I watched Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) because I wanted another submarine movie after Black Sea (2014) and I didn't have the five hours free for Das Boot (1981). I'm still sorting how I feel about it as historical fiction, but as an extended opportunity for mechanical failure, moral dilemmas, and men acting their faces off, I have to say it does what it said on the tin.
There was a real Hotel-class submarine designated K-19, ordered by the Soviet Navy in 1957 and launched in 1959. She was never nicknamed "the Widowmaker," though it is a matter of record that ten workers died during her construction; her real nickname was "Hiroshima," after the radioactive toll of her maiden voyage. The first of her class, not just nuclear-powered but armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, K-19 was built hastily and haphazardly, rushed through production to catch up with the Americans and the similarly swaggering USS George Washington. During sea trials, her hull coating would peel off, the reactor compartment would flood, the boat's plumbing would clog and fail. Most fatefully, hurrying to install the pipes of the reactor cooling system, some unknown worker in the yard at Severodvinsk let fall a drop of solder on an unprotected pipe, cracking it undetectably—and for want of that particular, microscopic nail, the cooling system would spring a leak while the boat was on maneuvers in the North Atlantic in the summer of 1961. The control rods did only so much to counteract the climbing core temperatures of the aft reactor. There was no backup cooling system; it had been vetoed in the design phase due to time and cost. K-19 is not remembered as Chernobyl at sea only because a team of volunteers, working in short shifts within the reactor room itself, jerry-rigged a new cooling system out of the boat's stores of drinking water before the reactor could melt down. All eight of those men were dead within days of the accident. More than another dozen would die over the next couple of years; the boat was hot as White Sands. The surviving crew to this day suffer from the long-term effects of radiation poisoning, which their medical records for decades passed off as a nervous disorder. The entire incident was classified—the living silenced and the dead off the record—until the fall of the Soviet Union.
I understand wanting to make a movie of this story. It's gripping, it's unsung, it's the bitter kind of heroism that should never have been asked of the men who rose to meet it; for an American audience, it combines good old-fashioned mistrust of the government with faith in the individual and proof that the Russians love their children too. Submarines are inherently suspenseful and so are nuclear reactors and I am far from the only sucker for heroic engineering out there. I also understand that historical accuracy is a nebulous commodity in Hollywood and sometimes the best you can hope for is errors made in good faith rather than disingenuously falsified. I love A Night to Remember (1958) and its docudrama tension that neither simplifies nor amplifies the ill-fated facts, but I have also watched a hell of a lot of Law & Order over the years, where you can sail right up to the edge of libel so long as you make sure to change the names. The thing that confuses me about K-19: The Widowmaker—story by Louis Nowra, screenplay by Christopher Kyle—is the way it splits the difference between these two approaches, right down to the title with its real name and invented epithet. All technical aspects of the disaster are faithfully reproduced from history, from the corner-cutting construction and the overheating reactor to the improvised containment measures and the horrific effects on the crew. As far as I can tell, all of the human aspects are made up. Not just names changed, but histories, personalities, relationships, even some very specific, dramatic decisions. The result, if you know anything about the real K-19, is a compelling but disorienting hybrid of reconstruction and soap. You can feel reality going in and out of focus at different turns of the plot. It gives me just as mixed feelings.
So if I can't take this film as historical witness, what can I do? Appreciate the acting, to start with. I can't say if it's a saving grace or a silver lining, but it's good and I accept that I might not have seen some of it without the script's inventions. Liam Neeson is solid, sensitive, and relatably trapped as Mikhail Polenin, K-19's executive officer and original commander, demoted for protesting the endangerment of his crew in a boat that literally blew a fuse during a drill in drydock, but Harrison Ford is remarkable as his Kremlin-appointed replacement, Captain Alexei Vostrikov. The actor is so well-loved and so comfortable as a maverick, it's clever to cast him as a martinet; it is even more rewarding that he rises to the challenge. There are no roguish mannerisms in a man who has to be the perfect homo sovieticus, seamless and unquestioning in his loyalty to the state. "I was told there are two versions about your father," Polenin says tactfully in a rare moment of downtime between the two men. "One, he was a hero of the Revolution. Two, he died in the gulag." Vostrikov glances over a little, cigarette smoke streaming in the damp winter wind. The slightest wryness comes and goes on his habitually grim face: "Both are true." Like the submarine he captains, Vostrikov cannot admit any weakness. Drinking with his fellow officers the night before K-19's commissioning, Polenin toasted sardonically to the fabled first cosmonaut who "orbited Earth before Yuri Gagarin—but he was not loyal enough to hold his breath when his life support system gave out, so now he never existed," but Vostrikov knows up close and personal how fast a man can be rewritten from hero to disgrace. His entire career, maybe even his politically connected marriage has been an exercise in proving he's not his father's son. If that includes going down with a shoddy, sparking boat he's too experienced a naval officer not to know is a cover-up waiting to happen, then Alexei Vostrikov will be loyal: he'll hold his breath. Of course, there are a hundred and twenty men on K-19 with him who might rather find a way to keep drawing oxygen with or without the approval of the motherland. They are used to easygoing, emotionally available Polenin with his credo that "a crew is a family." Vostrikov's coldly disciplined adherence to the Party line—substituting emergency drills for camaraderie, slideshow lectures from the political officer for motivation, pushing the sub itself to the limits of its creaking frame in a daunting, flamboyant missile test—looks to them like social climbing, sadism, or just plain lunacy. The fact that the audience knows better doesn't actually make us like him for it. It's a part as chilly and brittle as steel in arctic water and Ford gives it no easy cracks of vulnerability, not even when circumstances bear on the commander to alter his inflexible tack. I admire and enjoy this approach. Neeson isn't phoning his performance in, but it's pitched closer to the audience's sympathies. Vostrikov is way out among the moral icebergs and we aren't going to know till the end if he's hero or villain or fool or a little of each, like anyone.
Then there's Bigelow's direction. I'm sure the reason is as dismally simple as "misogyny," but it still puzzles me that she is so permanently associated with James Cameron when as far as I can tell their romance was short-lived, their collaboration Strange Days (1995) has her attention to gender and race all over it, and her eye as a director is entirely her own. I started noticing her flair for different kinds of action scenes with Near Dark (1987), where the roadhouse massacre and the motel shootout and the midnight tractor-trailer showdown each play out with a distinct spatial and emotional clarity, but it's even more on display in K-19: The Widowmaker, in which the killing factors of physics and engineering never alter and never interact the same way twice. The test sequence alluded to above begins with Vostrikov ordering K-19 to a depth of three hundred meters—not quite crush depth, but close enough that the submarine's hull booms and buckles as if under monstrous, invisible blows—and ends with a rolling, white-knuckled, emergency-fast ascent that smashes aside slabs of summer-weak polar ice and seems to swing its momentum straight on into the missile launch, a rocket-fueled follow-through that's just as breathlessly cool as Vostrikov wants to impress on his crew and leaves the audience's heart pounding between elation and dread. Bigelow is also extremely good with chaos, in that we never lose track of objects or people even when the characters don't know what the devil just happened or where it's coming from next. Her certainty carries the movie through some of its more melodramatic passages. There was never a mutiny aboard K-19, but Bigelow shoots this one as though it's just another piece of the boat's bad history, from the fatal accidents in the naval yard to the champagne bottle that didn't break at her christening to the utterly preventable nuclear near-miss itself, and at least until you double-check the history it feels no more unlikely than any of the other shit that hit K-19's fan. I don't know if the crew played football on the ice after the successful missile test, or if the parentally beaming political officer (Ravil Isyanov) really had everyone line up for a group photo, but why not? It is true that the crew of K-19 got some of the best food in the fleet. "Red wine gives you strontium. Or takes it away. Or something. Something good."
