★★★★

“The reprimand, if there is to be one, must come from your own conscience.”

William Friedkin’s swan song is the year’s greatest film.  Cretins will dismiss its sentiments as mere boomer talk, but years from now it will endure for what it is – a mic drop from one of America’s greatest cinematic provocateurs that speaks to the wounded and demoralized national soul, not with childish cynicism but poetic conviction.

Forgive me if this reads depressed, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is the first film of the 2020s decade that has reached me where I live.  I have for years now felt a lapse in my patriotism.  It is a feeling for which I usually mocked others.  “Oh, you’ve learned that America isn’t perfect and you’re disappointed?  Would you like me to buy you a book about literally anywhere else?”  I don’t take any of it back.  I also reprimand from the conscience.  Imperfect big things are built from imperfect little things.  The Constitution never demanded that the Union be perfect – merely that the people aspire to make it more perfect.  But the Constitution is not looked upon favorably today.  Perfection is either blindly demanded or meekly maneuvered against for its impossibility, so much so that a film like this can come along and – with the simple act of showing faces in a courtroom – blow every counternarrative to shreds like a mine in the middle of a waterway.

It is only fitting that it came from Friedkin – an affable filmmaker who embraced imperfection more audaciously than most ever could.  Friedkin has never cautioned his films against thumbed noses and dismissive hand waves.  It didn’t matter if he was tracking Popeye Doyle as he banged a commandeered car through the streets of New York City in The French Connection, or if he was putting ancient demons on the side of the 1960s counterculture in The Exorcist, or if he was opening fire on Yemeni civilians in Rules of Engagement, or if he was promoting college athletic rights in Blue Chips 27 years before the Supreme Court would recognize them.  In all of these films, and others, Friedkin dared to critique corrupt institutions and craven social norms, but his surgical lessons were often mistaken for reckless reactionism.  In his films, some form of justice was always being sought one way or another; flawed from the start, yet even from there at no point would you ever cry for it to stop.  Note his heroes – the racist cops in French Connection, the priest in The Exorcist, the cheating coach in Blue Chips, and the Colonel (and his former enemy from a past war) in Rules of Engagement.  None of these people are your fairytale paragons, yet there they were when you needed them.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial follows and contributes its own ideas to Friedkin’s larger sense of institutionalism. It is the first feature film to adapt the 1953 play that author and World War II veteran Herman Woulk wrote as a follow-up to his widely celebrated 1952 novel The Caine Mutiny.  It does not require your having seen The Caine Mutiny (1954), and, if anything, you might be better off watching this one first.  The story has been updated, not just geographically and temporally, but also in acute political terms to reflect America’s military ambivalence today.  Kiefer Sutherland as Lt. Commander Queeg does his part to that effect.  He clearly did everything within his power to avoid re-doing Humphrey Bogart.  A wise decision; The Caine Mutiny had the ultimate pathos from Bogart and something far closer to the full story, even with the way it sawed off both the front and back ends of Woulk’s novel, but dramatically the court martial there was almost an afterthought.

Friedkin’s update returns the larger theme of generational divide to this story.  Sutherland, again, does the heavy lifting here.  His cheekbone has dramatically sharpened over the years, which had the unintended effect of making his Jack Bauer less and less convincing with age.  But it makes him perfect for the role of an older, troubled man clinging to his marbles like his ship depends on it. His casting as Queeg brings to mind the last time he was seen in a military uniform playing the role of the idealistic Lt. Jonathan Kendrick, as well as his decade of heroics as Bauer.  His Queeg’s monologues are just as brash and rambling as Bogart’s, but Friedkin’s editing and slight distance lets you study him and his mannerisms carefully.  What emerges is an entirely new kind of tragedy as an imperfect institution reckons with narratives and counternarratives until everyone’s legacy bears a black mark, a yellow stain, or both.

The story of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial begins with reluctant defense attorney Barney Greenwald (Jason Clarke) entering the courtroom with his client Lieutenant Meryk (Jake Lacy), and sitting in the chair as the chief judge of the tribunal is the late great Lance Reddick.  In a film replete with monologues, Reddick’s character has no shortage of those himself.  He is, in his own way, another Friedkin supporting hero – reluctantly and cautiously allowing Greenwald’s questionable defense tactics to proceed through the trial, to the chagrin of the prosecutor, in his imperfect pursuit of justice for its own sake. A minesweeper in the Strait of Hormuz was swept and nearly capsized by a typhoon, and during that time, its skipper Commander Queeg was relieved on the grounds of mental unfitness for duty by his executive officer Meryk with the help of at least two others. Meryk is the defendant, but Queeg faces a disgraceful end to his 21-year naval career as he is put on the stand not once, but twice, and where you the audience, like a jury, are fed bits and bites of the full story of his previous year in command of the U.S.S. Caine to piece together in your imagination without a movie to show it to you. There is lots of “tell without show,” and yet The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial shows so much with so little. Its scenes lack space, variety, and overly rapid movement or blocking by actors, and it is precisely because of these deficiencies that you can immerse yourself with the characters in a way no other movie has done in years.

I could go on about the bittersweet memories of watching J.A.G. with my father this film recalls, or the way it cures and corrects Vince Gilligan’s misguided attempts to give Bogart’s moment in the original a tribute in Better Call Saul, but I leave this film and this review in agony. I haven’t felt like this since the last time I watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – a film from which Friedkin draws no shortage of subtle inspiration given the legends printed there and here. “Multitudes, Multitudes” Lt. Keefer’s working novel is titled; perhaps the least subtle part of the film.

Since September, 2021, the disastrous and embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan has left an open red sore on America that has not been fully acknowledged or appreciated. I have never served in the military, but even in my lowly self-conscious civilian status a certain unrecognized pain has sat with me as much as I imagine it sits with nearly everyone who can understand the magnitude of it, with apologies to those kids on TikTok that recently discovered how much they have in common with Osama bin Laden. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is also a dad movie as much as it is any movie, and I’m not a dad. I’m merely a lawyer, and not even a J.A.G. lawyer. I had every reason to dismiss it as coldly as I assume many others will. But that pain I just mentioned was right up there on that screen and its effect can only be likened to the typhoon that spun the Caine out.

William Friedkin came out of retirement from making films to reprimand America from his conscience. In doing so, he has rebuilt, however slightly and imperfectly, a broken, desiccated institution with the power of cinema and with his infusions of energy into every camera position and every cut. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial may feature nothing but naval uniforms but it is a movie for a nation and people who bear the scars of a 20-year conflict that ended with disgrace and now find the entire world embroiled in a new one. For what little it is and for what Friedkin had left to say, it is catharsis.

– Vivek