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.
