On the 7th of August 2023, as of writing almost two months ago, the great American filmmaker William Friedkin passed away. Traditionally in criticism, films, and works of art more broadly, should stand on their own divorced from context but there are exceptions, and anyone who tells you that their opinion of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is divorced from that context is either, frankly, lying, or they aren’t really, truly familiar with the life and times of one of the best filmmakers the great states has ever produced.
This is not only because William Friedkin is a great filmmaker but because he is one defined by people’s conflicting feelings on him and the complicated nature of not only the way his films have aged but the way they have frequently been reevaluated. He is often seen as a filmmaker who came over the course of a few smaller budget productions to develop a sharp and documentarian eye in the 70s but fell off in the 80s. However, this ignores works like Cruising and To Live and Die In L.A. Typically though, here we run into complications. Cruising came out in 1980 and really did herald the beginning of a difficult decade for the director. Similarly to other filmmakers who rose to prominence in the 70s like Martin Scorcese, Friedkin found himself poorly equipped for the evolving and restricting social standards of the 80s.
In Cruising, Friedkin attempted to make the kind of film that won him Oscar nominations and box office records in the 70s with films like The French Connection and The Exorcist; a deeply confrontational, actively controversy-courting thriller dealing straight facedly with issues of the time in culture and policing, seeing a hard-nosed cop make his way in the hardcore BDSM gay club scene to solve a string of serial murders. It isn’t even Friedkin’s first queer film after 1970’s The Boys In The Band. The very premise of the film actively twists conventional ideas of gender in serial killer films by showing us brutalized and victimized gay men instead of the conventional heterosexual women. This is already thumbing its nose at society somewhat. The first recorded AIDs case would happen within months of the film’s release and would go on to show just how hostile the 80s would be to queer life and expression, and while Friedkin was probably very clear eyed about what he was walking into, ithould be, in retrospect unsurprising that the film was heavily censored until very recently and was a box office failure.
This would herald a difficult few decades for Friedkin. Subsequent films in the decade like Deal of the Century and C.A.T. Squad found him increasingly floundering with films that even today find themselves relegated to obscurity and completionist curios. Despite films in the 90s like Jade and The Guardian, although critically panned, developing subsequent cult followings, it was an increasingly sparse output from Friedkin, culminating in 2000’s Rules of Engagement, 2003’s The Hunted, and 1997’s made for TV remake of 12 Angry Men. These are films that, although highly respected, feel like films by a filmmaker who has had to reconstruct his creative vision to fit within an increasingly rigid Hollywood system.
For most filmmakers, this would be the end. To make a brief comparison point, once Gregg Araki, one of the most fiery and important filmmakers to the 90s indie scene, started selling out with mawkish dramas like White Bird in a Blizzard, episodes of Ryan Murphy straight-to-Netflix Jeffrey Dahmer true crime dramas were somewhat inevitably in his future. It is true that he saw an invigorating career revival through lower budget, but exciting and edgy Tracy Letts play adaptations, originally staged by revolutionary troop Steppenwolf in Bug and Killer Joe. However, it’s been 12 years since Killer Joe and all he’s put out in the meantime was an underwhelming exorcism documentary that seemed to be trading more on past glories than new evolutions.
The point of all this is, if you are familiar with Friedkin, and love his works, you’re going into this movie hoping for a tidy resolution to a troubled career. You’re hoping for a triumphant swan song for a director whose career has often had to fight to be able to shout, and has had to shout merely in order to be heard. In many ways it seems to be a culmination of Friedkin’s career up until this point, a focus on the moral gray, a challenge to authority, and it contains Friedkin continuing to push forward his cinematic language, taking the stagiest of stage plays from the 50s, a single room courtroom drama no less, and without changing much finding a way to make it viscerally exciting. This is not to say it is without flaws.
Part of the context is that this is a summation of Friedkin’s career and fascinations up until this point. This makes the release of this film feel more poignant, but the other part of the context is that barely anyone is ever going to get to see this brilliant film. It’s being thrown straight onto streaming with no fanfare, no heralding, no publicity, at all. This is the same week, as many have pointed out, The Exorcist: Believer, directed by king of studio hacks David Gordon Green is stinking up the majority of the screens in a theater near you. A franchise sequel intended purely to spin money for a studio by starting a trilogy seemingly written by a focus group of the broadest cross section of society possible trying to please everyone, following up a film by one of the most uncompromising, sharp edged directors the world has seen. It’s sad, and it makes me sad.
So that’s what you need to know really going into any review of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. So what is it? Based on 1953 stage play, (although knowing that there are very obvious points of departure in adaptation), it follows a lawyer played by Jason Clarke hired to defend an idealistic young navy officer who has been court-martialed after, by the logic of the film, committing only the second mutiny in naval history against a commander played by Kierfer Sutherland. The film almost entirely plays out in this courtroom setting, interesting because this is not true of the book that birthed the original play. Something the film does really well is playing with your sympathies. As you only have the witness testimony to go from you have to piece it together yourself and the script does a good job at dripping you information and moments and character beats that keep you constantly re-evaluating your sympathies. This is a classic of the genre, especially when it comes to courtroom films based on plays. Just think of Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner’s hit A Few Good Men, the arc of which takes a very similar trajectory after a very similar premise. This is probably a case of John Carter syndrome where a classic of the genre in one medium has gone on to inspire countless imitators in another medium, only for the original to then seem slightly derivative as a result when it finally gets brought into the said second medium. Coming out in 1953, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial seems to have more in common, stylistically and tonally, with other play based courtroom dramas, or in this case the anti-courtroom drama of 12 Angry Men. This aspect of constantly playing with our understanding of characters probably has the most in common with Rashomon, another 50s production, and although not on Roshomon’s level, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial does excellent work with a familiar box of tricks. Suthurland’s gruff commander especially flitting between suspicious overseer to pitiable old man before questions over his paranoia and punitive attitude begin to take an ominous line. What this beloved and frequently used arc gets at is the idea that things we take as read within the military, things that, within that context seem familiar may only seem so because of ideas we’ve internalized about the military and when repeated back suddenly seem utterly ludicrous.
