Greyhound
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Burial at sea in Greyhound
Last week I finally had the chance to see Greyhound, a film I’ve been anticipating ever since I read the book two years ago. When the first trailer dropped in the Spring I was optimistic, albeit with some questions or reservations, and eager for June to come. Then COVID-19 did its thing and with theaters closed Sony lateraled to AppleTV+—a service I don’t have. So it took a get-together with family to give me the opportunity. I’m glad I finally got to see it.
Greyhound tells the story of Cdr. Ernest “Ernie” Krause (Tom Hanks), a career US Navy officer in command of a destroyer during World War II, and the roughly three days it takes to lead a convoy of merchant ships through “the black pit,” the zone of the North Atlantic out of reach of air cover from Canada, Iceland, or the British Isles, a zone infested with U-boat wolfpacks. More specifically, Greyhound takes place just months after Pearl Harbor, in the grim days when it was unclear whether the Allies would or could win the war, and Krause, despite his long career, is new to command. He has never seen combat. Appropriately, the film opens with the devoutly religious Krause on his knees by his rack, praying.
Krause and his destroyer, the Keeling—radio callsign “Greyhound”—will make contact with the Germans before the end of that day. Despite an early victory over this first U-boat, the wolfpack closes in and contact is unrelenting. The U-boats harry the convoy, whose four escorts—an American, a Canadian, and two British destroyers—shuttle continuously back and forth to oversee rescue operations for stricken ships, locate and pursue the U-boats, and—above all—provide coverage to the vulnerable cargo ships.
These competing duties stretch Krause and his crew, but Krause most of all. He does not eat or sleep for forty-eight hours and only occasionally stands still. By the final night his feet bleed and his speech slurs. But always he returns to the same problems—looking for and locating the U-boats, engaging them with a supply of depth charges that immediately runs low, conserving fuel, looking out for slower cargo ships or damaged stragglers, calculating and recalculating the time it will take to reach air cover and help.
And here I should mention the thing that holds the whole movie together—Tom Hanks. Hanks wrote the screenplay himself, adapting CS Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd, and it’s clear that this is a film he’s thought a lot about. All of the pressure and stress of command, even Krause’s short murmured prayers or quotes from the Bible at crucial moments in the story, come to us through the smallest changes in Hanks’s face. We read his decisions in his expressions, in the anxious glances he throws toward a damaged ship or the set of his jaw as he sweeps the horizon with his binoculars. It’s a powerful and gripping performance, but not a flashy one. Krause finds himself confronted with the first real test of his career, a career in which he has been “fitted and retained” for years—that is, good enough not to be let go from the peacetime Navy, not good enough to be promoted—and now he is eager to do the right thing, make the right decisions, and lead the men and vessels that depend on him through the wolfpack to safety. He wants to be a good shepherd, and the earnestness of Hanks’s performance as Krause is one of the film’s greatest strengths. (Tellingly, in the novel he is George Krause. In Hanks’s adaptation he is Ernest.)
A few critics have knocked Greyhound for its underdeveloped supporting characters, but I think the film makes up for this in casting. The film is full of interesting and—importantly—distinct looking faces, so that even as a new officer of the watch rotated to the bridge to join Krause I could remember his face if not his name. The cast also convey a lot about their characters without words—much of the dialogue is, after all, the spare and precise language of military command—through meaningful glances and small looks exchanged behind Krause’s back. We understand that one young lieutenant questions Krause’s leadership and judgement, and another is as eager to do well in his subordinate position as Krause is as the captain. So while these secondary characters may not be fully fleshed out, we feel who they are by watching them work together, which I will always prefer to those scenes in which happy-go-lucky GIs talk about their Ma or their Best Girl back home over a game of cards.
A few supporting characters do stand out. Krause’s XO, LtCdr Charlie Cole (Stephen Graham), is Krause’s second-in-command and confidant, the only one Krause briefly opens up to with his doubts—a moment they quickly downplay when they note a rating listening to their conversation. Krause relies on Cole; Graham, in a performance that makes the most of his limited dialogue and screentime, makes us understand why. We also get to know one of the ship’s mess attendants, Cleveland (Rob Morgan), one of only two black men shown aboard the ship, and Cleveland and Krause’s relationship leads to one of the most moving moments in the film.
The film has its problems. There is some dodgy CGI, something I was concerned about when I first saw the trailer, but I don’t know how the filmmakers could have overcome this without a worldhistorical Christopher Nolan-sized budget. The special effects mostly look good, especially one evocative shot that rises from the Keeling into a night sky illuminated by the flares and tracers of the convoy and the exploding torpedoes of the U-boats and higher and higher into the clouds, which flicker and glow with the combat beneath. It’s mostly CGI, but it provided a moment of repose and poetry in this otherwise efficient and machinelike war thriller. Other shots, especially frenetic shots of digital close combat between the various ships and the U-boats, don’t look as good.
