Nathaniel Carper-Young, Sophomore
The final William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, is a fitting testament to the director’s eclectic talents: it is at once riveting, economical, and profoundly restrained. The film (whose text originates from a celebrated 1951 Herman Wouk stage play of the same name) engages in a sort of eternal poetry of ugly dramatics, finding its moments of climax in the ridges of a searing scowl from Lance Reddick, or perhaps in the twinkling eyes of a disgruntled Jason Clark. This is why the film is so immediately impressive — Friedkin is able to pull so much out of his camera and his actors, even (especially) in the context of a narrative throughline as minimal as people in a courtroom arguing over the significance of a broken coffeemaker.
With this final project, Friedkin’s resources were tight. He had a 2-million-dollar budget to work with (as opposed to, say, The Exorcist, which cost around 64 million, adjusted for inflation), and it shows. There are no grand set-pieces, no extravagant locations, nor are there even any flashbacks, and therefore no moments of on-screen action — a lesser filmmaker might be inclined to fill something so heavy in dialogue and legal jargon to the brim with numerous juxtapositional scenes of calamity, panic, violence, what-have-you. However, not Friedkin; his cinema was often one of formal restraint (Bug is unbelievable), and his mastery of the smaller movie is plainly apparent here — The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, being perhaps the smallest project Friedkin ever made, is one of the most thoroughly gripping films of the last year. The courtroom is made an explicitly modern site of murder and hurt, and it is surprisingly effective.
The actual narrative of the film is of little importance; the film tells the story of Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Jake Lacy) and his (alleged) mutiny against Naval Commander Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland). This mutiny took the form of Maryk relieving Queeg in a time of great stress (a cyclone) on the grounds that Queeg was not mentally capable of performing his duties. In the film, Maryk is being court-martialed for his misconduct, and his defense is ostensibly meager — Lieutenant Greenwald (Jason Clarke) is Maryk’s attorney, and at the beginning of the film, Greenwald informs Maryk that he thinks he’s guilty. On the prosecution is Lieutenant Commander Challee (Monica Raymund, who truly owns the screen), an experienced, prepared naval attorney (Greenwald, in turn, had four days to prepare his case). This sets the tone for the film and its drama; one is presented with a given underdog and a given villain (because if there is an underdog, there must be a villain), and who wants to root for a villain? This is what drives the film, this conflict — you are always hoping for the best for Maryk and Greenwald, and the worst for Queeg and Challee.
And so, the film runs with this fabricated, archetypal hero-versus-villain conceit for about 100 of its 110 minutes, making every sensible step — at the end of the trial, Goliath seems to fall, and David emerges looking triumphant. Those 100 minutes are fascinating because of how straight they are played; they are very entertaining and unbelievably well-acted, but nothing really comes as a surprise. However, in those final 10 minutes, after all of the relationships have been established and the movie has seemingly concluded, the camaraderie collapses. Greenwald, drunk at a party, essentially tells Maryk that he is guilty, but also that Maryk’s writer friend (previously a near non-character) is even guiltier. He ineffectually waxes inebriated about America and terrorism and whatever-else, but this final scene works as the skeleton key for the entire film: all of the drama, all of the entertainment, all of the archetypal shadow-boxing — it meant nothing. There is no happy ending, and there is no justice. It was all a sham; lost in the wind.