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Reviews:
The
Perfect Storm: A Eulogy
by Michael Flanagan
Super
I almost began this review by quoting statistics, such as the
number of fishermen killed a year, or the ratio of fish caught compared to
sea-related injury and death, or the number of people killed in the storm
of 1992. But that would not be the purpose of The Perfect Storm.
The film shows how these men lived, what their lives were, and
what, as a possibility, were the details of the end of their lives.
The end, though, was not a possibility for the men of the Andrea
Gail, but a fact. The
burden of the film was to take the known facts and combine them with
unknown details, and to do this in a film worthy of the families of those
men as well as others who have lost loved ones in a similar ways.
Wolfgang Petersen based his film on Sebastian Junger’s book. Junger based his book on facts surrounding the storm, and
much of it centered around the men of the Andrea Gail, as does the
film. In the book he provided
factual stories of fishermen and storms, and juxtaposed them with the
possibilities of the men lost in what was meteorologically called The
Perfect Storm. The film takes
those factual stories and combines them into one proposed possibility,
which is presented as a tortuous struggle for survival. The
transfer from book to film could have been disastrous, but instead it
works as a perfect portrait, a tribute to struggle, loss, and love.
No, it’s not
about a love story, there’s no Titanic storyline here.
It’s about love of life and love of living. These elements bring the film heart, which leads to its
success. We aren’t watching
statistics, or various levels of possibility and probability. We’re watching the struggle to survive. The life of these fishermen isn’t what most would consider
enjoyable: most of it is
spent in a boat, or with dead fish, hoping to bring in enough to live
until the next week’s fishing trip, or to buy a place to live larger
than a closet, or to pay for a child.
But it is life, nonetheless, and it’s worth fighting for.
And the love between two people that’s lost is a wonderful
example of what many people have lost.
And it that loss we find more love of life, not just in personal
satisfaction, but in remembrance.
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