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At the time of the hijacking, a lot of the news reports focused on Captain Phillips and the nominal exoticism of a 21st-century piracy that had nothing to do with illegal downloads, football or Johnny Depp swashbuckling through a Disney franchise. The existential realities that inform contemporary Somali piracy turn out to be one of the unexpected themes of “Captain Phillips,” which begins as something of a procedural about men at work and morphs into a jittery thriller even as it also deepens, brilliantly, unexpectedly, into an unsettling look at global capitalism and American privilege and power. Phillips is unambiguously a heroic figure, but he’s scarcely the sole point of interest in a movie that steadily and almost stealthily asserts the agonized humanity of his captors.
This humanization hits you like a jolt. The shock isn’t that the pirates are people, however corrupted. But that even as the movie’s rhythms quicken along with your own — Mr. Greengrass works you over like a deep-tissue pugilist with smash cuts, racing cameras and a propulsive soundtrack so you feel the urgency as well as see it — an argument is being created. There is, you realize, meaning here beyond the plot, meaning in the barren Somali hamlet in which Muse and his companions congregate under warlord gunpoint and in the razored angles of their startling, gaunt faces. There’s meaning, too, in the wild eyes and stained teeth of men who never eat, but stuff their thin cheeks with khat, the amphetaminelike plant that, among its uses, helps suppress the appetite.
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shaun james bockert 