Boasting a strong cast, the story revolves around inveterate and ageing fisherman Ray Eldridge (Tommy Lee Jones) and his estranged son Tom (Ben Foster) and Tom’s half-brother Charlie (Toby Wallace). Fishing is at the heart of this story and the scenes out on the sea are the strongest. Tom and Charlie have the same mom (Ray’s ex) but Ray has managed to alienate most people due to his difficult personality. Tom, like his father, is a fisherman and has a crew but also can be difficult, unpredictable, and taciturn. Charlie’s just finished his undergrad and though his father wants him to become a lawyer, Charlie’s got his heart set on becoming a fisherman like Tom and his friends. Jenna Ortega plays Charlie’s new love interest Mabel, a young woman who wants to escape the world of her mother and her drug dealing household by applying to college.
Class, blue collar work, and economic need are at the heart of this movie. Anybody who’s seen a movie or TV show about Boston’s south side will pick up the gist very quickly. Ray’s sick and asks his son Tom to take Ray’s boat (named “Finestkind”) out on a fishing expedition so they may share the profits. Tom, being who he is, doesn’t respect the border limit and sails into Canadian waters, incurring a hundred thousand dollar fine. And thus, the thriller aspect of the plot is birthed when they must take recourse and do something shady in order to pay the fine and get Ray’s boat back.
Both the thriller/crime elements and the drama are heavy handed. We don’t get too much complexity in terms of Charlie’s romance with Mabel except that they come from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Tom and Charlie’s relationship similarly hinges on a kind of semi-alienation that must resolve itself into bonding through family. Perhaps the best scenes are those with Tommy Lee Jones who is seventy-seven years old now but still has it! With a weather-beaten face and distrustful eyes and unmistakable Southern drawl, he still commands the frame. The best surprise, acting-wise, was Clayne Crawford as the charismatic head of a drug dealing group Charlie and Tom become entangled with.
Being a New Englander himself, it might explain why Helgeland chose to write a thriller set in the area. His shots are fairly muscular, powerful ones but the drama would have benefitted from more nuanced and closer study. As mentioned before, the scenes out on the water are the best ones but this principally consists of a stretch in the middle of the film where Tom and Charlie and company take Finestkind out. We even see gratuitous footage of humpback whales breaching, as if Helgeland could not stop himself from turning up the cheese. People who like this genre of movies will probably like the film but others will find it a bit unmemorable, despite the presence of strong actors like Jones and Foster.
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