Blue-collar heroes in deep water

Opinion

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This article was published 29/09/2016 (2757 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the cause of the largest marine oil spill in history, the floating oil rig Deepwater Horizon has become synonymous with corporate recklessness trumping environmental concerns.

A filmmaker had a few ways to go in making a movie about the disaster that predicated the oil spill. Director Peter Berg takes a page from the big studio moneymakers of the 1970s and frames the Deepwater story as a disaster movie, albeit one with an underlying critique. Think particularly of the star-studded Irwin Allen-produced 1974 opus The Towering Inferno, in which a deluxe skyscraper proves to be the world’s tallest firetrap on the day of its opening due to the corner-cutting of a craven capitalist developer (William Holden).

Berg tells the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster from the perspective of Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), the chief electronics technician of the installation. Williams is a conscientious guy, and we share his unease when he is obliged to report on the rig’s technical shortfalls due to a nickel-and-diming policy on the part of the rig’s leaser, British Petroleum, miffed Deepwater’s mission is behind schedule and over-budget.

Williams’ immediate supervisor is offshore installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a.k.a. “Mr. Jimmy” (Kurt Russell), another decent guy insistent about proper inspections being carried out — an unnecessary expenditure in the eyes of money-conscious BP company man Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich).

Vidrine relents when Harrell insists on pressure tests to ensure the integrity of the oil well some five kilometres under the ocean surface off the coast of Louisiana. Berg, working from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand, has already explained the basic dynamics of oil drilling in the film’s prelude, in which Williams’ young daughter helpfully shows off her school project on the subject. If it’s a transparent bit of exposition, Berg succeeds in making an illustrative upside-down soda pop can feel decidedly ominous.

So when hell breaks loose, and the rig’s safety precautions unilaterally fail, the stage is set for calamity involving geysers of flame, flying glass and more crashing metal than a Transformers film festival.

The initial cataclysm catches our two heroes off guard — Mr. Jimmy is taking a shower and Williams is mid-Skype conversation with his wife (Kate Hudson). Of the main characters witnessing the explosion as it happens, it is 23-year-old rig worker Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) who tries to rise to the occasion, only to be told by her supervisor (David Maldonado) she doesn’t have the authority to issue a “Mayday” emergency call.

(If the scene feels like an on-the-nose Hollywood depiction of a young woman suffering the arrogance and condescension of an older male superior, well, that is how it happened according to a Wall Street Journal story.)

Even if the rig failure took the lives of 11 people, a disaster movie about a real-life disaster doesn’t means there won’t be some degree of dramatic embellishment (as in a climactic moment when Williams employs drastic measures to get Fleytas off the burning rig).

But unlike The Towering Inferno, thankfully, director Berg doesn’t feel the need to populate the cast with big, glamorous stars. He chooses actors who project a certain blue-collar veracity, chiefly Wahlberg and Russell, both manfully trying to keep their characters grounded in the industrial-workplace setting.

Berg doesn’t always feel the need to clarify what’s going on in some of the film’s hairier scenes of destruction, but given that it augments the sense of ground-level chaos, it may actually serve the story in its way.

It is estimated nearly five million barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico in the 87 days it took to cap Deepwater Horizon’s well. It is understandable the ecological cost ultimately overshadowed the loss of life on the oil rig itself.

Berg’s film offers something of a corrective portrayal of corporate greed trumping regard for human life, with a massive Hollywood set functioning as his soda can.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing