In making Finestkind, writer-director Brian Helgeland dusted off an old screenplay—but plenty of dust remains. The story of a college boy who learns the ropes on his brother’s fishing boat out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and is gradually drawn into economic peril, illicit activity, conflicting loyalties, and operatic violence, Finestkind was first written in the early 1990s, and Helgeland has said the script he ultimately shot was more or less the version he first offered to a then-22-year-old Heath Ledger a quarter-century ago. The film has specificity and stakes, but it’s ungainly and filled with placeholder dialogue; it’s the kind of promising spec script that would have benefitted from a structural rethink and on-set polish by a more seasoned hand… perhaps from a Hollywood pro like Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of L.A. Confidential.
Helgeland himself grew up in New Bedford, and worked on a scallop boat between undergrad and film school; from Finestkind it is evident that the time he spent on a commercial fishing ship totally changed his perspective on the world. Charlie, played by the babyfaced Aussie actor Toby Wallace, takes immediately to the sea, soaking up the hazing, scurrying under the dredge nets, shimmying his hips as he shucks, reveling in the backslaps as he drops a shot into his beer at a seaside dive. Both Charlie and the film itself fetishize manual labor and the call of the ocean, demonstrated in the many Moby-Dick shout-outs scattered throughout, as well as in Charlie’s friction with his blue-blood dad (Tim Daly), who expects him to start BU Law in September.
Finestkind hits some choppy waters—guileless exposition, forced music choices, stilted banter—but Helgeland, shooting in his hometown and out at sea in real trawlers with almost entirely practical effects, captures wind-lashed textures of real life and real work that wouldn’t be out of place in a rough diamond from 1970s New Hollywood. The actors catch facefuls of ocean spray; they reel in the wet creaky heavy metal cables; they wear thick rubber gloves to handle the catch without cutting themselves on the scallop shells.
Just as slumming English majors such as Charlie are suckers for this lifestyle’s ostentatious authenticity, movie critics may find themselves susceptible to Finestkind’s unpretentious craftsmanship and lived-in setting. But Helgeland has, or had, no clear idea what form to pour his impressions of the milieu into. The coming-of-age drama, a high-spirited and swearier Captains Courageous riff in which Charlie learns on the job from his idolized but semi-estranged and much older half-brother, Tommy (Ben Foster), eventually gives way to a crime drama focused on Tommy’s father, Ray (Tommy Lee Jones), the ornery and weather-worn first husband of the boys’ upwardly mobile mother (Lolita Davidovich). Rather than class conflict, the two brothers end up representing the divergent genre impulses that yank the movie apart, especially as Helgeland piles up a Jenga plot of escalating implausibilities and introduces an underworld kingpin, played by Clayne Crawford, who talks in a “whose cah we gonna take” voice and runs his empire out of a donut shop (Masshole excellence!).
Tommy, the role Heath Ledger told Helgeland he wanted when he was older, is the kind of hair-trigger blue-collar guy Foster can play without breaking a sweat. As his Texas-born dad, Jones is equally in the pocket, uncompromising and unlikeable even as the ailing Ray grows teary and weak. As the father’s fishing boat gets impounded and the son takes desperate measures to keep his head above water, you can see how this dynamic could have been the spine of a fine thriller, even allowing for dialogue as soft-boiled as “You live and you die. It’s in the in-between part that’s important.” But pushed out to the margins of the movie by Charlie, Helgeland’s callow author surrogate, the storyline feels gutted.
No one shows the strain of connecting the two movies more than Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega, as Charlie’s love interest, Mabel. In the underwritten role of a plucky working-class striver, Ortega conveys the flinty side of a girl who knows her own mind. But in a script that demands she be both rom-com dream girl and hard-nosed smuggler, Ortega is forced to sail into the wind of Helgeland’s wildest tonal swerves. (That said, his most egregious choice involves a tertiary character introduced in Act One sporting Chekhov’s pregnancy pouch.)
Per Google’s “People also ask” feature, one of the most pressing questions surrounding Finestkind ahead of its release concerns whether the movie is rated-R—suggesting, incongruously, that the audience most excited for this very unfashionable mid-budget drama is Ortega’s legion of young fans. For viewers graduating from YA streaming hits, Finestkind may well carry the raw ethanol whiff of adulthood, like baby’s first Smirnoff Ice. And if their acquired taste for salt-caked Massachusetts crime procedurals eventually leads them to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, then it will all have been worth it.
