Dead Calm

Several months back, TCM ran a night of "before they were stars" movies. With them about to expire from my DVR, I made a point of watching them before they expired and writing up the posts to schedule at some point in the future. First up is a very young Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm.

Kidman is a native Australian, and this movie was made in Australia even though I think the other two leads are not in fact Australian. Sam Neill is John Ingram, an officer in the Australian navy who as the movie opens is returning home for Christmas leave with a bunch of other sailors. At the train station, he's stopped by a couple of policemen who have some terrible news for him: his young child was killed in a car accident, and his wife Rae (that's Kidman) is in hospital badly shaken. We get a brief synopsis of the accident to see why Rae is in the state she's in.

To deal with their personal grief, John and Rae decide to take their personal yacht out to sea for a long voyage in the tropical Pacific (the movie was filmed near islands that are part of the Great Barrier Reef), together with their dog who is good about fetching things out of the ocean, which is a bit of foreshadowing. After a month or so at sea, the pair come across a boat that looks like it's adrift with nobody on it, at least not at first. There does turn out to be one man, who is barely able to make his way to the Ingrams' boat.

That man, Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane), has just his trunks and one backpack-sized bag, from which he fishes five passports, which he says are the passports of the other five people on the boat. Hughie then informs the Ingrams that the other passengers died of what he thinks is food poisoning (although why he didn't get poisoned himself is an obvious question), and that the boat is taking on water. He's sick enough that he's about to pass out, so the Ingrams put him in one of the below-decks cabins and lock the door.

John finds the log among Hughie's stuff, and reading it, he's got some questions, so he takes the dinghy over to the other boat to investigate. While there he's able to generate just enough power to run a monitor that has a videotape running that looks like it was taken on the boat and has two escort-type young women asked to be involved in some sort of morally questionable activity, with Hughie getting involved in it in a way that the man who chartered the boat clearly doesn't like. Obviously more reason for John to suspect that there's a lot more going on with Hughie than he's letting on.

And then Hughie wakes up and, finding out he's locked in the room, wants to get out. This is sensible enough, but rather than calling out for Rae when he gets the skylight opened, he breakes the hinges and escapes from the room to physically subdue Rae and start a sort of mutinty, steering the ship away from the one that he was originally on and that John is still (and which by now is fairly clearly takin on water, leaving it with an only partially functional radio). There's not much need for more of a synopsis, as the questions raised by Hughie's actions are fairly obvious. How they resolve themselves, however, is not necessarily what you might expect.

Dead Calm is a very well-made movie, with one small exception and one slightly larger exception. The small exception is that the story doesn't quite give a good explanation of how Hughie came to be so psychotic. The second deals with the ending. Apparently multiple endings were filmed and the one wet get is based on preview audience reactions. I would have preferred something else, although I also have to say that this comment in itself might be giving something away.

Dead Calm is another of those movies that came out when I was an adolescent and still too young to drive myself to the movie theater. That, and I don't know whether it would have shown up in my local not-big-city sixtyplex. So I hadn't heard of it until the TCM showing. However, I'm extremely glad that I have had this chance to watch Dead Calm. I highly recommend it to any movie buff.