The Island (1980)
Umbrella DVD (region 4)
d. Michael Ritchie; pr. Richard D. Zanuck, David Brown; scr. Peter Benchley; novel. Peter Benchley; ph. Henri Decae; m. Ennio Morricone; ed. Richard A. Harris; cast. Michael Caine, David Warner, Angela Punch MacGregor, Frank Middlemass, Don Henderson, Zakes Mokae (115 mins)
A sharp script underlies this comically violent slice of grotesque satire, the strangest of the Peter Benchley deep-water set paperbacks that had previously resulted in the hit adaptations Jaws and The Deep. Jaws, of course, was directed by Steven Spielberg and now has the distinction of being an all-time classic in American popular cinema; while The Deep was a polished, popular hit. The Benchley momentum set up by these films peaked in The Island, the box-office disappointment and critical lambasting of which ended Benchley’s bank-ability and popularity.
In The Island, Michael Caine plays a reporter following up a story on an unexplained wave of maritime disappearances in the Caribbean Ocean. Stranded, with his son, on an island chain, Caine discovers a tribe of pirates, the in-bred descendents of one time buccaneers who plan to turn his son into one of their tribe. They hold Caine captive so that he can perform “husbandly duties” in keeping the pirate bloodline pure. The disbelieving Caine is soon confronted by the reality of pirate leader David Warner’s plan to initiate the boy into the pirate tribe by having him kill Caine. Australia’s Angela Punch MacGregor plays the muddy pirate wench whom Caine must service.
The Island differs strongly from the other Benchley adaptations in that this film is as much a black comedy as it is a populist fable. Indeed, it uses its tale of modern-day piracy for a satiric look at the legacy of mad violence that informs both its pirate cult and the American gun culture that director Michael Ritchie seeks to parallel it with in the initial set-up of The Island. It is also by turns bizarre, grotesque and ludicrously hilarious. Director Ritchie had, prior to The Island, developed a reputation as a skilled political satirist and social commentator on American values in a body of films which culminated in the film festival setting of An Almost Perfect Affair. In that movie was a cynical disenchantment with his own career, and in The Island Ritchie applied his hand to Hollywood fantasy.
Thus, although The Island is shot through with the same sardonic wit and sly observance of character in Ritchie’s early work, it is also so far removed from plausibility as to be admittedly ludicrous. Of all the Benchley adaptations, The Island refuses to take itself seriously and accepts its ridiculous nature. And that is its unique tension: Ritchie is attracted to certain satiric ideas about violence and religion but duti-bound to work within expected Hollywood action thriller. Ritchie’s early works resisted genre, but here Ritchie deliberately embraces it, trying to bring his humour to an outlandish thriller about piracy in the Caribbean. Plot exposition in The Island is secondary to character and situation: once Caine is captured by the pirates, the film becomes a comical parody of notions of tradition, patriarchy and religious ritual.
In Ritchie’s satire, the mad pirates are an in-bred Christian cult. Physically grotesque and bizarrely outfitted in an assortment of ill-matched clothing – booty from the passenger boats they plunder with alarming regularity – they are a proud bunch who value their particular combination of Christian mythology, pirate tradition and gobbledy-gook. Caine’s horror here is the recognition of his sheer helplessness against dangerous religious cretins who actually manage to lure his son away from him with their antiquated cultism, enabled by a man fond of the pirate clique for little more than the opportunity it offers his sense of anthropological curiosity. This weird pirate community is visualized with attention to production design, filled with conviction in the details of its marauding pirate existence.
Ritchie delights in staging scenes in which Caine’s cynicism is confronted by a situation to him as absurd as it is horrific: as when his son, forced to shoot at him in a game of target practice, says with assurance afterwards that he could have hit him if he wanted to. Patriarchy is either demented or hopelessly inadequate in Ritchie’s gleefully violent satire, and Caine’s son is their battleground. The excessively violent conclusion is an ironic repudiation of humanity with a vicious nihilism that Ritchie would subsequently abandon in his direct look at American gun culture survivalism in The Survivors.
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