K-19: The Widowmaker
Credit Where Credit Is Due
The first draft of this review spent about three paragraphs talking about the set design of K-19, and how wonderful and realistic it looked, and the detail of the instruments and the furnishings. Then, naturally enough, I checked the invaluable Internet Movie Database, and it turns out that my praise for the set designers was badly misplaced; the movie was actually shot aboard a military-surplus Juliet-class Russian nuclear submarine. So much for my infinite store of knowledge about moviemaking.
Let us then give credit where credit is due. Here, it goes to the cinematographers and the camera crew, working in damp and horribly cramped conditions, who have turned out a movie that looks first-rate if it does nothing else. K-19 looks absolutely stunning and realistically claustrophobic. Everything about it — or almost everything — bespeaks authenticity and care. The exception, of course, is Harrison Ford’s painfully bad Russian accent, which threatens to scuttle the whole movie, and almost does.
Ford here plays the captain of the K-19, the first Soviet ballistic missile submarine, launched in 1961 to counter the threat of the American Polaris missile subs. The submarine is poorly designed, built by drunken, incompetent, and corrupt shipbuilders, and is missing all sorts of important gear. A critical system malfunctions in the presence of a high-ranking Soviet Admiral during a drill in drydock in Murmansk. Ford is brought in to serve as the sub’s captain, replacing Liam Neeson. However, the good-natured Neeson is the only one who knows all the things wrong with the boat, so he stays on as the executive officer, and focus for the crew’s discontent. After another series of disasters, K-19 finally leaves drydock in Murmansk, heading for the Arctic Ocean and a missile test.
This leads to some conflict between Ford and Neeson, but none of it is very interesting. The conflict is more metaphorical than anything else. The doomed K-19 itself is meant to be a metaphor for the Soviet Union. Ford, in turn, is a metaphorical representative for the Brezhnevian wing of the Communist Party, narrow and inflexible, plodding and unimaginitive, and deeply dim-witted. Although he initially questions the sanity of the orders he recieves, he is constitutionally unable to break them, and has to work hard to sell the crew on his abilities and his common sense in the face of such nonsense. The problem is that Ford — who is all cut out for heroism — has little idea about how to play this kind of character. He retreats into a gruff, insular shell, complete with a woeful accent, and is not much of a factor in events.
Neeson is representative of the Khrushchev/Gorbachev liberal viewpoint; he is essentially a poster boy for glasnost twenty-five years early. This makes him terribly cynical and world-weary, but a little compassionate and kind, at least in the abstract. But he can’t take the focus off Ford for one second. Even though Ford does not do an incredibly good acting job here, and even though his accent is bad enough for me to comment on it in four separate paragraphs, Neeson cannot upstage him. Ford’s iconic presence is too great for that. And at a critical moment in the movie, Neeson heads for his cabin, sulking, and we hardly ever see him again, and don’t miss him.
Fortunately, both the ship and the movie are saved by the heroism of the mostly anonymous supporting cast. The pivotal scenes in K-19 involve a welding job on an ailing nuclear reactor that must be completed under hazardous conditions. K-19 does a wonderful job of mixing courage and cowardice here, easily equal to a similar scene in Saving Private Ryan. However, just as any good fortune that the submarine K-19 experienced was wiped out by misfortune, so is the good fortune of K-19 the movie wiped out by a confused, overly drawn-out ending and a ludicrous conflict between Ford and his crew that seems to have been put in purely for swank.
K-19 is a perfectly respectable submarine flick, one that manages to be exciting and visually compelling and interesting almost despite itself. It is good enough that one wonders how good it might have been if two changes could be made. If the action were presented in Russian with subtitles instead of weirdly-accented English, it would be much more realistic. If the role of the captain were played by someone other than Harrison Ford, it would place the focus of the movie in its proper place. Of course, making either or both of these changes would — in the mind of any right-thinking studio greedhead — reduce K-19 to an arthouse picture, so the whole thing is an impossibility.
Rather than focusing on K-19’s shortcomings, let us rather recognize the good, well-accented acting that does take place, and the good work of everyone involved on the technical and visual side of things, and the elements of the screenplay and the acting that really do work, when given the chance. Let us give credit where credit is due.