Wind

Carroll Ballard made The Black Stallion and Never Cry Wolf, two films in which a person is attached to something larger than themselves and the camera is more interested in the larger thing. Wind is the same arrangement with yachts. Will Parker (Matthew Modine) sails for Morgan Weld (Cliff Robertson) in the defence of the America’s Cup, loses it, and spends the rest of the film trying to get it back, and the shape of that, from a story by Roger Vaughan, Jeff Benjamin and Kimball Livingston and a script by Mac Gudgeon and Rudy Wurlitzer, is the shape of every sports picture ever made. The verdict is simple. On the water this is as good as sailing has ever looked on a screen. On land it is a film waiting for the tide.

The racing is the reason it exists and the reason to see it. John Toll puts the camera on the rail with the deck tilted past forty degrees, down at water level with the bow coming over the lens, and up in a helicopter looking down on two white triangles on a green sea. You see the grinders’ arms, the sheets running out, the spinnaker going up in a bag and then filling with a crack. Michael Chandler cuts between the two boats so that, without knowing a thing about the sport, we always knew who was ahead and by how much, which is more than most racing films manage. Basil Poledouris scores it with brass and a wide string theme that would be too much anywhere else and is right here.

When Weld’s boat loses the Cup, we felt it as a blow, and we were surprised, because nothing in the writing had earned it. Toll and Chandler had, by letting us watch the two yachts tack towards the mark for several minutes with almost no dialogue, so that one wrong call on the water reads as plainly as a dropped catch. That is Ballard’s gift. He trusts a picture to carry a scene and he is usually right.

Then everyone goes ashore. Modine plays Will as an agreeable blank; asked to be a man who has thrown away the oldest trophy in his sport, he looks like a man who has mislaid a jumper. Jennifer Grey has the better part, a sailor as good as anyone on the crew who is kept off the boat because Weld does not want a woman aboard, and the script raises that grievance in the first reel and then more or less forgets it. Robertson plays Weld as a man whose money has made him courteous, which is nicely judged and little used. Jack Thompson, as the Australian skipper Jack Neville, is the only person who appears to be enjoying himself, and we were glad every time he turned up. Stellan Skarsgård, as the designer Joe Heiser, gives a part that could have been silly a dry intelligence, and Rebecca Miller as Abigail Weld does what she can with a woman defined by her cheque book.

The middle hour is the problem. The story takes Will inland and the film, which has been alive on the water, goes slack. There is a romance that neither Modine nor Grey seems to believe in, a stretch of boat-building that Lawrence Eastwood’s production design makes handsome, all sawdust and cold light in a long shed, and a good deal of talk about wanting it badly enough. We were bored in the desert, and bored in a way that felt avoidable, because every time the film cut back to water it recovered inside a shot. Marit Allen’s costumes, faded cottons and crew jackets, are more carefully observed than most of the people wearing them.

Measured against Ballard’s own earlier films, Wind is the weakest of the three, because the first two had the sense to keep their human beings quiet. The Black Stallion goes most of an hour with a boy and a horse and almost no words. Here the sailors talk, and what they say is what sailors say in films. At 126 minutes there is a tighter picture inside this one, and it would be nearly all sea.

Most critics have found the story clumsy enough to sink the whole, and we see their point. We are a little warmer because of what Toll did on the water, and because we have not often sat through a sport we do not follow and understood every tack. See it on the largest screen you have, and expect to reach for the remote whenever the boats are tied up.