These sometimes immiscible measures of reality and invention blend to the best advantage in the scenes around the reactor, which constitute both the technical heart of the movie and a mini-arc for Peter Sarsgaard's Lieutenant Vadim Radtchenko, the top-of-his-class reactor officer posted straight from naval academy to K-19. He's almost an audience stand-in, so bright-eyed and science-proud that it feels like kicking a puppy to suggest he's not fit for the job, but he's replacing "the best reactor officer in the Navy"—sacked without appeal by Vostrikov for being uncharacteristically drunk on duty—without ever having seen a reactor in the wild. He'll get a good view of this one. It's terrifying. ( It's a privilege to be a part of this future. )
Of course there are clichés. If you have a fiancée in this genre, you might as well pay down on a headstone before you leave port; if you're going to bring a pet on board a nuclear submarine, just spare everyone the metaphor and make it a canary. A lot of the small moments are nicely observed, as when one sailor talking longingly of seeing the sun and the stars learns that his bunkmate will be going right back to the family coal mine once he's mustered out, "so it's all the same to me." A lot of the broader moments, like the timing of a fire or the topside crew mooning an American helicopter, that's a thing. I would also be remiss if I did not mention the accents. None of the non-Russian actors attempt a full Russian accent, thank God, but neither do they use their own accents in the accepted convention of non-English languages represented as English; instead they sound mostly like themselves with varying Russian inflections and a couple of characteristic vowel sounds and once again I won't say it doesn't work, but who decided it was the best practice? I know little about this film's production, but I wondered at various points about development hell or studio interference. Nothing else should explain the mushy, superfluous epilogue which drags the story out through Vostrikov's trial and several intertitles and eventually into a post-Soviet cemetery where the survivors of K-19 gather to mourn their fallen comrades with all the uncomplicated nationalism the script had heretofore dodged. It's all the more frustrating since the film has a perfect closing shot about ten minutes previous, a moment of immense, weary triumph and ambiguity as the camera spirals out from a pair of Soviet submarines side by side in the glacier-blue water, whatever the men on the decks are saying to one another fading into the orchestral sweep of Klaus Badelt's score and the hovering blades of the U.S. Navy chopper, like the destroyer on the horizon present for this story but not part of it, and now we're on the outside, too.
So I'm still thinking about K-19: The Widowmaker vs. "Hiroshima" K-19. On the one hand, it's history. You don't fake it. You especially don't fake it when there are survivors and families and the dead whose lead-coffined reality was nothing but rumors and samizdat for years. If you're going to tell that story, tell it true. On the other, however historically twitchy it makes me, I can see the argument for fictionalizing the captain and his crew as a way of dramatizing the conflicting drives behind K-19's predicament, putting the ideas right there in the water instead of abstractly behind a desk. My personal jury's still out. I suspect I would have been happier if the film had either stuck more authentically to the facts of K-19 or filed the rest of the serial numbers off and run exactly the same script with a fictional Hotel-class submarine, so that there was no danger of confusing the two. All the same, it provides one of the best pieces of acting I've ever seen from Harrison Ford and further incentive to find the memoirs of K-19's real-life commander Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev, who died of cancer in 1998. Not to mention more movies by Kathryn Bigelow. This version brought to you by my traditional backers at Patreon.
There was a real Hotel-class submarine designated K-19, ordered by the Soviet Navy in 1957 and launched in 1959. She was never nicknamed "the Widowmaker," though it is a matter of record that ten workers died during her construction; her real nickname was "Hiroshima," after the radioactive toll of her maiden voyage. The first of her class, not just nuclear-powered but armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, K-19 was built hastily and haphazardly, rushed through production to catch up with the Americans and the similarly swaggering USS George Washington. During sea trials, her hull coating would peel off, the reactor compartment would flood, the boat's plumbing would clog and fail. Most fatefully, hurrying to install the pipes of the reactor cooling system, some unknown worker in the yard at Severodvinsk let fall a drop of solder on an unprotected pipe, cracking it undetectably—and for want of that particular, microscopic nail, the cooling system would spring a leak while the boat was on maneuvers in the North Atlantic in the summer of 1961. The control rods did only so much to counteract the climbing core temperatures of the aft reactor. There was no backup cooling system; it had been vetoed in the design phase due to time and cost. K-19 is not remembered as Chernobyl at sea only because a team of volunteers, working in short shifts within the reactor room itself, jerry-rigged a new cooling system out of the boat's stores of drinking water before the reactor could melt down. All eight of those men were dead within days of the accident. More than another dozen would die over the next couple of years; the boat was hot as White Sands. The surviving crew to this day suffer from the long-term effects of radiation poisoning, which their medical records for decades passed off as a nervous disorder. The entire incident was classified—the living silenced and the dead off the record—until the fall of the Soviet Union.
