This Memorial Day weekend, I decided to see a movie that would boil the patriotic blood in my veins—one that would make me walk a little taller, a little prouder as I thought of all the sacrifices our men and women have made in the name of freedom, duty and honor. And so, I watched a movie that was as full of heroism as an overstuffed turkey.
That movie was Men of Honor.
The biopic about Carl Brashear, the first black Navy diver, may not have had as big a budget nor as many overpaid stars as its box office counterpart Pearl Harbor, but it certainly waved just as many flags and squeezed just as many red-white-and-blue tears from audiences. Not to mention the fact that Cuba Gooding Jr. did double-duty: starring in Men of Honor and donating the leftovers to Pearl Harbor.
Men of Honor is the kind of movie that’s determined to make you feel good at all costs. (As proof: an alternate ending on the DVD’s extras is decidedly much more downbeat than the version that appeared in theaters.) In the hands of director George Tillman Jr. (Soul Food), Brashear’s story takes on such chest-swelling importance that you’d swear you were watching a movie from Jerry “Pearl” Bruckheimer and Michael “Harbor” Bay. Except for the fact that there aren’t that many orange-fireball explosions in Men of Honor…plus, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Pearl Harbor’s script was originally written by a geeky 16-year-old flyboy wannabe who slept during fifth-period History class. Men of Honor seems to be penned by someone who had at least a couple years of community college under his belt (note to screenwriter Scott Marshall Smith’s attorneys: I am only making an assumption here, based on presentable evidence. I am not casting aspersions on your client’s intelligence—which runs orbital rings around the Pearl Harbor team).
However, what Pearl Harbor and Men of Honordo share is a sense of self-importance that can get tiresome if administered in too large and too frequent doses.
I have nothing against movies that get us all shivery about big dreamers or movies that make us swell with altruism inside our own skin. I like to get all misty-eyed and pulse-pounding same as the next schlub. But the problem with movies like Men of Honor is they don’t know the meaning of moderation. Tillman insists on shoving Brashear’s greatness down our throats to such a degree that we end up gagging on inspiration.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not faulting Tillman’s intent, only his ham-handed style. Brashear’s rise above racism and circumstance is, no doubt about it, the very essence of the word “inspirational.”
There’s certainly enough throat-lump material in the real Brashear’s life from which to draw. The son of a Kentucky sharecropper, Brashear was determined to honor his hard-working father by becoming the first African-American Navy diver at a time when the military may have been rainbow-colored, but racism still saw to it that those colors never went outside the lines. Soon after joining the Navy in 1948 (the same year Truman desegregated the military), Brashear is bluntly told he’s got three choices: be a cook, become an officer's valet, or get out.
Yes, but those white officers haven’t seen him swim yet…and boy, can Brashear fly through the water like a torpedo! In a typical “proving his worth” scene, he so impresses his commanders that he’s given a spot on the Navy’s Search and Rescue team. But of course, he really wants to be a diver.
Standing on the sidelines, Master Chief Billy Sunday (Robert DeNiro) watches with a grim mouth and a raised eyebrow. Sunday (not the famous revival preacher Billy Sunday, he’s quick to tell people) is a bigot with a golden heart. He’s also got a bit of a drinking problem and a loud mouth—both of which get him reassigned to teaching new diving recruits at the Navy’s school in Bayonne, New Jersey. A couple of years later, Brashear finally makes it to diving school, where he runs up against Sunday, a bitter, drawling man who cares so deeply about the Navy that he’s afraid it will be tainted by desegregation. Still, despite the fact that his face is always twisted into a bitter-lemon expression, Sunday doesn’t want to see any of his men die at the bottom of the ocean.
It would be a horrible death. One of the things that Tillman captures well is the little-known world of Navy diving. This is not the sleek scuba snorkeling of the Navy SEALs, this is the hazardous work performed by sailors in cumbersome, 190-pound Mark 5 suits—those old outfits with fishbowl helmets and air hoses running from the diver to the surface. We spend a good portion of time underwater as Brashear and the others train in the claustrophobic suits. Up on land, Sunday spends his time puffing on his MacArthurian corncob pipe and glaring at the water, hoping that the troublesome black diver doesn’t resurface…yet, at the same time, respecting Brashear for his unquenchable spirit of ambition.
Right from the start, the movie turns into a battle of wills between Sunday and Brashear—a sort of racial reversal of Lou Gossett Jr. and Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman, and it draws some of the best parts from that and other like-minded movies. The script even calls for DeNiro to bark at his trainees with lines like these: “The Navy diver is not a fighting man, he is a salvage expert. If it is lost underwater, he finds it. If it's sunk, he brings it up. If it's in the way, he moves it. If he's lucky, he will die young, 200 feet beneath the waves, for that is the closest he'll ever get to being a hero.”
There are many other lines of dialogue like that—speeches of calculated majesty, every word ringing like a trumpet fanfare. Fortunately, Tillman has two marvelous actors on board to keep the movie's feet on earth. DeNiro and Gooding both deliver compelling portraits of men who are haunted by the fear of failure. Both actors are full of an emotional intensity that grounds the picture in something closer to reality than the script’s clichés would have us believe. With his jutting jaw and laser-sharp eyes, Gooding gives another fine example of the unbridled energy which earned him an Oscar for Jerry Maguire. And DeNiro? Well! no one but no one does unbottled rage like Bobby D. Billy Sunday is such a stew of volatile tempers and morose self-destruction that I half-expected to hear DeNiro start berating a trainee with “You splashin’ me? You splashin’ me? I’m the only one here. You gotta be splashin’ me.”
Men of Honor is a showcase for Gooding and DeNiro. Most of the other cast members—including Charlize Theron as Sunday’s wife and Hal Holbrook as an off-the-rocker commanding officer—aren’t given enough to flesh out their characters beyond cardboard-cutout types.
In the end, Men of Honor gives us a fine example of solid acting and provides a few unforgettably inspiring moments. Sure it gets puffy and slick and tries to choke you with good intent, but for a good Memorial Day movie, you could do a lot worse than Men of Honor. Trust me on this one.
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