Men of Honor

This film opens with the battered, bloody visage of Master Chief Navy Diver Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro) and for the next two hours the punishment never lets up. Directed by George Tillman Jr. (Soul Food), this is the clunkily told true story of Carl Brashear (a no-nonsense Cuba Gooding Jr., who could use a little of the subversiveness of his Oscar-winning role in Jerry Maguire) and his struggle to become the first African-American deep-sea diver in the US Navy. From the Sisyphean plowing of arid Kentucky fields to his demeaning dishwashing in a Navy mess to the merciless hazing inflicted in diving camp where he is the only black candidate and the odds are cynically rigged against him by the redneck Sunday and the dotty commander (Hal Holbrook), Brashear perseveres, unwilling to break his promise to his sharecropper dad never to give up.

Inspiring? Perhaps. But pathological also, as Brashear's upward career intersects the self-destructive downward spiral of Sunday's and the word "honor" more and more comes to mean a kind of sado-masochism. Brashear's ordeals grow increasingly brutal and bizarre, ending with a courtroom demonstration that is as much a ritual of obeisance to the white powers that be as it is an assertion of will and dignity. As in The Hurricane and Remember the Titans and almost every movie made about black heroism, a man proves his honor by proving worthy of the injustice that oppresses him. At the Flagship, Holiday, Hoyts Providence Place 16, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
-- Peter Keough