November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz, it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn't be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actual interesting filmmaking” is nearly random (if not downright inverse), it often is.
Philip V. Caruso/smpsp
A proud Cuba Gooding, Jr., dives down deep for his country
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Screenplay by Scott Marshall Smith based on the life of Carl Brashear
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Men of Honorhas “Oscar bait” written all over it. Were you to use the latest Cray supercomputers to analyze and design an Academy Award contender, this is what it would come up with: a real-life story filled with inspirational uplift; a strong central character, played by an immensely likable actor; liberal social consciousness; more inspirational uplift; thrilling struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds; two respected stars, who already have three Oscars between them; and, of course, yet even more inspirational uplift. While it's not as cloying as that description may imply, Men of Honor has no shame about overplaying its hand.
Cuba Gooding, Jr., stars as Carl Brashear, a black man born into a hard-working family of Kentucky sharecroppers in 1931. Correctly realizing the military is the surest way to break from the tenacious cycle of poverty, long hours of menial labor, and lack of education, Carl joins the navy in 1948, just as President Truman orders the armed forces to desegregate. Like most black sailors in those days, Carl immediately is consigned to working in the galley, but after spotting the heroic behavior of Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro), Carl grows determined to become a navy salvage diver, a specialty considered completely off-limits to minorities.
Sunday may be an unbelievably courageous diver, but he's also a foul, vindictive racist, as Brashear discovers two years later. Our hero's endless series of applications to diving school finally has broken down the resistance of a still discriminatory navy, and he is transferred to a diving school in Bayonne, New Jersey, where Sunday is now head instructor. Sunday's attitudes are in no way distinctive. The officer in charge of the facility, senile Mister Pappy (Hal Holbrook), is, if anything, even more racist, and the enlisted men are no better, save one single slightly dim white boy (Michael Rapaport).
Like many biopics Men of Honor runs into structural problems in presenting the highlights of Brashear's life. It's really two stories, vaguely bound by a common theme and by the fictional composite character of Sunday. The first hour and a quarter presents the hero's insanely arduous struggle to become a navy diver; the final 45 minutes are set almost twenty years later, when Brashear is badly injured during a critical rescue mission. With his left leg so badly mangled that he can't dive anymore, Brashear makes a decision that seems almost insane (not to mention gruesome): He requests that his leg be amputated so that he can be fitted with a prosthesis and return to work. Of course even then he must fight the navy bureaucrats who, despite this mad sacrifice, still don't want to let him back in the water.
While both stories have to do with Noble Perseverance Against Stacked Odds, they really are two altogether different narratives. The first pits Brashear against racism, the second against a self-interested bureaucracy. In the first section, Sunday is presented as the embodiment of Brashear's enemies. In the second he becomes Brashear's ally in a totally dissimilar fight. The film has to suddenly establish a new enemy, a caricature named Captain Hanks (David Conrad) -- a slick college-boy type with no practical experience and no regard for service tradition. He's supposed to represent some vaguely terrible “new navy.”
What new navy? Perhaps such a shift in naval administration really occurred in the Fifties and Sixties, with the hardened old tobacky-chawin' World War II vets replaced by snotty desk jockeys, but Men of Honor stops just short of having Hanks twiddle a handlebar mustache. (When the term code of honor is mentioned, Hanks at first seems not to have heard of it and then snorts to show contempt for such a naive notion.) And the two episodes are arguably contradictory. Wouldn't the new navy bureaucrats have been precisely the people who ended such “honorable” old traditions as, say, the virulent racism detailed in the first hour and fifteen minutes? The film tries to have it both ways, and director George Tillman, Jr. (Soul Food), is a skilled enough filmmaker to finesse us past most of this; it's only the next day that you begin thinking, Hold on a minute ...
The second problem that makes Men of Honor less effective than it might have been is that Brashear, the central character, is, despite Gooding's best efforts, two-dimensional (and I'm not so sure about that second dimension). He has one trait, determination, and no inner conflict. He's a virtual perseverance machine. Yes, he has obstacles to overcome, but they're all external; he barely falters for a second. It's the secondary character, Sunday, who has an interesting inner life and who undergoes some kind of change.
De Niro, sporting a haircut that unfortunately calls to mind his recent turn as Fearless Leader in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, is great enough as an actor to dominate any scene in any script he chooses. And here he makes us utterly loathe Sunday in the beginning, so much so that presenting his transformation into Mr. Nice Guy is a formidable task. (An introductory scene, which feels like a last-minute add-on, shows the nice post-1960 Sunday, to tip us off not to hate the guy too much.) Tillman's answer is simply to avoid the task altogether. Much of this massive personality change seems to take place off-camera, during the gap between the stories.
