‘The Caine Mutiny Court Martial’: Venice Review

Dir. William Friedkin. US. 2023. 109 mins. 

Carried off well, the traditional courtroom drama can be cinema’s equivalent of the string quartet. It is often written off as a theatrical genre, non-cinematic by definition. But its essential spareness, spatial restriction and emphasis on words performed with persuasive conviction will force any film-maker to draw on the essence of their formal invention, and often it is just the controlled use of cinema’s barest tools that will show a director’s mettle. That is the case for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, the final piece by William Friedkin, who died last month. Due to screen in the US on Showtime after premiering in Venice, this magisterially simple version of a celebrated stage warhorse is a steely, no-nonsense final chapter to Friedkin’s career, as well as a stately farewell to cast member Lance Reddick, who died in March, and to whom the film is dedicated.

A steely, no-nonsense final chapter to Friedkin’s career

Almost entirely set in a military courtroom, this is the latest treatment of a fiction that began as Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, part of which was reworked by the author as a successful stage play, ’The Caine Mutiny Court Martial’. The novel was filmed by Edward Dmytryk in 1954, with Humphrey Bogart as the naval commander Queeg, while Robert Altman made a TV version of the play in 1988, with Brad Davis and Eric Bogosian in the cast.

Stylistically, this film is close to Altman’s chamber drama, but with considerably less peripheral fussiness in the action; Friedkin brings a keen focus to the direction and reworks Wouk’s drama, set at the end of World War Two, for the present day and a different field of naval operations. Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (Jake Lacy, from The White Lotus and the American The Office) is executive officer on the Caine, a US navy minesweeper in the Gulf, and is being court-martialled for mutiny after he relieved his commanding officer of his command during a storm. His justification, he claims, is that Lieutenant Commander Philip Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland) showed signs of mental disturbance that endangered the safety of the Caine and its crew. Assigned to defend him is Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jason Clarke), who will have to convince the military tribunal that Queeg’s was unfit to command – and much of the drama hinges on the way that Greenwald keeps us, and the courtroom, guessing the motives for some of his more eccentric-seeming strategies.

The structure could not be more simple. With everything taking place in the courtroom – except for brief moments in an outside corridor, and a coda in a reception room – a succession of witnesses, including Queeg and Maryk, are quizzed by Greenwald and by prosecuting counsel Commander Katherine Challee. This character, gender-changed from Wouk’s original, is played by Monica Raymund, from TV’s Chicago Fire and Hightown, whose performance is the film’s absolute barnstormer. Raymund is fiercely imposing as her character implacably grills her witnesses and is also the film’s centre of action, setting the camera in motion as she paces to and fro across the court.

Among the witnesses, yielding nicely varied star turns, are Lieutenant Keefer (Lewis Pullman), a fellow officer of Maryk’s with a literary sideline outside the service; naval expert Captain Southard (an insouciantly no-nonsense François Batiste); and a gauche young petty officer played by Gabe Kessler, who sweetly contributes the film’s comic relief. Throughout, the procedure is forcefully refereed by Reddick, gravely authoritative as Captain Blakeley, the court’s presiding officer.

Friedkin adventurously rebooted his late-period career by filming two plays by Tracy Letts, Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011), which allowed him to embroider imaginatively on spare dramatic frameworks. Here, by comparison, he’s gone for the barest bones: Michael Grady’s camerawork opts for unvaried lighting, with all the participants under the clear glare of a well-lit courtroom, and with camera angles and occasional, subtle camera moves providing the rhythmic and dramatic variation. A briskly edited mid-point crescendo comes in the form of the testimony from an increasingly rattled psychiatric officer (Jay Duplass).

Everything is in the language here – the testimonies doing the work of vividly evoking in detail the shipboard events – and in the performances. Friedkin has cast beautifully, not least in the supporting roles, with Jason Clarke’s Greenwald – until the coda, at least – remaining enigmatic and tantalisingly withdrawn, belying his imposing bulk. And as Queeg, Kiefer Sutherland gives us something we haven’t seen from him before: casting off his 24 action man persona, he moves here into the register of a character actor in a vintage Burgess Meredith vein, his Queeg nervy, laden with psyche-revealing tells, and speaking from the corner of his mouth with just the faintest edge of James Cagney.

The coda, in which Greenwald pulls the rug out from under everyone, is true to Wouk’s original, but in a 2022 context suggests a more conservative interpretation of the material than would have seemed apparent in a World War Two context. It’s an ending that may make some modern audiences uncomfortable, but it comes across as a characteristic farewell flourish from a director who always specialised in provocation within the mainstream.