The Finest Hours
starring Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Holliday Grainger, John Ortiz, Kyle Gallner, John Magaro, Graham McTavish, Michael Raymond-James and Eric Bana
screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson
directed by Craig Gillespie
Rating: ♦♦◊◊◊
Called “The Blizzard” in Japan, The Finest Hours is a biographical drama based on the book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias. It is about a real incident on February 18, 1952 when a New England Coast Guard unit in the United States performed one of its most famous sea rescues, during a harsh winter storm. Chris Pine plays a rookie seaman, Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernard Webber, sent to locate the oil tanker SS Pendleton which was split in two in high seas during a blizzard. Bernie was dispatched with a small crew of volunteers in a small motorized lifeboat which, under the weather conditions, almost couldn’t make it out of the harbor and into open water. But it did. And it located the tanker’s wreck, and it rescued the crew and, despite losing its compass in the rough weather, managed to return to shore.
It was a heroic rescue, but I thought the film was okay, not great. It reminded me of the George Clooney movie The Perfect Storm (2000, directed by Wolfgang Petersen) in how it featured man against the sea. I got bored with all that wind and water.
For me one of the most interesting things about the film was the appearance of actor Abraham Benrubi in a supporting role as the SS Pendleton’s cook. I remembered him for the hospital administrator role of Jerry Markovic from the old medical drama series ER (1994-2009). It’s nice to be able to identify actors over the years from one project to the next and to be able to say, “Hey, I know that guy! That’s Jerry Markovic from ER! Man, did he get old!”