I understand wanting to make a movie of this story. It's gripping, it's unsung, it's the bitter kind of heroism that should never have been asked of the men who rose to meet it; for an American audience, it combines good old-fashioned mistrust of the government with faith in the individual and proof that the Russians love their children too. Submarines are inherently suspenseful and so are nuclear reactors and I am far from the only sucker for heroic engineering out there. I also understand that historical accuracy is a nebulous commodity in Hollywood and sometimes the best you can hope for is errors made in good faith rather than disingenuously falsified. I love A Night to Remember (1958) and its docudrama tension that neither simplifies nor amplifies the ill-fated facts, but I have also watched a hell of a lot of Law & Order over the years, where you can sail right up to the edge of libel so long as you make sure to change the names. The thing that confuses me about K-19: The Widowmaker—story by Louis Nowra, screenplay by Christopher Kyle—is the way it splits the difference between these two approaches, right down to the title with its real name and invented epithet. All technical aspects of the disaster are faithfully reproduced from history, from the corner-cutting construction and the overheating reactor to the improvised containment measures and the horrific effects on the crew. As far as I can tell, all of the human aspects are made up. Not just names changed, but histories, personalities, relationships, even some very specific, dramatic decisions. The result, if you know anything about the real K-19, is a compelling but disorienting hybrid of reconstruction and soap. You can feel reality going in and out of focus at different turns of the plot. It gives me just as mixed feelings.
So if I can't take this film as historical witness, what can I do? Appreciate the acting, to start with. I can't say if it's a saving grace or a silver lining, but it's good and I accept that I might not have seen some of it without the script's inventions. Liam Neeson is solid, sensitive, and relatably trapped as Mikhail Polenin, K-19's executive officer and original commander, demoted for protesting the endangerment of his crew in a boat that literally blew a fuse during a drill in drydock, but Harrison Ford is remarkable as his Kremlin-appointed replacement, Captain Alexei Vostrikov. The actor is so well-loved and so comfortable as a maverick, it's clever to cast him as a martinet; it is even more rewarding that he rises to the challenge. There are no roguish mannerisms in a man who has to be the perfect homo sovieticus, seamless and unquestioning in his loyalty to the state. "I was told there are two versions about your father," Polenin says tactfully in a rare moment of downtime between the two men. "One, he was a hero of the Revolution. Two, he died in the gulag." Vostrikov glances over a little, cigarette smoke streaming in the damp winter wind. The slightest wryness comes and goes on his habitually grim face: "Both are true." Like the submarine he captains, Vostrikov cannot admit any weakness. Drinking with his fellow officers the night before K-19's commissioning, Polenin toasted sardonically to the fabled first cosmonaut who "orbited Earth before Yuri Gagarin—but he was not loyal enough to hold his breath when his life support system gave out, so now he never existed," but Vostrikov knows up close and personal how fast a man can be rewritten from hero to disgrace. His entire career, maybe even his politically connected marriage has been an exercise in proving he's not his father's son. If that includes going down with a shoddy, sparking boat he's too experienced a naval officer not to know is a cover-up waiting to happen, then Alexei Vostrikov will be loyal: he'll hold his breath. Of course, there are a hundred and twenty men on K-19 with him who might rather find a way to keep drawing oxygen with or without the approval of the motherland. They are used to easygoing, emotionally available Polenin with his credo that "a crew is a family." Vostrikov's coldly disciplined adherence to the Party line—substituting emergency drills for camaraderie, slideshow lectures from the political officer for motivation, pushing the sub itself to the limits of its creaking frame in a daunting, flamboyant missile test—looks to them like social climbing, sadism, or just plain lunacy. The fact that the audience knows better doesn't actually make us like him for it. It's a part as chilly and brittle as steel in arctic water and Ford gives it no easy cracks of vulnerability, not even when circumstances bear on the commander to alter his inflexible tack. I admire and enjoy this approach. Neeson isn't phoning his performance in, but it's pitched closer to the audience's sympathies. Vostrikov is way out among the moral icebergs and we aren't going to know till the end if he's hero or villain or fool or a little of each, like anyone.
