The Mercy (2018)
The incredible story of amateur sailor Donald
Crowhurst and his solo attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The
struggles he confronted on the journey while his family awaited his
return is one of the most enduring mysteries of recent times.
Director:
James MarshWriter:
Scott Z. BurnsStars:
The incredible story of Donald Crowhurst , an amateur sailor who
competed in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in the hope of
becoming the first person in history to single-handedly circumnavigate
the globe without stopping. With an unfinished boat and his business and
house on the line, Donald leaves his wife, Clare and their children
behind, hesitantly embarking on an adventure on his boat the Teignmouth
Electron. The story of Crowhurst's dangerous solo voyage and the
struggles he confronted on the epic journey while his family awaited his
return is one of the most enduring mysteries of recent times.
Country:
UKRelease Date:
2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Deep Water See more »Company Credits
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IMDbPro »
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Aspect Ratio:
2.35 : 1Did You Know?
Trivia
One of two biopics about Donald Crowhurst slated for release in the UK
only a few weeks apart. The other, the independently produced Crowhurst (2017), starring Justin Salinger
as Donald Crowhurst, was finished earlier, but the distributor of The
Mercy bought it and delayed its release until a month after that of this
film.
A handsome period bio-drama about the doomed final voyage of yachtsman and fraudster Donald Crowhurst, The Mercy comes with an illustrious Britfilm pedigree. The director is James Marsh, whose credits include Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire and acclaimed Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything.
Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz headline the cast. And yet this unresolved
maritime mystery feels oddly flat and functional, diluting a tragic
tale full of unanswered questions into an anodyne middlebrow weepie. It
opens on U.K. and Irish screens later this week, with a staggered global
rollout to follow.
With its evergreen dramatic themes of grand ambition, financial
desperation and human folly, Crowhurst’s story has already inspired
stage plays, novels, poems, documentaries and even operas. Another
big-screen treatment of the same story, Simon Rumley’s indie
psycho-thriller Crowhurst, is also set to bow in the coming months. In a bold tactical move, The Mercy co-producers
Studiocanal have also bought the rights to Rumley’s film, agreeing to
release it soon after their bigger-budget rival version plays in
theaters.
In 1968, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper launches its
Golden Globe Race offering big cash prizes for the first ever
single-handed, around-the-world, non-stop sailing voyage. Both the first
and the fastest competitors will win £5000 each, the equivalent of
around $80,000 today. An amateur sailor with four young children and
mounting debts, Crowhurst (Firth) signs up for the race, hoping to
reverse his bad luck and promote his current venture, an electronic
nautical navigation device. Striking a high-stakes funding deal with
businessman Stanley Best (Ken Stott), he sets to work preparing an
innovative triple-hulled yacht for the race, the Teignmouth Electron.
Despite his own last-minute doubts, the reservations of wife Clare
(Weisz) and ominous technical issues with his experimental boat,
Crowhurst finally sets out to sea in late October. But his plans unravel
almost immediately, falling far behind the competition. In an
increasingly desperate state, with no hope of winning, he makes the
fateful decision to abandon the race, lingering off the coast of South
America and filing fake journey logs charting his fictional progress. He
even makes landfall in Argentina, breaking the rules of the race, a
detour that Marsh turns into a welcome injection of farcical human
drama.
By early July 1969, after eight months of almost total solitude, and
facing near certain financial ruin if he returns to Britain, Crowhurst
suffers some kind of mental breakdown. He begins writing florid,
delusional, quasi-religious screeds in his journals, one of which
provides The Mercy with its title. His disappearance on the
lonely high seas, most likely a suicide, is presented by Marsh in a
suitably vague, symbolic manner. His unmanned yacht was found intact and
adrift in the Atlantic on July 10,1969, but his fate remains an
unsolved mystery almost half a century later.
Peppered with tender flashbacks to conversations between Crowhurst and his family, The Mercy frames
this story primarily as a heart-tugging personal tragedy. Which of
course it was, on one level, but Marsh’s conventional bio-drama approach
does not yield great rewards cinematically. A bolder retelling of these
strange events might have found richer psychological, political or
social dimensions to Crowhurst’s disastrous failed mission.
To his credit, Marsh moves the story along at a breezy pace and milks
maximum eerie effect from the sense-warping oddness of being out alone
on the vast ocean, assailed by a constant soundtrack of creaks and
cracks and slapping waves. In a departure from Rumley’s film, which had
strong psychological horror undertones, The Mercy depicts
Crowhurst’s descent into hallucinatory madness in relatively restrained,
poetic terms. But while the two pictures vary wildly in tone and style,
both ultimately struggle to resolve the same dilemma: There is little
inherently dramatic about watching one man going progressively insane
inside the cramped cabin of a sailing boat.
Firth’s performance, reliably solid but low on emotional intensity,
only reinforces this general flatness of mood. David Thewlis brings some
much-needed comic fizz as Crowhurst’s bumptious press agent, but
Weisz’s acting skills are shamefully underused in her handful of bland
vignettes as a passive, dutiful spouse.
The Mercy makes Crowhurst more hero than anti-hero, laying
the brunt of blame for his death on arm-twisting business partners and
sensation-hungry media vultures rather than on his own reckless
adventurism. “Last week you were selling hope, now you are selling
blame,” Clare angrily berates reporters when tragedy strikes. This
soapy, simplistic line encapsulates a key problem of Marsh’s film, which
constantly seeks the dry land of moral clarity where there is only an
unfathomable ocean of uncertainty.
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