The film also feels overedited in some portions, as if, in the long delays between shooting and releasing Greyhound, the filmmakers or the studio (not unlikely given Sony’s history of meddling with productions) were unsure of some stretches of the film. This is particularly the case at the very beginning, in a short scene that establishes Krause’s thwarted love for Evelyn (Elisabeth Shue), and in the final battle, which feels like something is missing in the buildup to the climax.
But the CGI and editing are not insuperable problems. More questionable to me is the decision to show the audience some of what the U-boats are up to. We get occasional cutaways to the subs surfacing or rising to periscope depth to target the convoy. While I think this is meant to give the audience an Oh no, look out! feeling of tension, waiting for Krause and crew to spot and react to the threat, for me they more often deflated the building tension. One of the most powerful aspects of the book was that its point of view was utterly confined to that of Krause, and his continuous scrabble for mere knowledge of his situation made it exhausting and unbearably tense. By providing the viewer of the film with more information than Krause, it separates us from him at a few crucial moments when I think it would have been better to stick with him and watch and wait. Fortunately, the strength of the storytelling and Hanks’s performance carry us through the film, so this is another issues that doesn’t sink the film. (Sorry.)
The only outright artistic misstep, I think, is the decision to have a U-boat commander (voiced by Thomas Kretschmann) hijack the frequency of the Keeling’s ship to ship radio to taunt Krause—and occasionally howl at him. While surely intended to be creepy or threatening, it felt like neither and more like another slip in the filmmakers’ confidence in the foreboding mood that they had created.
(It was also impossible with the technology available and, moreover, inadvisable for a sub trying to hide and escape depth-charging.)
So, those issues aside, here are a few other things I appreciated about Greyhound:
It’s short and fast-paced. Critics used the word “efficient” repeatedly, something I think a few of them intended to be condescending. I think it’s a strength. The film clocks in at just over an hour and a half and there’s not an ounce of fat on it.
It’s got an enviably authentic feel. Greyhound shot some scenes aboard a surviving Fletcher-class destroyer that has been maintained in WWII-condition as a museum piece, and the sets, equipment, and uniforms look great. The characters also act like men from the period, which is always a plus.
Greyhound includes some aspects of the war that don’t often make it into movies. The Keeling catches ricochets from another ship’s anti-submarine fire and there is at least one straightforward friendly fire accident. The men also show their inexperience and make mistakes—a big problem in a military trying to grow quickly from its minuscule interwar size to something that could take on the Axis.
The film is subtle. I’ve mentioned the power of Hanks’s quiet, unshowy performance, but the film brings in a lot of other things without calling attention to them or giving us an exposition dump. This is particularly the case with the mess attendants, Cleveland and Pitts (Craig Tate), a nod toward the racially segregated roles in the US military at the time that allows us to see it in context without derailing the story for a sermon.
The film also treats Krause’s religion seriously, allowing him to be specifically and meaningfully Christian. A rare thing in films today. This also provides a few little moments of kinship with Cleveland.
Greyhound was shot digitally by DP Shelly Johnson. I prefer and always will prefer the look of film, but Johnson’s work looks fantastic and the dreary blues and greys of the wintertime North Atlantic set the mood exceptionally well. Look for the return of sunshine as the film’s hope spot.
The film is also pretty clean, language-wise. This isn’t usually a concern for me, but the film’s relative lack of profanity, its short running time, and its attention to details of life aboard ship and background issues like segregation mean I’m already thinking about this film for classroom use. The characters’ own attention to policing their language also hints at the elaborate traditional protocols of the Navy, something I appreciated.
Finally, as I’ve already hinted, Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed the audience. One of my favorite things in any historical film is for the filmmakers to drop us into an unfamiliar world and trust us enough to keep up and learn (cf. Valkyrie, The Alamo, and the masterpiece of this kind of storytelling, Master and Commander). Greyhound does that admirably, establishing how things are done and why without the use of clumsy exposition. The first U-boat attack and Krause’s countermeasures do an excellent job of this.
Greyhound may not make it into the top tier of World War II films, but it is a finely-crafted film that tells a good story well, and it gripped me from beginning to end. It’s clearly a labor of love for Tom Hanks, and I think his efforts in shepherding this film into existence have proven worthwhile.
If you get the chance to see Greyhound, its availability limited as it is by streaming on AppleTV+ rather than having a theatrical release, do so. For myself, I hope to see this on the big screen someday.
