The Finest Hours (2016)

There is something almost archaeological about The Finest Hours, a Disney rescue drama so committed to the mid-century template that it could be carbon-dated to 1955. Craig Gillespie directs the 1952 Pendleton disaster with a straight back and a stiff upper lip: a nor'easter, a split tanker, a small boat with a twelve-man capacity taking on thirty-two souls. Chris Pine plays Bernie Webber with the quiet stoicism of a man who has never once considered his own interiority. The film wants nothing from us but our admiration, and it receives it, politely, like a hat passed at church.

The cultural markers here are faint and largely incidental. John Ortiz appears among the crew, a presence noted and then moved past, which is the correct behavior for a film whose setting is a 1952 New England Coast Guard station. Holliday Grainger's Miriam gets the most generous treatment, confronting the commanding officer and organizing the townspeople to aim their headlights at the harbor, a gesture that is warmly human and only lightly modern. The nor'easter is weather, not a sermon. The tankers are a workplace hazard, not a metaphor for extraction. Nobody in this film is asked to learn a lesson about themselves, which is a relief and also, commercially speaking, a catastrophe.

The result is an old-fashioned picture that inspires without instructing, a rare specimen in the current ecosystem. It is earnest, it is white, it is heterosexual, and it lost Disney roughly seventy-five million dollars. We classify it accordingly, with the mild melancholy of a sommelier presented a perfectly decent bottle of milk.