Reviewed: William Friedkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
Peter Tonguette
The great American filmmaker William Friedkin made movies about a police officer whose methods were scarcely discernible from criminals (The French Connection), a priest challenged on his own failings by the devil (The Exorcist), and a detective who blends in far too comfortably with the murder suspect he is pursuing (Cruising). Friedkin, who died in August at the age of 87, did not merely tell the stories of these flawed figures, but seemed to comprehend their essential universality. Each of us, Friedkin was saying, shares in the flaws that make an officer compromised, a priest doubtful, and a detective enigmatic. He spoke of his interest in what he called “the thin line between good and evil.”
Friedkin’s harsh, harsh vision is as far from being touchy-feely as imaginable, yet his works are possessed by a peculiar empathy for those scoundrels, outcasts, and misfits who are judged by a society that nonetheless cannot proffer any alternatives to them.
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With his final film, Friedkin again addresses his essential theme. In his modernized interpretation of Herman Wouk’s play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which begins streaming on Paramount+ on Oct. 6, Friedkin contends with the figure of Lt. Cmdr. Phillip Queeg, the allegedly off-his-rocker leader of the USS Caine who is relieved of duty by a pearl-clutching subordinate. Like Wouk, Friedkin asks whether Queeg, for all his quirks and foibles, was nonetheless essential for the functioning of the military (just as the officer in The French Connection may have been what was called for in crime-ridden 1970s-era New York). And, like Wouk, Friedkin comes down solidly on the side of Queeg, played here, in an urgent performance, by Kiefer Sutherland.
Friedkin, who penned this adaptation of the play that updates the time frame from World War II to the Persian Gulf in 2022, is saying that an uptight oddball like Queeg is preferable to the wan whippersnappers who stand in judgment of him.
The fellow facing the court-martial is Lt. Stephen Maryk, who, as played by Jake Lacy, is the latest in a line of seemingly indistinguishable bland young men in the Friedkin oeuvre. There’s the suspected murderer played by Richard Cox in Cruising, the in-over-his-head father played by Dwier Brown in The Guardian, even the clean-cut but loony conspiracy theorist played by Michael Shannon in Bug. Friedkin can barely stomach Maryk, who, in a narrative that remains largely intact from the Wouk original, is accused of mutiny for wresting control of the Caine from Queeg for the latter’s mismanagement during a typhoon.
During the course of the court-martial, Queeg is characterized as a “petty tyrant” for various misdeeds and overreactions, the totality of which lead to the accusation that he is essentially of unsound mind. In example after example, assorted underlings allege that he has lapsed into fits of megalomania over otherwise inconsequential infractions involving strawberries, a coffee maker, and the overuse of water on board the Caine. In Friedkin’s film, Monica Raymund plays Cmdr. Katherine Challee, the prosecutor who exposes these accusations for the babyish complaints that they are. The character of Challee not only has truth and realism on her side, but she is played by an actress who makes her points forcefully and convincingly. Similarly, Friedkin grants great authority to the head judge, Capt. Luther Blakely (played with effortless command by the late Lance Reddick, to whom the film is dedicated).
Yet, as in Wouk’s play, Friedkin gives a wide berth to Lt. Maryk’s defense attorney, Lt. Barney Greenwald (an excellent Jason Clarke), who overstates the significance of Queeg’s eccentricity and, moreover, dragoons Queeg into exposing the fault lines in his own character. In a film shot in generous, gliding wide shots, perhaps the most significant close-up comes when we first see Queeg manipulate a set of marbles in his hands — a nervous habit said by one military psychiatrist to reflect Queeg’s attempts to conceal a tremor in his hands. Despite the advocacy of the prosecutor, and the skepticism of the judge, we know, with this one perfectly filmed and edited shot, that Queeg’s goose is cooked.
In the end, injustice prevails: Maryk is acquitted and Queeg is permanently tarnished as a weirdo, a control freak, and a scold. Sutherland brings a mush-mouthed stridency to a role made famous nearly seven decades ago by Humphrey Bogart in the fine 1954 film version of the novel on which Wouk based his play, The Caine Mutiny.
In the denouement, Greenwald becomes sufficiently inebriated to tell the truth about the whole awful affair: Maryk deserved to be brought up on charges of mutiny, and Queeg, as Greenwald puts it, deserved better. In this updated version of the story, Greenwald admits to being one of the eager young recruits who signed up to join the armed forces after 9/11, but Queeg and his kind “were already on station and ready to go,” he says. Queeg may be a nutter, but you cannot choose the men who step up to defend you — just as you cannot choose the officers who protect you or the priests who exorcise you. The film would make fascinating viewing alongside Friedkin’s big-budget military drama Rules of Engagement, which suggested that there was complexity and ambiguity even to an act as shocking as the U.S. military firing on protesters outside an embassy. That boldly probing, brilliantly realized film came before 9/11, but it asked the same moral questions that would become central to the Bush era — and came up with few emotionally appealing answers.
This Caine Mutiny, then, is both pure Wouk and distinctly Friedkinesque — a most unexpected melding of two seemingly incompatible artistic personalities. Yet Wouk’s language and plotting also bring out a pleasing classicism and control in Friedkin’s style. Although Friedkin had come to specialize in adaptations of plays near the end of his career — both Bug and the invigoratingly misanthropic Killer Joe were based on works by Tracy Letts — this is his first film in decades that eschews handheld photography and jarring editing for graceful, even luxurious camera moves. Friedkin seems to have been left rapt by the words his actors were speaking. The simple staging and well-appointed but unobtrusive courtroom decor focuses the audience’s attention on the issues at hand. We, the jury, must conclude that Friedkin has it right: in this era of naive virtue signaling, Capt. Queeg is the hero we have been waiting for.
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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.