To date, the only resistance to Peter Weir’s cinematic version of Patrick (O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels about the British Navy in the days of Napoleon has come from those vexed by the fact that Weir and John Collee, who co-wrote the screenplay, have played fast and loose with the sacred texts on which the film is based. Such grousing was inevitable, for O’Brian’s fans are as obsessed with the fine detail of their saga as any Harry Potter addict or Baker Street Irregular, and Master and Commander is in no way a literal adaptation. Instead, it recombines elements of several O’Brian novels into a single plot, and goes its own sweet way on countless occasions. Heresy! quoth the outraged buffs. Murder on the high seas! Clap those men in irons—or, better yet, give them a taste of the cat.
Such folk, like the poor, will always be with us, and will always be ignored. Hollywood doesn’t make movies for people who read books. People who read books do go to movies, however, and one of them, Christopher Hitchens, panned Master and Commander in Slate. Now Hitchens is a contrarian who likes nothing better than to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, even when it’s right and he’s wrong. Yet he put his finger on an aspect of the film about which the trailer had left me extremely suspicious:
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