The Finest Hours is Disney’s wistful retelling of a 1952 Coast Guard rescue attempt off the coast of Cape Cod. The setting is the small, quaint beach town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, home to mostly fishermen. Wellfleet is the type of town where everyone knows each other, a place where you don’t have to look before crossing the street, as an early scene depicts. Everything in the frame in The Finest Hours is saturated with a Disney-fied nostalgia that evokes the charm of a simpler time.
The lead character, Bernie Webber (Chris Pine), is an unassuming and timid man stationed at the local Coast Guard post. He strives to follow “regulations” and struggles to work up the courage to ask his supervisor’s permission to marry his girlfriend Miriam (Holliday Grainger). Director Craig Gillespie goes to great lengths to portray Webber as a chivalrous gentleman, adding to the film’s yearning nostalgia. Pine’s performance suffers from this insistence on being tame. Webber feels flat, and Pine is a good actor trapped in a boring, sheltered box of a character. However, even with all the mild-mannered and overly innocent cliches in the film, The Finest Hours works well as a disaster movie.
The film does a nice job of immersing the viewer in the experience of this disaster and rescue. You feel every bit like you’ve been transported to 1952. When the movie transitions to the high seas, the computer effects are lifelike and each scene is gripping. Webber’s mission is to take a four man team to find the remains of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker ripped in half by a merciless nor’easter. The storm is still roaring and any rescue plan is near impossible to accomplish. Aboard the slowly-sinking Pendleton, a ragtag group of survivors is narrowly held together by engineer Ray Sybert (a solid performance by Casey Affleck).
Any film that honestly explores human behavior in the face of near-certain death earns its moment. This is where The Finest Hours shines. A ghost from Webber’s past emerges – a rescue mission gone wrong where local fishermen were caught in a storm and drowned. The crew on the Pendleton has a variety of reactions from the chef singing peaceful songs in order to calm the fearful to an engineer who falls apart at the thought of not seeing his family again. Gillespie does a fantastic job of humanizing the crew, even those with limited screen time.
The constant fear of death not only adds suspense to the movie, it also appeals to the audience. Death is all around us, and our tendency is it to ignore it. The Finest Hours invites the viewer to examine their own ghosts, to find solidarity with humanity because we all face death together. After a movie like The Finest Hours, a big question to ask ourselves is phrased well by theologian Peter Rollins: “Death as nothingness impacts us all, and the big question… is not ’Is life possible after death?’ but ‘Can we live before we die?’” The film is thus aptly titled, because for several fine hours in February of 1952, through self-sacrifice, a few men discovered what it was like to truly live.
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