Why Russell Ranks High

By RICHARD CORLISS

John Aubrey is a captain for all winds. His bravery is seasoned by intelligence; his initiative is tempered by loyalty to the Crown and its naval legend Lord Nelson. Aubrey commands his frigate, the Surprise, with strength, not bravado, and an ease and rigor that win the respect of his men. He also has what any bunch of superstitious sailors needs in a boss: a nose for good fortune. They call him Lucky Jack. His nickname is a prayer to the fickle Fates that rule the sea, his presence a guarantee that the crew's lives are in the best hands.

The real Russell Crowe is not quite Aubrey, the unambiguously heroic fellow he plays in Peter Weir's splendidly bracing sea epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Sometimes, the actor comes off as a brute, a primitive: Crowe Magnon Man. So we gladly cede to others the honor of carousing or canoodling with him. We might lock up our daughters at his approach. We would not care to be within striking distance of his coiled wrath.

But then, we don't have to be. For a critic or a filmgoer, an actor's private life should be irrelevant to the art and glamour he can create onscreen. And there, alchemy occurs. Crowe is often magnificent: attractive, complex, subtle. Watching him slip inside a role is a matter not of forgiving but of forgetting all the tabloid baggage. The lout of a thousand headlines vanishes, and the superb movie actor appears magically in his place. When Crowe is at the helm of a movie, we're proud to sail with him.

He shares some of his gifts with other Australian-bred stars, from Nicole Kidman to Hugh Jackman, who have lately taken over Hollywood. They must hide within plain sight. Plain sound, rather: to suppress their native whine, they have to "act" every time they open their mouths. Yet like the rest of the world, the Aussies have been casing Hollywood movies since childhood. Because they know the territory, they can infiltrate an American character with a cat burglar's suaveness: entering without breaking.

But Crowe has something more than an agreeable presence and technical precision. He can convey inner strength, rage and desperation without ever pushing it. People see this power and think Brando. No doubt Crowe has done so too. (In an earlier incarnation he went by the name Russ Le Roq and recorded a single called I Want to Be like Marlon Brando.) He's muscular as well, and it's earned bulk, not the pretty-boy sculpture of the body builder. Like Brando, Crowe could play a biker, a dockworker, a mafioso or Stanley Kowalski.

One big difference: you won't hear Crowe screaming "Stella!" He rarely raises his voice in films. As the neo-Nazi skinhead in his 1992 attention snagger Romper Stomper, he achieves his most menacing effects with a whisper and reads a passage from Mein Kampf as if it were a sacred bedtime story. The tough cop he played in the 1997 L.A. Confidential is another soft-spoken type: in lieu of shouting, he tattoos his fist on a suspect's face, grabs a man's genitals. Never does he strut or preen or pace nervously, Pacino-style. There's no spillage of energy. The Sea of Crowe has a surface calm; rancor roils a few fathoms below.

Sociopaths are the common coin of modern movie drama. Crowe sometimes finds gold in more remote parts. His Jeffrey Wigand, in The Insider, seems exhausted, neutered by the ethical choice facing him. Here is a man ready to implode, like a condemned building awaiting the dynamite. So his determination to air an inconvenient truth has the impact of a half-man willing himself to be whole. John Nash in A Beautiful Mind is many men--too many, for the film's conflict--and several of its characters are in his crowded, confused head. Crowe shows here, and so often, that the interior life is the most absorbing life there is, and the most frightening.

Master and Commander is in Crowe's burly heroic mode, like his Maximus in Gladiator. But Jack Aubrey has no bloodlust for vengeance. He wants to serve his country. It is his duty, in a distant corner of the Napoleonic Wars, to engage an enemy ship, the Acheron, off the east coast of South America. It is his inspiration to track this state-of-naval-art devil ship to the other side, near the Galapagos Islands. The film is full of inspiration too. Not since Jaws, or maybe Pinocchio, has there been a sea-chase epic of such craft, brio and good comradeship.

Like Crowe, Weir has often made films that seek the heart of darkness beneath the tough skin of the adventure genre: The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Mosquito Coast. But in the journey of adapting (with writer John Collee) and filming the Patrick O'Brian saga--in his long sail, figuratively, from Gallipoli to the Galapagos--Weir has reconciled a traditional war story with modern, mature film attitudes. He has done something daring for an intellectual director: celebrate military heroism.

Aubrey, of course, is one such hero--and a new kind for Crowe. Other Crowe film figures are renegades; Jack, who is sure of his own authority and of those above him, is a dedicated company man, a genius of a middle manager. Crowe plays him straight, flicking charm in a quick smile or, when wounded in battle, silently summoning the will to fight on.

But he is no solitary saint, fighting a balky crew. In a way, the crew is the collective hero. Four episodes reveal how sailors prove their mettle by risking or ending their lives. Two of these are the boy officer Lord Blakeney (Max Pirkis, a child actor with a scary mixture of poise and beauty), who bravely bears having an infected arm sawed off; and Aubrey's closest friend, ship's doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), who astonishingly confronts his own dire surgery by heeding the medical dictum "Physician, heal thyself."

The film, which combines two O'Brian books, tells its stories with a wonderful efficiency; its briskly sketched characters have the detail of full portraits. Blakeney, for instance, is given two opposite role models: the warrior Aubrey and the intellectual Maturin. The boy is beguiled by the doctor's love of the natural world and the fantastic creatures in it. Yet after a great battle, when Blakeney visits Maturin, who is absorbed again in his books, we can tell that the boy has been matured by combat; he sees that his destiny is to be not a man of science but a man of war. All this is revealed, not by dialogue but in a brief shot of Pirkis' pensive face.

Crowe has many of these moments too--secrets of remorse, doubt and longing, never spoken, shared only with the camera. For all the movie's perfect storms and burly skirmishes, its art is in the creation of people the audience comes to know so well after two hours that it can read their thoughts. So Master and Commander is to movies what Russell Crowe is to acting. With subtlety and power, it explores the complexities of men at war, even with themselves. It puts the passion into action, and the thrill into thought.

--By Richard Corliss