The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: William Friedkin’s final film shows his absolute mastery of his craft

• Reviewed from the 2023 Venice International Film Festival

That William Friedkin’s final film should be an adaptation of a stage play, ‘The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial’, is a fitting way of bookending his career. After all, of his first four feature films, three of them were based on plays – The Birthday Party (1968), The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970) – and his experience of live television drama provided Friedkin with the skills to deal with the economy of a theatre piece. With lower budgets than in his heyday, Friedkin had for some time been collaborating with playwright Tracy Letts on spiky chamber dramas.  

Herman Wouk originally adapted his own 1951 novel into a play in 1953. It has also been adapted as a film – The Caine Mutiny (1954) – for the ageing Humphry Bogart in one of his rare non-heroic roles, but Friedkin adapts Wouk’s play for the screen, maintaining its two location simplicity. The story is apparently simple. Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (Jake Lacy) is accused of mutiny having assumed command of the eponymous ship during a typhoon off the coast of Iran when he believed that his mentally incapable superior, Captain Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland) was endangering the vessel with his refusal to turn the ship into the wind. He is reluctantly defended by Lieutenant Greenwald (a rare lead role for the ever watchable Jason Clarke) and the Commander Katherine Challee (Monica Raymund) presses the navy’s case for the prosecution. The late Lance Reddick presides as the head of the court with a steely moral authority and the kind of disapproving glare that can shrink an entire audience in their seats.   

With no flashbacks and no music, Friedkin embraces the austerity of his means as an opportunity to show his absolute mastery of his craft. It’s like giving Pablo Picasso nothing but a sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. As long as the pencil is sharp, he can make universes appear. Here, the story is told entirely through dialogue and reaction shots. The light might change outside the windows, but there’s no effort to make the background particularly realistic. The cinematography by his regular collaborator Michael Grady is best described as television ready. And yet Friedkin has created a thoroughly gripping courtroom drama. 

Updated to the present day, it’s surprising how little Friedkin has actually had to change. There’s a reference to 9/11 and terrorists but America still believes in an esprit de corps best exemplified by the kind of soldier who is willing to make it a career and subsume their whole lives and personalities to the service. “Thank you for your service” for Friedkin was obviously a sincerely held belief rather than a mouthed platitude. 

The back and forth of the story depends on a shifting view of Captain Queeg, brought out by the legal strategies of Greenwald. Despite consistently strong supporting roles Clarke has yet to really breakthrough as a lead actor and he certainly deserves to. The Australian actor has just appeared in Oppenheimer in a role uncannily symmetrical to that played here. For Nolan, he was the villainous prosecutor and here he is the good though reluctant defender. In both he is superb. Former brat-packer Sutherland begins coldly, struggling with a jowly stiffness, his nerves in his fingers as his hands claw involuntarily at his armrests, but in one long take his Queeg shows increasing fragility. 

It’s an odd argument – to offer sympathy for the powerful but incompetent man – but Friedkin has never followed the path most trod and here he drives the story forward so effectively, aided by an exemplary cast (his sharp pencil perhaps), that the moral of the tale is not half as important as the execution. This is a film that hums like a well-tooled machine and in its unflashyness it’s easy to miss the craft to it, but it stands as a testament to a director who despite coming to prominence as part of the New Hollywood had all the skills of the old. To prove the point: the last shot is accompanied by a cut that – given its recently acquired finality – feels like the cinematic equivalent of a mic drop.