Then there's Bigelow's direction. I'm sure the reason is as dismally simple as "misogyny," but it still puzzles me that she is so permanently associated with James Cameron when as far as I can tell their romance was short-lived, their collaboration Strange Days (1995) has her attention to gender and race all over it, and her eye as a director is entirely her own. I started noticing her flair for different kinds of action scenes with Near Dark (1987), where the roadhouse massacre and the motel shootout and the midnight tractor-trailer showdown each play out with a distinct spatial and emotional clarity, but it's even more on display in K-19: The Widowmaker, in which the killing factors of physics and engineering never alter and never interact the same way twice. The test sequence alluded to above begins with Vostrikov ordering K-19 to a depth of three hundred meters—not quite crush depth, but close enough that the submarine's hull booms and buckles as if under monstrous, invisible blows—and ends with a rolling, white-knuckled, emergency-fast ascent that smashes aside slabs of summer-weak polar ice and seems to swing its momentum straight on into the missile launch, a rocket-fueled follow-through that's just as breathlessly cool as Vostrikov wants to impress on his crew and leaves the audience's heart pounding between elation and dread. Bigelow is also extremely good with chaos, in that we never lose track of objects or people even when the characters don't know what the devil just happened or where it's coming from next. Her certainty carries the movie through some of its more melodramatic passages. There was never a mutiny aboard K-19, but Bigelow shoots this one as though it's just another piece of the boat's bad history, from the fatal accidents in the naval yard to the champagne bottle that didn't break at her christening to the utterly preventable nuclear near-miss itself, and at least until you double-check the history it feels no more unlikely than any of the other shit that hit K-19's fan. I don't know if the crew played football on the ice after the successful missile test, or if the parentally beaming political officer (Ravil Isyanov) really had everyone line up for a group photo, but why not? It is true that the crew of K-19 got some of the best food in the fleet. "Red wine gives you strontium. Or takes it away. Or something. Something good."
These sometimes immiscible measures of reality and invention blend to the best advantage in the scenes around the reactor, which constitute both the technical heart of the movie and a mini-arc for Peter Sarsgaard's Lieutenant Vadim Radtchenko, the top-of-his-class reactor officer posted straight from naval academy to K-19. He's almost an audience stand-in, so bright-eyed and science-proud that it feels like kicking a puppy to suggest he's not fit for the job, but he's replacing "the best reactor officer in the Navy"—sacked without appeal by Vostrikov for being uncharacteristically drunk on duty—without ever having seen a reactor in the wild. He'll get a good view of this one. It's terrifying. ( It's a privilege to be a part of this future. )
Of course there are clichés. If you have a fiancée in this genre, you might as well pay down on a headstone before you leave port; if you're going to bring a pet on board a nuclear submarine, just spare everyone the metaphor and make it a canary. A lot of the small moments are nicely observed, as when one sailor talking longingly of seeing the sun and the stars learns that his bunkmate will be going right back to the family coal mine once he's mustered out, "so it's all the same to me." A lot of the broader moments, like the timing of a fire or the topside crew mooning an American helicopter, that's a thing. I would also be remiss if I did not mention the accents. None of the non-Russian actors attempt a full Russian accent, thank God, but neither do they use their own accents in the accepted convention of non-English languages represented as English; instead they sound mostly like themselves with varying Russian inflections and a couple of characteristic vowel sounds and once again I won't say it doesn't work, but who decided it was the best practice? I know little about this film's production, but I wondered at various points about development hell or studio interference. Nothing else should explain the mushy, superfluous epilogue which drags the story out through Vostrikov's trial and several intertitles and eventually into a post-Soviet cemetery where the survivors of K-19 gather to mourn their fallen comrades with all the uncomplicated nationalism the script had heretofore dodged. It's all the more frustrating since the film has a perfect closing shot about ten minutes previous, a moment of immense, weary triumph and ambiguity as the camera spirals out from a pair of Soviet submarines side by side in the glacier-blue water, whatever the men on the decks are saying to one another fading into the orchestral sweep of Klaus Badelt's score and the hovering blades of the U.S. Navy chopper, like the destroyer on the horizon present for this story but not part of it, and now we're on the outside, too.
So I'm still thinking about K-19: The Widowmaker vs. "Hiroshima" K-19. On the one hand, it's history. You don't fake it. You especially don't fake it when there are survivors and families and the dead whose lead-coffined reality was nothing but rumors and samizdat for years. If you're going to tell that story, tell it true. On the other, however historically twitchy it makes me, I can see the argument for fictionalizing the captain and his crew as a way of dramatizing the conflicting drives behind K-19's predicament, putting the ideas right there in the water instead of abstractly behind a desk. My personal jury's still out. I suspect I would have been happier if the film had either stuck more authentically to the facts of K-19 or filed the rest of the serial numbers off and run exactly the same script with a fictional Hotel-class submarine, so that there was no danger of confusing the two. All the same, it provides one of the best pieces of acting I've ever seen from Harrison Ford and further incentive to find the memoirs of K-19's real-life commander Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev, who died of cancer in 1998. Not to mention more movies by Kathryn Bigelow. This version brought to you by my traditional backers at Patreon.
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