There
have been a lot of posthumous service medals bestowed in recent years, which
maybe isn’t a bad thing, but the Navy has made it pretty dishearteningly clear
one of them will absolutely not be the Navy Cross for chaplain Lt. Thomas Conway. According to survivors, he tirelessly swam through shark-infested
waters administering spiritual comfort and last rites to the men of the USS
Indianapolis. However, the bureaucrats were able to reject a recent petition on
technical grounds, allowing them to add further insult to the injury of the 880
fatalities, many of whom possibly could have survived were it not for
procedural snafus. The horrific, heroic stories of the heavy cruiser’s captain
and crew are told in Mario Van Peebles’ USS
Indianapolis: Men of Courage (trailer here), which opens this
Friday (Veteran’s Day) in New York.
Technically,
the Indianapolis’s final mission was an unqualified success. They were
delivering parts and uranium for what would be the Little Boy atomic bomb to
Tinian in the Marianas. It was a highly classified mission, so they were not
allowed destroyer escorts. They made it to their destination safely, but they
were forced to fatally push their luck on the unescorted return trip. To make
matters exponentially worse, since their mission was off the books, nobody noticed
when the Indianapolis failed to arrive home on schedule.
The
gist of what happened after the cruiser was struck by multiple torpedoes will
be familiar to many from either Doug Stanton’s bestselling nonfiction account
or Quint’s monologue in Jaws. Captain
Charles Butler McVay would have preferred to go down with his ship, but through
a perverse twist of fate, he survived to become the scapegoat. Historians and
screenwriters Cam Cannon & Richard Riondo Del Castro agree it was a dubious
court martial, especially when some future presidents received medals for losing
PT-boats under roughly analogous circumstances.
The
Nic Cage renaissance continues with another surprisingly restrained yet deeply
tormented performance as CAPT. McVay. Tom Sizemore does his thing as crusty
Chief Petty Officer McWhorter and Thomas Jane channels his dashing inner Errol
Flynn as seaplane pilot Lt. Adrian Marks. Awkwardly, the two blandly played Seamen
rivals competing for the same girl adds a distracting and unnecessary soap
opera side show. However, the unexpected soul of the film comes from terrific
character actor Yutaka Takeuchi as Mochitsura Hashimoto the future Shinto
priest, who (reluctantly) commanded the submarine that sunk the Indianapolis.
Thanks
to the humanistic portrayal of Hashimoto, USS
Indianapolis celebrates the courage of the officers and crew, while reproaching
the injustices done to McVay without demonizing the Japanese people. However,
the dehumanizing aspects of the Imperial war machine, particularly the manned Kaiten
suicide torpedoes (so rarely seen in cinema), is depicted in no uncertain
terms.