Tuesday, September 7, 2021

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN (2003)

 






PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*


 

 

The failure of 1995’s CUTTHROAT ISLAND seemed to provide the last hurrah for the piracy-swashbuckler. The genre flourished in the days of the studio system, when the major filmmakers could maintain lavish sets, including the simulacra of mighty sailing-ships—sets which could also be rented by smaller studios for humbler productions. But one offshoot of the largely naturalistic genre—what might best be called “the supernatural swashbuckler”—arose in the 2000s to keep the icon of the pirate alive and kicking.

 

The setup of PIRATES appears, like many previous works in the genre, to place its emphasis upon the star-crossed fate of two young lovers. Heroine Elizabeth Swann is still in her girlhood when she and her father are sailing toward Jamaica, where the elder Swann serves as governor. The ship discovers a young boy afloat on the waves in a boat, and though he’s still alive when they take him aboard, he has no memory of his past. He’s newly christened with the name Will Turner and apprenticed to a Jamaican blacksmith, but unbeknownst to the governor, Elizabeth becomes fascinated with the young boy. Eight years later, and played respectively by Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, the two youths share a secret love, but commoner Will has no chance with a daughter of the English aristocracy. Governor Swann wishes Elizabeth to marry landed gentry like himself and pushes her to an alliance with a naval officer, Norrington.

 

 Into this struggle between rigidly stratified classes saunters the story’s real star: a gangling, loony-talking seaman who turns out to be none other than the notorious Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Sparrow clashes with the constabulary, who want to hang him, but he ends up rescuing Elizabeth from a planned marriage, so that he fulfills one of Will’s desires even while placing the young woman in danger. There’s a lot of rigamarole about why Sparrow went missing for years and how he lost his pirate ship and his crew to his rival Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), and some of the rigamarole has to do with a supernatural curse that was apparently was not part of the original script. Nevertheless, even though the magical elements seem haphazard at best, they’re almost certainly the things that sold the PIRATES project to an audience for whom swashbucklers are more defined by light sabers than by cutlasses.

 

In contrast to the original film’s first two bloated sequels, though, the first PIRATES entry displays the core of a good psychological opposition to match the sociological struggle between stultifying respectability and raucous lawbreaking (though no one is seen doing anything really piratical). It eventually comes out that Will’s long-deceased father was one of Sparrow’s crewmen, and Will, as a descendant of the original crew, possesses a possible cure for Barbossa and his cursed pirates. Sparrow allows Will access to the lawbreaking world of his father, and it wouldn’t have been hard to rewrite PIRATES along Oedipal lines, with an actual father from death returning to lay claim to the son’s true lover. But then, Johnny Depp conveys no paternal associations; he’s more like the “weird uncle.” Sparrow makes various lascivious remarks to Elizabeth in the course of the movie, but there’s never any real sense that he’s a genuine romantic rival for Elizabeth’s hand, and so she too profits from Sparrow taking her for a walk on the wild side.  

 

Director Gore Verbinski and his crew steer a steady course, ably paying homage to the naturalistic thrills of Classic Hollywood pirate-flicks, and the score, emphasizing the rhythm of pounding waves, makes the film a delight to listen to as well as to see. 


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