Cinematical

Director Phillip Noyce lets us know what he's up to at the beginning of Dead Calm, when Billy Zane turns to Nicole Kidman and nearly grinds the movie to a halt by launching into a monologue on her beauty. "When you're 80, you'll still be a beautiful woman." What follows is 90 minutes of near-pornographic close-ups and extreme close-ups, with a few medium shots thrown in for good measure. Noyce puts on such an exhibit of Kidman's face that I'm surprised he didn't insist on some kind of 'discovered by' credit. I'd be willing to wager this movie is framed more in close-ups than any other in the past twenty years.

Dead Calm is about more than faces, though - the story has a lengthy pedigree. Orson Welles famously sunk years of his life into an attempt to film this story of one man who descends into the bowels of a foundering ship in order to re-start its engines, while his wife battles a satanic killer on an adjacent blue-water sloop. Welles' beneficiaries still had the rights to the story when Noyce and his producers embarked on making a new version, and the negotiating had to be done with Welles' girlfriend, Oja Kodar. Rumor has it she refused to show them Welles' Dead Calm footage, for fear that they would sensibly just try to copy it. Interesting footnote: actress Jeanne Moreau, who appeared in that film, and director Peter Bogdanovich, who was responsible for spading frozen peas into Welles' blowhole in the final years, both insist the film was shot to completion and exists now in a semi-finished state.

It's easy to see why The Master would have been attracted to the project; the story structure makes the movie nearly free of important dialogue, which is challenging. The dual crises, with one ship sinking and the other hijacked, also requires thoughtful direction and provides a lot of interesting opportunities. There's also the inherent challenge of shooting on water, which seems to tempt the most talented directors at least once during their careers. The water in Noyce's version of Dead Calm is especially gorgeous - the film was shot in Whitsunday Passage, between mainland Australia and the Great Barrier Reef. (The current DVD issue of the film is woefully inadequate.)

In fact, Phillip Noyce does a number of things right, not the least of which is to make his camera truckle to Nicole Kidman's face in a way that would make Josef von Sternberg blush. He also keeps the motivation of the killer, played by Billy Zane, deliberately vague instead of spinning out an elaborate backstory, as I've heard exists in the original novel. We never find out why he killed everyone on board his own ship, or what motivates him into his psychotic rages. Zane's approach to the role, to make his character a corollary to the ocean's unpredictability, is appropriate. He's also quite sunburnt during the film, which adds to the performance.

Another thing I like about the initial interaction between the three leads is that there is no trust to be violated. In too many thrillers, strangers offer other strangers the benefit of the doubt and let them enough rope to hang themselves. In this movie, Kidman and Neill never believe the story of the stranger who arrives in a rowboat for a second. They prepare for the worst, but continue doing the right thing nevertheless. Whether or not it's smart for a man to leave his wife on a boat with a bizarre stranger is another matter, but since there would be no movie unless this happened, you have to let it slide.

The film is technically top-notch; the sets seem to be hoisted up onto some sort of gimble contraption that rocks them back and forth, which is money well spent, since it adds to the reality and almost gives you sea-sickness during some of the later scenes. There is also some well-done underwater footage, and one extremely memorable, if disturbing shot where Sam Neill is fidgeting around in the undercarriage of the sinking ship and a naked dead woman floats into his point-of-view, vagina-first. You don't exactly see that on the shot list every day.

On the other hand, the film is blemished by a ridiculous prologue that seems completely boosted from another story. It has something to do with a car wreck, a child, and a few other elements that have no connection to the rest of the movie whatsoever. I strongly recommend taking a pair of garden shears to the first ten minutes of this film for any future director's cut. The performance of Sam Neill as the husband is also somewhat off-putting; he seems to realize that he is the functionary of the three leads, and his expression doesn't change much throughout the film. Perhaps he felt that between the astounding ocean footage and the director's bewitchment with Kidman's kiwi-fresh pallor, no one would pay any mind to his performance anyway.

Most of Noyce's films since Dead Calm have been rather tepid detective and political thrillers. To my knowledge, he's rarely made another film that could be said to exhibit a distinctive personal style, unless you count 2002's well-received Rabbit-Proof Fence (he's currently working on an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral, which I'm looking forward to for other reasons). As a director who is safely perched on the lower rung of the A-list, it seems likely that he may yet work with the prolific Kidman again in his career. When that happens, get ready for another round of record-shattering close-up action.