Crow (Part One)

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

This is the strange but true story of a wannabe hero who bottled out without leaving a message when his attempt to circumnavigate the globe hit troubled waters. His poorly prepared vessel and delayed late autumn start didn’t help matters. Marooned in the middle of nowhere he threw in the towel when the elements conspired against him. James Marsh’s The Mercy was a decent stab at the story and enjoyable enough largely due to Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in the lead roles. But Rumley’s low budget psychological drama is by far a better film. Leaner, meaner and infinitely more moving, it cuts straight to the chase with some salient, snappily edited opening scenes that see the entire endeavor from Crowhurst’s unique point of view. Spare on dialogue, it’s a plucky prequel to the descent into doom. Salinger’s Crowhurst is a pullover-ed Walter Mitty character whose ambition far outreaches his talent. With an ailing business on his hands, his first concern is winning the money, and his ego explodes buoyed up by the prospect of being a hero – from the safety of his chintzy armchair in Teignmouth. While Firth’s Crowhurst was more internalized about the drawbacks, trying to contain his anxiety and hide it from his family; Salinger bluffs things over with a misplaced bravado that often gets the better of him in the wee small hours when he sobs into his wife’s comforting bosom.

After the stress of the preparation, the bleached out sailing sequences are the dreamlike impressionistic focus of this trip to the nightmarish depths of claustrophobic despair. Told through the intricate details of his domestic hell inside the boat: sleepless nights, tinned food, broken equipment and flooding – all this is set to a minimal ambient score of electronic beeps and echoes as the haunting loneliness of his dread and anxiety eventually leads to the epiphany moment where he morphs into maniacal Mitty mode before madness and misadventure eventually blow his mind and puncture his spirit after a solitary slap up lunch on Christmas Day. While, on dry land, his bloated agent, wife and back-up team give rousing renditions of “Jerusalem”, ” Silent Night” and “I Vow to the My Country”, Mr Mitty is having a ghostly last tango in Argentina.

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

The Mercy is a glossy, prestige drama with awards aspirations (which are not unwarranted). Crowhurst — written (with Andy Briggs) and directed by Simon Rumley — isn’t so much an arthouse take as one more akin to the British equivalent of grindhouse: 70s horror, a little bit psychedelic, a little bit queasy, a little bit experimental, a lot existential. The film takes place almost entirely on Crowhurst’s trimaran boat, the Teignmouth Electron, at sea, though the tone is set by a scene on land, when Crowhurst (an electrifying Justin Salinger: Everest, Robot Overlords) hesitates in signing the contract with his business partner that puts him on the hook for more money than he could ever pay back, should he fail to complete the race. In the otherwise quiet room, a clock ticks, loud and aggressive, a pestering metronome of pressure. At sea, the monotony of quiet, lonely routine — which Rumley presents with a kind of hushed dread all its own — soon gives way to eerie, almost stream-of-consciousness horror as the poorly constructed and unfinished Electron begins to fall apart in the middle of the ocean, and as Crowhurst’s mind begins to unravel with the impossible audacity of what he has attempted, and what he stands to lose. Recurring motifs of English patriotic songs sung by Crowhurst’s family — in his imagination, perhaps, or twisted memories of how they sung him off to sea — feel like irresistible self-bullying: Don’t you dare let the side down! Recurring nightmares of fish flapping around him in his bunk, gasping for air, dying, are like a funhouse distortion of his own struggle to right himself, to find a way out of this mess of his own making. The washed-out 70s-home-movie vibe of the film (not represented in the images here, or, weirdly, in any of the studio-supplied stills) renders Crowhurst’s descent into madness as something spied-upon and therefore true… even though much speculation is involved. Crowhurst is a jarring, visceral experience… but not much more than that. It’s too intimate, perhaps, too inward-looking, to offer the larger context that a real story with historical import and modern relevance could demand. But then, we have The Mercy for that.

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]