as his younger co-stars if its not as involved or sexually provocative. Neill’s recent unexpected passing is a tough pill to swallow, and I felt a compulsion to engage with some work of this internationally beloved Kiwi who may well have been one of my favourite actors. And Dead Calm, which is a great and popular story, felt like the right piece.
Director Philip Noyce and screenwriter Terry Hayes came to the material after an earlier version famously failed to manifest. The book Dead Calm by Charles Williams was the source of an attempted late-period Orson Welles movie called The Deep, which Welles worked on for three years with his partner Oja Kodar appearing in the lead role before abandoning it due to its highly difficult and inconsistent production -later the negatives of what had been shot were lost. Noyce bringing it to the screen was a particular triumph in that context.
Restoring the original title, Noyce and Hayes changed the setting from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific. Their story centres on an Australian couple, John and Rae Ingram (Neill and Kidman respectively) recovering from the traumatic death of their young son with a vacation on their yacht out to sea. They encounter a wayward schooner and a single American man adrift whom they rescue called Hughie (Zane). He claims to be the single survivor of a bout of deadly food poisoning that hit the rest of his crew, but John having a hard time buying it, rows out to the boat to investigate while Hughie recuperates, only to discover a slowly sinking vessel full of horribly mutilated corpses. In this time unfortunately, Hughie commandeers the yacht and sails it away, stranding John and leaving Rae in his psychotic clutches.
Most of the movie’s attention is hereafter focused on the tension between Hughie and Rae, as Rae has to feign compliance in order to stay alive and reunite with John while Hughie proves completely unhinged in both personality and motivation. What he actually wants and where he is taking the yacht is an open question -his paranoid musings never landing anywhere concrete. John learns that he was seemingly a photographer for models on the previous boat before his presumed violent rampage -but anything else about him is unreliable and that’s good. It makes him far more threatening. The fact that he is still clever and cognizant but it can be difficult for Rae to tell when, adds to that too. It is little wonder that both Kidman and Zane benefited enormously from what this movie allowed of them. Kidman was starting to rise in her career at this time, but Zane was mostly a small-time actor -his other role of 1989 was a reprisal of his then biggest credit as a goon to Biff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II. He is very confident and menacing here though, and Kidman plays the quietly suppressed terror of his victim well.
That sexual dynamic though is very important -and it is something that Hayes and Noyce added not present in the original book. It is certainly uncomfortable, in that its debatable whether Rae’s ultimate sexual activity with Hughie is technically consensual -given it is part of a ruse and clearly not something she is enthusiastic about. Up to that point his whole presence reeks of sexual dominance and coercion as perhaps the only thing he is really after. And of course it functions to emasculate John in absentia -Neill is never sexualized by the camera here Kidman and Zane are. The audience is meant to take him being made a cuckold as one of the film’s greatest horrors. They are also meant to perhaps read a warped attraction towards one another -Noyce includes several close-ups of Rae and Hughie looking at the other in a heated texture, glistening sweat on the brow and similar sultry indicators. Rae’s whole deception is marked by concession and submissiveness, and via details of composition and body language the film would argue it is not entirely unwilling. A contrast of masculinity is presented between Hughie and John -John is stable and tender, but Hughie is dangerous and spontaneous. It is a kind of idea, or put more bluntly a fantasy, that has largely fallen out of fashion in recent decades, certainly when presumed as in this movie’s case from a male perspective positing what young women subconsciously want in a sexual partner (women artists are of course much more astute at walking that tightrope generally). That allusion to the attraction of a kind of violent and primal sexual interplay feels rightly more complex and less uncritical now.
But for all of this subtext, the text remains on point of Hughie being dangerous and spontaneous in a decidedly non-sexy way. Through several scenes, Zane plays him in a manner akin to Jack Nicholson in The Shining -fitting as this character also gets locked in a storage closet, though bound as well, when Rae spikes his drink. He is a crazed kind of devil capable of anything and his threat is accentuated by the isolation of the boat at sea -Rae can’t escape him. Her efforts to subdue him drip with vivid suspense and claustrophobia (and she is often foiled by her own dog), though of course to the latter degree it is nothing to what her husband experiences.
John spends much of this time in the sinking schooner, pumping out water and trying to catch up to the yacht, while learning a bit more about Hughie’s disturbing tendencies and communicating covertly on the radio to Rae, though only in a code of receiver clicks as it is too water damaged for him speak into it. As a result of this and him being on his own for so long, Neill performs in silence for most of his screen-time, or at least without dialogue. And he is perfectly engaging through it. For being coded as the less conventionally masculine of Rae's sexual prospects, he has a lot more grit and greater instincts than his counterpart -he is intelligent and resourceful and all of it comes across in how he pulls himself through his situation and determines to rescue his wife and ship. Neill plays his sequences with fear and some panic, but also a great deal of hardiness and confidence. This was in fact one of the movies that landed Neill on Spielberg's radar for Jurassic Park and it is easy to see why. In Neill's hands the character comes alive and challenges the dichotomy present to Rae -Hughie may represent danger and John safety, but safety doesn't have to be boring -it can be badass and stimulating in its own way. And it holds true in spite of a dearth of chemistry between Neill and Kidman (he was twenty years her senior after all).
Nevertheless, making John the ultimate hero of the piece in a horribly tacked-on ending is a major mistake. The movie reaches a natural, cathartic conclusion when Rae makes her stand, harpooning Hughie and setting him adrift before rescuing John as he catches up to the yacht. But apparently due to test audiences being unsatisfied with any sense of ambiguity regarding Hughie, a new ending was shot in which he turns into a slasher movie villain, surviving and climbing back aboard some time later to sneak up on Rae only for John to finally kill him via shooting a flare directly into his mouth. It is certainly dramatic, but rather silly too -feeling distinctly inorganic to everything else in the movie. And it diminishes a little the power of Rae defeating her abuser.
Dead Calm is a pretty decent thriller otherwise that does the theme of terror on a boat better than just about any other movie I've seen on the subject -few though those have been. Noyce has a very Hitchcockian grasp of suspense and sets a mood wonderfully well, assisted by a thrilling synth score by Graeme Revell -the film was a career breakout for him as well. Quite rightly, the performances of Kidman and Zane were noted -they each have a lot to work with and do very well with the material- but Neill delivers a strong showcase as well. An underrated but vital performance, as Neill was apt to give on any occasion.

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