The Mer­cy

In 1998, the British visu­al artist Taci­ta Dean pro­duced a small vol­ume of pho­tographs and text enti­tled ​‘Teign­mouth Elec­tron’. It con­tained a selec­tion of arte­facts from her trip to the island Caiman Brac, the final rest­ing place of the epony­mous tri­maran built and pilot­ed by a myth­i­cal fig­ure in the annals of mod­ern sail­ing: Don­ald Crowhurst.

Through som­bre images of the crum­bling ves­sel, Dean evokes the shat­ter­ing plight of a dizzy-head­ed dream­er who, in 1968, dis­ap­peared at sea while com­pet­ing in the Sun­day Times Gold­en Globe solo around-the-world yacht race. The stark sim­plic­i­ty of the pic­tures – the mot­tled hull, the smashed win­dows, or mere­ly the tragedy of see­ing a boat gath­er­ing moss on dry land – are haunt­ing, even if you have no knowl­edge of Crowhurst’s watery fate.

The Mer­cy is a new work from direc­tor James Marsh, who seems to be tee­ing him­self up as the British Wern­er Her­zog. His films tend to focus on men who over­come mas­sive logis­ti­cal odds to envis­age their fan­tasies, men such as the charis­mat­ic wire-walk­er Philippe Petit who danced between the Twin Tow­ers in Man on Wire, or Stephen Hawk­ing, whose phys­i­cal imped­i­ments proved no bar­ri­er to intel­lec­tu­al path find­ing in The The­o­ry of Every­thing.

With the lat­ter film, he man­aged to apply his for­mu­la to the awards cir­cuit, and was duly reward­ed for his sac­cha­rine efforts. This new one feels like a return to the flinty, moral­ly ambigu­ous ter­rain of superb IRA thriller, Shad­ow Dancer.

Yet Crowhurst is cut from a dif­fer­ent cloth to Petit and Hawkins, as he is some­one whose can-do demeanour is cut through with a cloy­ing, fatal­is­tic arro­gance. The sto­ry is, in many ways, about a man who acci­den­tal­ly com­mits sui­cide. In Crowhurst, Col­in Firth is sad­dled with a nice, rangy role. In the film’s first half he is a paragon of Eng­lish spark and self-reliance, decid­ing on a whim that he wants to break the record for cir­cum­nav­i­gat­ing the globe non-stop, and he intends to do so in a new type of boat. He smiles cheer­i­ly, he con­nects with his pre­co­cious kids, he is affec­tion­ate to his wife, who is played by the always-impres­sive Rachel Weisz.

Yet she is deeply scep­ti­cal of his scheme. She is con­cerned with the sim­ple eco­nom­ics of life and sur­vival. Who will feed their chil­dren while he is gone? And, God for­bid, what if he doesn’t make it back? Crowhurst’s first big mis­take is attack­ing this task like it’s a cake­walk, that fame, glo­ry and cash will be theirs in a heart­beat. It is a film about mis­judg­ing the size and scale of the world from the van­tage of the cosy Eng­lish provinces. The Mer­cy also feels a lot like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind, but instead of reach­ing a musi­cal inter­galac­tic epiphany, there’s noth­ing but lone­li­ness, con­fu­sion and an expand­ing web of lies.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, yet Marsh tries way to hard to main­tain dra­mat­ic inter­est when his sub­ject is lit­er­al­ly lost at sea. The film begins as a metic­u­lous and light­ly objec­tive retelling of the Crowhurst saga, yet takes a major wrong turn when it decides to plun­der the acrid state of his inner psy­che. As this jaun­ti­ly edit­ed phan­tas­mago­ria on the high seas angle falls at, you can’t help but think back to Dean’s sim­ple pho­tographs, which say every­thing by say­ing noth­ing at all.