A&E's 'Shackleton' movie tests limits of our endurance
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Shackleton, Shackleton, Shackleton.
Shackleton at Imax. Shackleton on PBS. Shackleton in black-and-white silence, color with commentary, or bound for more coffee-
table-book glory at the local Borders.
I don't know about you, but I've nearly reached the limits of my Endurance.
The unrelenting craze for a man and crew whose intended Antarctica crossing 90 years ago instead became an incredible journey of survival is a bit puzzling.
Granted, Sir Ernest Shackleton's feat via ship, sled, rowboat and mountain climb rates high as derring-do. The hackneyed explanation for his popularity is it fills a craving to conquer physical adversity that the modern world can't supply except through pitiful simulations such as "Survivor" and trendy eco-vacations.
But if adventure and achievement are chief qualifications, then where are those Norwegian flag-bearing Roald Amundsen T-shirts, mugs and TV miniseries? Surely getting to the South Pole first and making it back alive counts for something.
As usual, show business can tell us a great deal about the dynamics of human worship. And that's the chief service rendered by A&E's long, anemic drama "Shackleton," starring Kenneth Branagh at 8 p.m. Sunday and 9 p.m. Monday.
Though not much fun to watch, the four-hour, two-part film does suggest how a man may secure the kind of immortality that sends people rushing to bookstores and theaters nine decades later.
The first rule is: Bring a tremendously skilled cinematographer on your voyage. It's one of many smart moves the real Shackleton made, and you wish those who produced the TV program, A&E and Great Britain's Channel Four International, had done likewise. Shackleton's cinematographer was Frank Hurley, a young Australian whose images of the Endurance and its men remain astounding. Without Hurley's passion for recording and his fine artistic skill, today's widespread Shackleton fad could not exist.
It's surprising, then, that a glaring weakness of A&E's "Shackleton" is the camera work.
Though taped in Iceland and Greenland, tight close-ups reduce intimidating icy vistas to the scale of an empty parking lot at Snoqualmie Summit. Interesting action — men swinging axes to chip ice or wrestling sleds over floes — is cut off at the top and edges of the screen. Movement and atmosphere are thus stifled to stage dimensions.
A stage is the wrong place for an adventure epic. But it's a perfect home for Branagh. And there's the rub, as he might say in one of the many immodest, Shakespearean speeches that writer-director Charles Sturridge has inserted in Shackleton's mouth.
In one scene, Sir Ernest portentously invokes the family motto as if history itself were in the room taking notes. His rebuke of a crew member while they are stranded in Antarctica ends with an embarrassingly egotistical "I will not let them bloody die." This feels all wrong. A reason for the real Shackleton's current appeal has to do with a style of command that emphasized deed over word — an understandable attraction in our verbally centered age — and his selflessness.
But these qualities are antithetical to what Branagh does best. Language is his ammunition and an extroverted character his best weapon. Small wonder Shackleton looks glum when he's quiet and his take-charge moments appear so manic.
The greatest sin "Shackleton" commits, however, is in botching a great story. You might ask how this could be, especially from a cable channel that's given us the thrilling likes of "Horatio Hornblower."
The answer lies in the real Shackleton's example. His expedition came at a bad time in terms of publicity — the eve of World War I — and as the movie shows us, required a variety of creative gambits to get attention and funding.
Shackleton emphasized patriotism and British superiority. He sold film rights and photo rights and cultivated newspaper editors.
Above all, he marketed a new angle, which was crossing Antarctica instead of reaching the pole.
Nevertheless, when he and the Endurance crew finally returned home, their story was swallowed up in the Armageddon consuming Europe.
Coming after numerous documentaries, books, etc., on the subject, A&E may have feared its "Shackleton" would be greeted with a similar yawn.
So this production also finds a new angle, which is to focus on its hero's messy personal life (wife and mistress), on how the crew filled the months when they were stranded (singing and dressing in drag for pantomimes) and on pre-voyage fund-raising — in short, on much less of the quest itself. We don't reach sea until an hour into the proceedings.
Yawn. No doubt "Shackleton" won't suffer quite the same immediate obscurity as its subject. Still, A&E pilots its production straight into the doldrums, leaving viewers stuck up-channel without an oar.
Kay McFadden will be on vacation until April 26. If you've got a TV suggestion or question in the meantime, please contact Melanie McFarland at 206-464-2256 or at mmcfarland@seattletimes.com