The Venice world premiere of William Friedkin’s final picture, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, began with a tribute to the late director (who died less than a month ago) from festival chief Alberto Barbera and jury president Damien Chazelle, the latter of whom gave a moving speech about the filmmaker, calling him “the kind of director who made the rest of us directors look safe.†The cast wasn’t there, owing to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes, but had they been, another absence would have been noticed: that of Lance Reddick, one of the stars, who died this past March. Knowing they’re not there certainly makes for a bittersweet watch — but not a distracting one, because soon enough, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial grabs your attention with its hard-edged, engrossing filmmaking.
Friedkin adapted many theatrical pieces for the screen over the course of his career. Indeed, he was one of those directors who seemed to know just exactly how much to “open up†(or not) a particular play when trying to turn it into a film. Some, like Tracy Letts’s Bug (a late-period masterpiece for Friedkin), needed very little futzing with. For The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, based on Herman Wouk’s acclaimed 1953 stage play (which the author wrote in the wake of his best-selling 1951 novel, which in turn was also adapted into a hit 1954 war picture starring Humphrey Bogart), Friedkin updates the time period, bringing it into the present day and the so-called War on Terror, but he keeps much of Wouk’s dialogue and structure, remaining within the fixed location of the courtroom and the matter-of-fact cadence of testimony and cross-examination. The result may seem dry and theatrical at first, but it soon becomes quite absorbing. It also feels like a throwback to some of the TV drama work Friedkin did in the 1960s, early in his career. (Perhaps appropriately, it was just announced that The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will stream on Paramount+ with Showtime in the U.S. on October 6, then make its cable debut on Showtime on October 8.)
The story follows the trial of Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (played in this film by Jake Lacy), an executive officer who seized control of the minesweeper Caine from its captain, Philip Francis Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), during a deadly storm. Though Maryk is the accused, his defense attorney, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jason Clarke), ably turns the court-martial into an examination of the temperamental Queeg’s paranoid, petty, tyrannical ways, a pattern we soon discover reaches back months, even years. And let’s just say it: Those of us who’ve developed a fetish for shots of Jason Clarke calmly skewering witnesses in the wake of Oppenheimer are very much in luck.
The odds are stacked against Greenwald and Maryk, and Friedkin slyly nods to this in the ways that he shoots the competing attorneys. The military prosecutor, Commander Katherine Challee (Monica Raymund), is often framed in full shots against a row of military judges. The camera tracks with her as she moves confidently, a subtle visual echo of the institutional power she commands. Greenwald and Maryk, by contrast, are often isolated and occasionally shot from lower angles. We sense that they’re fighting a system they have little chance against. As the head judge, Reddick exudes pure authority and becomes almost like the voice of God.
Because of the hermetically sealed nature of the film, it’s initially left to the viewers to decide what actually happened on the ship. But the deck is clearly stacked against Queeg, whom Sutherland plays as smug and awkwardly officious. The actor has played psychos more than once in his career, and while he doesn’t take Queeg that far, we can imagine, as we watch him, what a wounding experience it might be to serve under this guy. It’s a different depiction, of course, than Bogart’s, who played Queeg as a small, clearly fragile man with darting eyes; you started to feel sorry for the guy after a while.
This isn’t the first filmed adaptation of Wouk’s play. In 1988, Robert Altman did his version for television, with Brad Davis as Queeg, Eric Bogosian as Greenwald, and Jeff Daniels as Maryk. That, too, was a masterful piece of staging, and Davis (a very good actor, taken from us just a couple of years later by AIDS) gave Queeg a grandiosity that made it clear from the get-go that the man was unhinged. And the original work, The Caine Mutiny, Wouk’s epic novel, actually showed what happened on the ship, presenting Queeg as a vain, emotionally unstable dictator. That in turn set up the court-martial as a validation of the executive officer and his young allies’ actions.
But here’s where things get interesting. In both novel and play, Wouk pulls the rug out from under his characters (and the reader, and later the viewer) in a powerful and surprising coda right after the trial, in which Greenwald reveals how he really feels about Queeg and about the men who rose up against him, some of whom come from privilege. There are elements of Wouk’s own biography scattered throughout the story, and one senses in this epilogue a vein of self-criticism; he was, after all, a young man who served on minesweepers.
As a result of this, the finale of any version of The Caine Mutiny winds up becoming something of a bleak celebration of the career officers who are on the front lines of a war long before the enlisted men show up. It also suggests that after 20 years of service, the rigors and brutal infrastructure of the military may well turn people into Queegs. It’s a dark, unexpected, uncertain ending, and that powerful coda is one of the defining elements of any work with the words “Caine Mutiny†in it. Friedkin deploys it here as well, with an austere suddenness that makes it clear how radical it is, even after all these years.
Some might read this as a misstep, however. At the time Wouk was writing, the good war of WWII was recent, and the story’s ultimately patriotic overtones made perfect sense, however tempered they may have been by what we’d seen in the courtroom and onboard the ship. One of the threads of the original play is Greenwald’s Jewishness, which at first marks him as something of an outsider in this world and factors into the story’s denouement. (As a result, the final scene of Greenwald confronting the educated mutineers over their actions feels like the different sides of Wouk’s persona — the lower-class Jewish kid who went to Columbia and wound up writing a best-selling war novel during his military service — arguing amongst themselves.) Updating the work for modern times, Friedkin largely dispenses with this once-crucial element.
In bringing the story to the present, the director also appears at first to step in a hornet’s nest of discourse, as the legacy of the Forever Wars stands in sharp contrast to that of WWII. But I’d argue that this brings a surprising complexity to the film, and maybe even reinvents Wouk’s coda a little bit. It’s not a particularly patriotic ending anymore, but it does draw an even starker line between career military officers and the enlisted men and women who joined in the wake of 9/11, essentially marking them as two different cultures. “9/11 happened and so many of us joined up to fight the assholes who crashed those planes into those towers,†Greenwald recalls, noting his desire to “fly over the Middle East and bomb some terrorists.†He says this not with rage or vengefulness but a certain casual bitterness, as if he doesn’t really believe in it anymore.
It’s an idea that runs through Friedkin’s work. Back in 2000, he made a controversial (and underrated) war movie/legal drama called Rules of Engagement, starring Samuel L. Jackson as a Vietnam veteran who, while protecting the U.S. Embassy in Yemen from a throng of protesters and snipers, orders his men to fire on a crowd and winds up slaughtering dozens of civilians. Much of that film follows Jackson’s trial, as he is defended by an old, retired war buddy played by Tommy Lee Jones. Stylistically, that nervous, blustery work is miles away from The Caine Mutiny, but it has a similarly complicated vision of morality, justice, and the mental pressures of command. Rules of Engagement has the Hollywood sheen of a “good guys versus bad guys†blockbuster, but it leaves the viewer in a genuinely dark, uncertain place. At the time, it seemed like a paycheck picture for Friedkin, who had clawed his way back into the studio system’s good graces after a few missteps in the 1980s. But there were very few mainstream directors who could have pulled a movie like that off.
He has done something similar here, taking a play whose attitudes were forged on the front lines of WWII and sending it in a pointedly murky direction. Even with its complicated moral vision, Wouk’s ending reoriented the story’s emotional focus; some might argue it clarified it. Friedkin’s ending leaves you unsure of what to think or feel. It sends you out questioning your beliefs — about war, about service, about madness, even about right and wrong. In that sense, despite the lack of ornament and the reduced scale, this Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is pure Friedkin.
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