Sturm und Drang

While The Perfect Storm is mostly sound and fury, it signifies a good deal more than should be reasonably expected from an effects-fueled summer thriller. Adapted from Sebastian Junger's 1997 novel, the film chronicles the high weather and higher tragedy encountered by the crew of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat which, in the autumn of 1991, found itself at sea during the maritime convergence of three fearsome squalls.

In recent years, the cinematic depiction of natural phenomena has yielded a bevy of stilted failures (Twister, Volcano, ad nauseam) which gleefully indulge in CGI wizardry at the expense of human conflict. The Perfect Storm, by contrast, is the first disaster movie where the graphics, spectacular as they are, complement rather than subsume the drama at the story's vibrant heart.

The doomed fishermen include Captain Billy Tyne (a sympathy-eschewing George Clooney), a gruff, obdurate salt determined to stem his streak of professional misfortune, along with a host of iconic types like Mark Wahlberg, who is surprisingly strong as an idealistic rookie. In a comparatively undernourished but no less visceral subplot, a trio of pleasure boaters finds their cruise menaced by the gale. While this scenario clearly exists to leaven the grimness of the Andrea Gail's ordeal, it does allow director Wolfgang Petersen to stage a prolonged, riveting helicopter rescue.

This entire project marks a welcome return to form for Petersen, whose last effort-the crudely jingoistic Air Force One-epitomized sleek prefab nihilism. With The Perfect Storm, he has re-identified the humanity that propelled Das Boot and, to a lesser degree, In the Line of Fire. Petersen is the rare action director able to elicit strong performances from his casts, nowhere more consistently, perhaps, than in this film. These spirited, pitch-perfect actors suffuse their characters with utterly convincing nuance. Particularly fine among the ensemble are Diane Lane, vulnerable and earnest as Wahlberg's landlubbing beloved, and the luminous Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, a splendid actress too rarely seen in recent years.

The Perfect Storm is impeccably played throughout (a few bathetic newsroom scenes notwithstanding) and its first half-hour establishes an authentic dramatic milieu. Still, the movie falls a touch short of the perfection its title augurs. Petersen and editor Richard Francis Bruce never establish a discernible temporal trajectory-we're unable to register the passage of time (which, is difficult to convey amid an apocalyptic tempest). This ambiguity lends the film a biblical timelessness, to an extent, but it also undermines the drama unfolding among the anxious folk back on land. How long has the Andrea Gail been at sea? How many days have Lane et al held their collective breath?

Another debit: James Horner's tame, rote score, which contributes an unnecessary and inapt dimension of generic heroism. But a quibble like this withers in the face of such electrifying technical mastery: The Perfect Storm's seamlessly incorporated special effects burnish the drama in exhilarating, unobtrusive fashion-the climactic breaker, in particular, inspires bottomless, primal dread. Rarely have sound and fury been harnessed so effectively to accessible emotion.