Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (Jake Lacy) stands accused of mutiny for his actions while aboard the U.S.S. Caine.  His story is that the captain of the ship, Lt. Commander Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), had been showing a pattern of mental decline and when the ship was caught in a cyclone in the Strait of Hormuz, Maryk detained the captain and led the ship to safety.  Represented by Lieutenant Greenwald (Jason Clarke), Maryk is less than pleased with his defense, and Greenwald does not mince words that he is equally unpleased with his client. Maryk’s agitation clouds his testimony, though, opening up further lines of questioning from the lead prosecutor, Lt. Commander Challee (Monica Raymund) seeking to discredit his self-perceived expertise. 

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is the final film and the realization of a long-sought passion project from revered director, William Friedkin, who also wrote the script based on Herman Wouk’s 1952 novel.  The legal drama debuted posthumously and out of competition at the 80th Venice International Film Festival ahead of its release on Paramount+ with Showtime.  Running a comparatively brief 109 minutes against its colleagues in the genre, the film is still verbose to say the least, and intriguing in its largely single location and still camera work.  There is a confidence in the direction that is a common theme across the director’s body of work, and it should come as no surprise that the man who filmed one of the seminal exorcism films in the Cannon as a procedural drama, that he is able to make courtroom proceeding exciting hooking audiences on every minor reveal discovered across the testimony without relying on outbursts, flashbacks, or camera tricks. 

With Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992) the inevitable and inescapable high-water mark upon which all military court films since have been judged, it is best to get those comparisons out of the way early so that Caine Mutiny can then be examined in its own right.  Friedkin presents a synthesized version of this arc, forgoing any of the interpersonal drama or investigative work in which Reiner’s film circled, instead, we have a highly efficient, albeit clinical, legal drama.  Tensions flare, even without a bombastic performance from Jack Nicholson, and it is the simmering discomfort that propels this film.  It struggles, though, because it never quite shakes the feeling that it is litigating a policy dispute whereas A Few Good Men opens with a bloody mystery to solve.  Working with a thin budget, Friedkin understandably does not show us any of this action play out on the sea – though, by writing this it becomes clear that we the audience have truly been cheated of what could have potentially been a real masterpiece – so the result is all tell and no show. Because the ship was steered to safety, for those unfamiliar with the chain of command, there is an unavoidable question of why are we investigating a scenario where all is well that ended well, and the severity of Maryk’s actions is never clearly defined by the film. 

Instead of relying on flashbacks, we, like Lt. Challee and the rest of the panel, must rely on the twisting and contradictory testimony to suss out what actually happened aboard the U.S.S. Caine. The result is a masterclass in performance and perspective as characters are painted by one another to be one way, only for the story to shift and change when it is their turn to testify their own account. We are regaled by Maryk with stories of his own heroism under Queeg’s paranoid and tyrannical leadership – stories about missing cheese and strawberries that drove life and work on the ship to a halt for days on end – but when Queeg is given the opportunity to speak for himself, we see a meek and nervous man and begin to view Maryk as an arrogant boy who was acting out because he did not get his way. The cast does not change the meter of their respective performances wildly to enact these shifting views – much of that work is done on the page – but it does require careful attention to nuance on everyone’s part to take the small wins when they can, how to hold themselves while on the stand, and when to show a crack in their own beliefs. With Friedkin instructing Michael Grady’s camera on how close to hold, and Darrin Navarro’s edit which at times is largely uncut, Caine Mutiny is an actor’s showcase even without all the pomp and circumstance. 

While Lacy and Sutherland excel in their separate sparring, the real knockout performance comes in the finale when Clarke’s Greenwald confronts his celebrating client after his actions were excused by the court, sparing the man a fifteen-year prison sentence while simultaneously tarring the name of a career navy man. Geenwald’s moral predicament perfectly encapsulates the conundrum at the heart of the film; how are we supposed to act when we are working in a structure that dictates doing something against what we know in our hearts to be correct. In Maryk’s case, he felt his experience on the lakes back home superseded the path of action that his captain was taking. For Greenwald, he has little else but contempt for his client, but to betray Maryk would be to betray the oath he took to give his clients unbiased counsel. In taking on Maryk’s case, Greenwald has betrayed himself, and Clarke shines as a crumbled man who is noticing, perhaps for the first time, an inequity in the justice system to which he has committed his life. The speech grows as the simmering anger that he had to keep back in the courtroom overflows into rage as he calls out the young generation of Maryk’s peers who all come from wealth that will afford them some insulation as they rack up a few years of service that they can turn into a book deal or a talking point in their higher aspirations of elected office; the new guard consuming the old. 

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, despite its intentionally simplistic structure and design, is a challenging work to break into. It demands attention while featuring uniformed characters sitting and talking, in a brown, wooden room. Released on the home screens, it is a tall ask for audiences to find an uninterrupted, undistracted two hours, but in a way, this release pattern exemplifies the film’s own themes of the changing of the guard. More and more of our auteurs of Friedkin’s class are finding the theatrical environment evading them in favor of spectacle. There is, as always, some exception here, but by and large focus is on what comes next. What is being set up to sell audiences on the next ticket? There is little room at the multiplex, as ironic as that sounds, for the more thoughtful, meditative, and stand-alone pieces so if your film is not a springboard for a franchise – as Greenwald insinuates that Maryk and his peers’ time in the Navy is a springboard for a career as political pundits – you will receive a budget out of pity, a thank you for your service, and sent to the small screen to bother as few people as possible while the executives, mournful over the diminishing returns of the third installment of their rebooted franchise, sit and wonder what happened to today’s filmmakers and why don’t they make ‘em like they used to?