Part of the reason that this film doesn’t feel stagy, familiar, and maybe slightly wooden in the way that, maybe A Few Good Men sometimes does, is that William Friedkin is an excellent director. He’s adapted single room stage plays before with 1970’s The Boys In The Band but that felt distinctly stagey whereas this film is incredibly dynamic. Another excellently directed film about people talking in rooms is The Social Network which feels the need to spice up its people in rooms stuff with a stylish and bombastic boat race complete with techno remixes of classical music and hyper wide lenses with shallow focus. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial never feels the need to escape the room, by comparison, it understands that stripping back the embellishments can be just as engrossing as adding them. What this film does really well is there is barely any score other than right at the beginning and confident camera moves with an eye towards pacing the forward momentum of the film pulls you into the film. Despite not much happening on screen you can barely look away because Friedkin after 50 years in the director’s chair, understands exactly when to cut into an expression, knows just when to pan to someone not talking, knows exactly how to move the camera to lead you into a meticulously planned edit; long story short, Friedkin knows exactly how to manipulate your attention to make you stay gripped by a very mundane court case, and fuck me is he good at it. I could not look away from stuff like Lance Reddick’s concerned expression, Kiefer Sutherland’s face looking old and bedraggled, or Jason Clarke’s crestfallen eyebrows.
The performances all around actually really carry the film. Fans of the show 24 will be familiar with Kiefer Sutherland performances of this type but he updates it to this more aged character. His performance is actually quite brilliant, it reveals layers as it goes on as the script reveals layers about his character but it never seems like he’s changing the performance. This is of course a facet of the screenplay in that it calls for new sides of his personhood to be revealed but Sutherland executes it perfectly, a seamless ramp up to one of the best monologues I’ve seen on screen in a very, very long time. Regarding Jason Clarke; I, like I think a lot of other people, had one day written him off as boring uninspiring, uncharismatic, but he has done an amazing job of taking the facets of his screen presence that caused him to be written off like that and utilize them to be quite electric on screen. Fans of his brilliant turn in this year’s Oppenheimer will be familiar with him doing exactly this and he’s just doing more of it in this movie. It is delicious. I could watch Clarke conduct cross examinations with exactly the same level of fascination and awe as I would watch Alfred Molina’s turn in Boogie Nights. The late, great Lance Reddick, to whom the film is dedicated, also puts in an impressive turn as the chief magistrate and shows us sides to his screen persona I wish we had had the opportunity to see more of.
Now we get into where I think the film gets slightly lost in the mire. The film takes a part of the original play and tweaks it for the modern age, invoking stuff like the uptick in army recruitment when 9/11 happened, and I don’t think this scene works, almost at all. To be honest, I think it was a flaw in the original play, and it muddies the thematic clarity of the film, which is very much the intention but it’s laying on ambiguity that would be implied in subtext very effectively if this whole scene were to be entirely excised. As it happens it plays less like a complicated note to end on, which it would be otherwise, but instead turns into needless theatrics, stupid and pointless twists, and lecturing to the audience about the darn kids these days who have their heads all up in video games and books and have no idea what it’s really like in the real world. Whereas A Few Good Men undercuts and undermines the classically beloved war hero general to make a broader point and critique of the American outlook regarding the military, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial has a very different idea about the same story.
Friedkin’s best work is electrifyingly anti-authoritarian, be it Sorcerer, Bug, or The French Connection. Even The Exorcist, which had little direct political commentary, so upset the establishment by spitting in the faces of their standards it is anti-authoritarian by extension. This film however, probably as it’s the product of an older man, gets its hands all tied up in umming and ahhing about the state of the nation and it’s, to be honest, more condescending, and less electric, less dramatic. Moreover, I don’t like films lecturing to me about the state of the nation, especially when it boils down to ‘these darn kids these days’. This part being present in the original actively undermines the message. There’s the famous Socrates speech where he bemoans the lack of respect of kids, “Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.” The more things change the more they stay the same, and updating this ending to fit the context of today when it was still true in 1953 only makes it more clear to the smart viewer that this is not a specific critique of today’s children, but a blind punch downward at the younger generation that older people always make generation upon generation, and it’s slightly meaningless.
This is not to say this is a bad movie. As a capstone to a great career it is perfect, summing up the thematic and stylish fascinations and evolutions of one of America’s all time best filmmakers, and I definitely think you should watch this rather than the other new Friedkin-connected movie that is stinking up cinemas the world over at the minute.
A Fistful of Film 