Crowhurst

Typ­i­cal – you wait 40 years for a biopic about ill-fat­ed sailor Don­ald Crowhurst, then two come along at once. Between James Marsh’s glossy The Mer­cy and Simon Rumley’s more straight-laced Crowhurst, the sto­ry of a British busi­ness­man who attempt­ed to sin­gle-hand­ed­ly sail around the world in an attempt to win prize mon­ey to save his ail­ing com­pa­ny has clear­ly caught the imag­i­na­tion of film­mak­ers in recent years.

Though The Mer­cy beat Crowhurst to the punch in cin­e­mas, Rumley’s film actu­al­ly pre­dates its big-name coun­ter­part, and takes a more uncon­ven­tion­al approach to the source mate­r­i­al. Lensed with a fuzzy ​’60s sen­si­bil­i­ty, it feels less like a film made in 2015 and more like a rel­ic from a bygone era, open­ing on the ocean with Justin Sallinger’s tit­u­lar Crowhurst receiv­ing a mes­sage from across the Atlantic. From there it back­tracks to fill us in on the cir­cum­stances con­cern­ing Crowhurst’s mis­guid­ed expe­di­tion, and fol­lows a fair­ly lin­ear nar­ra­tive as he departs and inevitably begins to lose his marbles.

Giv­en that he’s on screen for almost every scene, Sallinger puts in a sol­id turn as the doomed sailor, his mild-man­nered buf­foon­ery fac­ing a rapid descent into unnerv­ing mad­ness, con­veyed through trip­py visu­als, hal­lu­ci­na­tions and a lot of scream­ing. It’s a some­what heavy-hand­ed depic­tion of Crowhurst’s men­tal devo­lu­tion, and the lo-fi nature of the film means it feels like a strange cross between an exper­i­men­tal movie and a BBC prime­time drama.

The real prob­lem with Rumley’s slight­ly clum­sy film is the same prob­lem which its Stu­dio­Canal sta­ble­mate also failed to recog­nise: the facts of the Don­ald Crowhurst sto­ry are stranger than any fic­tion­al imag­in­ing. These recent attempts to make order out of chaos are doomed to feel trite, fail­ing to recog­nise that the sto­ry of an unlucky (and fair­ly fool­ish) man bat­tling the ele­ments with a fore­gone con­clu­sion is not par­tic­u­lar­ly grip­ping, and arguably the great­est tragedy of Crowhurst’s fol­ly was the young fam­i­ly he left behind.