November 9–16, 2000

movie shorts

Men of Honor

At the start of Men of Honor, Master Chief Billy Sunday (Robert DeNiro) limps into a train station in Charleston, South Carolina, 1966. This loud-mouthed good ol’ boy and his stanky-drunk Navy buddies, also bloodied, settle onto a bench to regale each other with memories of their recent battle, but Sunday’s attention is diverted by the television, which shows his old diver-training-school nemesis, Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.) doing good work on a ship in the Pacific, looking for a lost nuclear device on the ocean floor. When Sunday turns his attention to Brashear, his associates are startled, to say the least, and soon they’re wondering aloud if he’s a "nigger-lover."

Most of what follows takes Brashear’s point of view — as he struggles from his sharecroppers’ son beginnings to his eventual triumphs and tragedies as a Navy Diver — but the fact that the film opens with Sunday watching him underlines its primary concern with the complicated relationship between ambivalent racist Sunday and unquestionable hero Brashear, and the ways that their repeated clashes comment on and eventually shape U.S. military "history" (at least as it’s recounted here). While Brashear is based on a real person and Sunday is a fictional composite, in George Tillman Jr.’s film, they come together in a neatly choreographed dance of righteous nobility in the face of ignorance and fear.

If Sunday’s redemption is a bit suspect — as Brashear’s superior officer during the 1950s, he almost kills the young diver, under the auspices of keeping the Navy racially "pure" — Brashear is definitively heroic from the jump. He enlists in the Navy, supposedly desegregated by Harry Truman, but of course, the recruit finds that he’s relegated to kitchen duty. Determined to be a Master Diver — and not incidentally, the Navy’s first black Master Diver — Brashear eventually makes his way to a New Jersey training facility run by Billy Sunday, a courageous diver who’s so ornery that he’s regularly busted in rank. On their first meeting outside the diving school, Sunday calls Brashear "Cooky" and won’t let him in the gate, making him stand outside at attention, waiting to "report for duty" all day long. Such abuse, of course, only makes Brashear more resolute.

This interaction is the short version of the plot, which repeats without much variation: Sunday is cruel, Brashear is resilient, again and again. And again. Brashear is hampered by a number of impediments in addition to Sunday’s personal abuses, including his seventh grade education and the training school’s commanding officer, Mr. Pappy (Hal Holbrooke), who makes it his mission to keep Brashear from passing his Master Diver exams.

As Brashear’s displays of valiant will are the film’s raison d’être, everyone else tends to showcase his greatness and/or learn by his example, from Pappy to Sunday to fellow diving student Snowhill (Michael Rapaport), whose pathetic life Brashear saves, from Brashear’s unbelievably loyal wife Jo (Aunjanue Ellis) to Sunday’s wife Gwen (Charlize Theron) whose brief appearances reveal precious little about her own boozy despair; their central function appears to be assuring you that Sunday must have occasional non-asshole moments. So even when he leaves "Nigger Go Home" notes on Brashear’s bunk, almost drowns Brashear during a practical exam and then almost drowns himself during a barroom contest in which he and Brashear don water-filled diving helmets to see who can hold his breath the longest, Sunday somehow comes off as an okay guy whom you want to see spared eternal damnation. When he finally decides to help Brashear make his Master Diver rank, Sunday recovers from his alcoholic haze and turns gallant himself, fighting off a malicious bureaucratic whippersnapper (Holt McCallany) who refuses to grant Brashear his more-than-deserved promotion.

Sunday’s salvation is symptomatic of Men of Honor’s. Surely, it’s not a bad thing to want the crazy-mean Sunday to see the light, any more than it is to want Brashear to succeed at his seemingly impossible task. And it’s a good thing, we all know, that the military is still working to reduce racism within its ranks (as well as sexism and, to a much lesser extent, homophobia). But in presenting Brashear’s amazing saga as if it’s only about an individual overcoming tremendous odds incarnated by other individuals, the film lets the Navy — as a social and political system — off the hook, even arguing (ironically) for its greatness because a man as remarkable as Brashear would want to be part of it.

Of course, this attitude is partly a function of securing the Navy’s cooperation in the film’s production, illustrated by one Navy advisor’s observation in the press kit that Brashear’s "is an inspirational story, one that transcends race." While I have no doubt that he and the filmmakers believe this fiction (in spirit if not particular, perhaps), Brashear’s story — even in its big-screen dilution — is so manifestly about long-term, institutionalized racism that such a comment sounds patently naïve, even disingenuous. The trick in this film (and many others that take on similar rehabilitative projects) is to set this racism in the past and attribute it to screwed-up, drunk, self-absorbed, insane individuals, so viewers who don’t identify with those individuals are reassured that they’re not to blame.