Finestkind
This film is like its main characters. They are best on the sea. The writer/director grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts where the film is set and worked on a boat that gathered deep sea scallops over 100 miles offshore for two weeks at a time like his subjects.
We hear the sounds of the ocean, the calls of the birds, the splashes of the waves before we see anything. We can almost smell the salt in the air. Then we see Tom (Ben Foster) on the dock. Figuratively speaking, he is throughout this story between freedom and clarity of open water, landlockedness of earthly complications family obligations, bosses rules, politicians’ rules, girlfriends’ rules, money.
For Tom there are only two parts to life: being on the water and waiting to go back out again. It’s another world, where sky and sea merge as one beyond any visible horizon. Whales pass under boats.
Like others in this movie Tom has a view about what it means to be a man. In his mind masculinity equals maximum possible freedom from everything but nature itself. There’s some light hazing with newcomers but an instant bond with anyone who chooses this life.
There are men who work in offices and wear ties somewhere offstage here what those at sea consider lesser beings because they won’t do hard physical work fit for males (“They’re not men”). Helgeland’s guy talk dialogue is brief, sardonic, elliptical everything emotion or vulnerability isn’t.
The word “Finestkind” sums up all those things by itself as well as being literally true it’s not only a boat name but also an all purpose term for just about anything anyone would want to say “an expression of trade.” It can mean anything from “that’s cool” to “f— you.” It is “the Swiss army knife of words.” That’s not understatement, it’s barely-statement.
Charlie (Toby Wallace) comes over to Tom on the dock. They haven’t seen each other in a long time, but they are half brothers and Charlie looks up to him. Their mother is Donna (Lolita Davidovich). She divorced Tom’s father, who everyone calls Mr. Eldridge (Tommy Lee Jones), then married Charlie’s dad, a lawyer named Gary (Tim Daly).
Charlie has just finished college and been accepted at law school. But he turned down a job in his dad’s office so he could spend this summer crewing for Tom instead. He also likes Mabel (Jenna Ortega), who may be bad news after making some risky choices although she tries telling him “It’s where I’m from, not where I’m headed.”
Soon as they get out on the water something terrible happens. Mr. Eldridge talks Tom into taking his boat out.
Another ruin occurs. Tom now needs two hundred thousand dollars to get his boat out of impoundment, so he takes a job that’s even more dangerous, and with even worse people. Another ruin.
Helgeland wants us to get swept up in the brothers’ story as they sink deeper into their choices’ consequences, but the most real relationship in the movie happens in one short scene between exes played by Jones and Davidovich. Foster is at his best when he can keep his feelings coiled tight and ready to explode at any moment like this one, but there isn’t much for him to do here and Wallace can’t do much with a role that’s been conceived too broadly. By the time Charlie and Mabel start discussing Moby Dick during sex, it’s all over but the shouting.
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