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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