'Perfect Storm': A better book or movie?

Perhaps its brutal finality is better comprehended on the page than on the screen.

By MARGO HAMMOND

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 30, 2000

As the final credits were rolling across the screen during an advance screening of The Perfect Storm, I heard a woman behind me say, "Boy, was that a downer."

Most moviegoers are like that. They want to see a happy ending. Or, as in Titanic, that other sea disaster movie, at least a survivor or two.

Readers, on the other hand, are not so afraid of gloom (with the possible exception of the romance aficionados who, by definition, insist on happily ever after). For some of us, in fact, the bleaker the better.

Witness all the readers who have devoured Sebastian Junger's searing non-fiction account of the doomed Andrea Gail that inspired that "downer" movie. The Norton hardback, published in 1997, was on the New York Times bestseller list for one solid year. To date, 3.5-million copies of The Perfect Storm have been sold in paperback, winning a place for the book on the paperback best-seller list for the past two years non-stop. Recently, thanks no doubt to the movie version, the book returned again to the No. 1 spot.

'Perfect Storm' imperfectly told Special effects occasionally drown out the real-life story behind this tragic tempest.

Why has the book been so popular? Readers are fascinated by Junger's vivid portrait of the treacherous but profitable occupation that puts fish on our tables and people's lives at risk. They are intrigued by the author's detailed lessons in wave physics and meteorology. But by far the most talked about passage in The Perfect Storm has been Junger's unflinching description of death by drowning. The author didn't pretend to know exactly what happened to the six crew members aboard the Andrea Gail when it met up with the storm of the century and was overwhelmed by mammoth waves. But he was able to interview people who had been through similar situations, and survived. The resulting re-creation of what might have happened is riveting.

"The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening," he reports. "Having never done it before, the body -- and the mind -- do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. "So this is downing,' a drowning person might think. "So this is how my life finally ends.' "

Junger's ability to offer such reflection and conjecture while still sticking to the facts is what gives his book its greatest appeal. Junger tries to describe something unknowable, and that is terribly compelling.

Movies, however, cannot so easily speculate on how something "might" have happened. Not surprisingly, the screen version of The Perfect Storm takes far more liberty than Junger was prepared to do in imagining the final minutes of the Andrea Gail. Although Junger made up no dialogue, the screenwriter not only created conversations, he made up whole characters and invented relationships that never existed.

Linda Greenlaw, the swordboat captain, is real. But her flirtation with Billy Tyne, the captain of the Andrea Gail, is pure fiction, as is her speech at the memorial service for the drowned crew (although the scene is shot in the very church where the service took place).

In the movie, a crew member named Bugsy tries to pick up a single mother of two at the Crow's Nest the night before the ill-fated Andrea Gail leaves port. Although refusing to spend tbe night with him, the woman unexpectedly and touchingly comes back the next morning to see him off. All that is also invented but not entirely out of whole cloth: As Junger reports, Bugsy did try to score the night before he set off to sea. The Crow's Nest is also real, but in the movie the bar has been moved closer to the pier.

Readers may be bothered by these additions and adjustments, but for the most part the movie version of The Perfect Storm is an admirable adaptation of Junger's reportage. A mature movie, it doesn't try to glamorize or over-dramatize a story that is an unblinking look at the harsh truth of man's struggles against nature and the elements.

For readers who enjoyed even the mind-numbing details of boat construction in The Perfect Storm, the ending is not a downer. It's reality.