Greyhound trailer reaction
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Tom Hanks on the bridge of the destroyer Keeling in Greyhound
Yesterday afternoon the first trailer dropped for Greyhound, a World War II film written by and starring Tom Hanks. Greyhound is based on the novel The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester (most famous as the creator of Horatio Hornblower), which was my favorite book of the year when I read it in 2018. I’ve been looking forward to the movie ever since.
The Good Shepherd is the story of Commander George Krause (Ernest Krause in the movie, per IMDb), a US Navy officer whose career has been undistinguished and his rise through the ranks slow. The outbreak of war with Germany and Japan finally gets him the rank of commander and the command of his own ship, the destroyer Keeling. Intensely religious, Krause reflects repeatedly on scriptures that seem to speak to his circumstances, and he approaches protecting the merchant ships entrusted to him with a fatalistic but Christlike sense of duty (it’s all right there in the title). This duty could mean redemption for Krause, who carries with him the burden of a long career with little actual experience, the seeming disregard of his superiors, and a failed marriage.
The novel begins as Krause, the thirty-seven merchant ships of his convoy, and the three other military escorts from other Allied countries enter the “air gap” or “black pit,” the stretch of the North Atlantic between Nova Scotia and Iceland and the British Isles that lay out of range of Allied air cover, where the convoys and their escorts had to fend for themselves. This zone was the primary hunting grounds of the U-boat wolfpacks. The subs which would fan out across the convoy routes until one submarine made contact, then signal the others to close in and harry the convoy from all directions. This technique proved devastatingly effective, especially during the periods in which the German Enigma codes were undeciphered, and The Good Shepherd takes place at the height of the U-boats’ success, in early 1942.
The novel was excellent—intense and gripping, comparable only to something like Deliverance in its conveyance of an exhausting life-and-death struggle. I read it in three days. I hope the movie lives up to it. So, as has become my wont when I do these trailer reactions on my blog, here are a few notes and impressions based on Greyhound’s first trailer:
The novel takes place across about three days and sticks with Krause the whole way. It’s told in third-person limited and, as I wrote when I named it my favorite fiction read of the year two years ago, it’s “intensely interior.” Krause doesn’t sleep and barely eats for three days, and a great deal of the drama comes not from colorful characters, the suspense of dramatic irony, or sheer action, but from the second-by-second calculations Krause makes any time a ship falls behind, one of the escorts under his command breaks away to chase a U-boat, leaving an opening, or a U-boat is spotted—rarest of sights—and the ships have to rush to its position and find it. There’s a lot of figuring and reckoning of relative speeds and distances and positions relative to the ship itself—all made with the continuous threat of U-boat attack if the Germans detect this vulnerable spot—and if Krause is not present or doesn’t see it, neither do we. It’s riveting. But I wondered even as I read it how to make it a movie. The filmmakers have clearly chosen to show us a lot more than we get in the book, which is fine—it’s not called adaptation for nothing—but I hope this doesn’t undermine the intense, exhausting mental game that the book evokes so strongly.
All that said, the trailer does give us plenty of shots of Krause’s bridge and the instruments he uses to captain the Keeling, communicate with the other escorts, and, especially, hunt the U-boats. The brief depth charge sequence in the trailer is suggestive—Krause has to guess on the basis of an oil slick whether they’ve killed a submerged U-boat or not. In the novel this is yet another source of anxiety, because Krause knows that the U-boat commanders will try to game him by dumping excess oil, blowing air from their ballast tanks to create phantom ASDIC pings, and all sorts of other tricks. Occasionally they succeed.
Hanks wrote the screenplay, and the film is directed by Aaron Schneider, whose previous movie, a Southern gothic fable called Get Low, I enjoyed. Based on that film and what we get in the trailer for Greyhound, Schneider has a strong visual sense and good feel for period filmmaking.
Lots of CGI, which is fine—I honestly don’t know how you’d tell this story without a lot of digital assistance. But it looks better than Midway, which ended up being good despite some of its special effects, so that’s something.
There are at least some real ships here, as Greyhound shot aboard the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Kidd. I hope this will lend the movie a lot of authenticity as well as something concrete and physical to which to the audience can anchor its imagination.
Related: Tom Hanks looks pretty great in uniform, and on the bridge. It’s easy to see why he’s made a career of playing unflashy and competent leaders.
The trailer includes scenes in a posh hotel lobby with Elisabeth Shue, presumably playing Krause’s estranged wife. As I mentioned, the whole book takes place over three days in the North Atlantic, so I wonder whether these are flashbacks, a sort of “cold open” or prologue, or if the film has an entirely different structure.
The film also stars Stephen Graham as one of Krause’s officers. Graham is British but has played Americans in period pieces a number of times—Sgt. Ranney in Band of Brothers, Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies, Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire—so he seems like a natural fit. He’s also one of those actors who can arrest your attention with very little screentime, so I look forward to seeing what he brings to his part since the junior officers in the novel are, by design, very thinly characterized.
I’m a sucker for lowering skies and gloomy atmosphere, so I’m sold there. This looks like a realistically oppressive and dreary North Atlantic, though the ice and snow of the novel don’t seem to be present. The cinematographer is Shelly Johnson, who has, like Schneider, shown a knack for period atmosphere, shooting such films as Hidalgo, The Wolfman, and, speaking of World War II, Captain America: The First Avenger.
The film was shot two years ago and its release has been delayed several times. It was originally supposed to come out last March, then this May, and now June. I haven’t come across any specific reason for these delays, and—contra the whole internet—a delay or reshoot is unremarkable, but I do hope this doesn’t signal some kind of editing or story trouble.
“Inspired by actual events” seems kind of weaselly. Forester did base his novel on experiences as a civilian embedded with various Allied ships during World War II, including both American and Royal Navy vessels, and there was a Battle of the Atlantic, but beyond that The Good Shepherd and Greyhound are, as far as I know, fiction. “Inspired by” continues to be the best example of the Hollywood publicity machine’s manipulation both of the audience and the idea of a “true story.” Pin that on the PR people, though—I’m not holding that against Hanks or the film.
I had worried somewhat that the film would downplay the novel’s religious overtones, but, lo and behold, the trailer opens with Krause praying for strength and concludes with him bringing hellfire to the Germans.
Finally, this movie combines two of my favorite jokes: the internet meme advice never to travel with Tom Hanks, and the classic Onion article “Tom Hanks Forces Houseguests to Play ‘World War II’ With Him.”
I’ve watched the trailer a couple times now and am quite excited to see it. The sailors of the Atlantic convoys are seldom acknowledged heroes of World War II—they lived in some of the most stressful and dangerous conditions imaginable, from the ships themselves to the freezing weather and a powerful, mostly invisible foe that would strike without warning—and I hope Greyhound will effectively bring their story to a wide audience. Tom Hanks, with his long, genuine interest in the war and the ordinary men who fought it, seems like just the right man for the job.
Greyhound arrives June 12, just in time to be a belated birthday gift for me (I have already tipped my wife off that I might maybe perhaps like tickets). Looking forward to it!
