Happily seduced.(Master and Commander)(Video Recording Review)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 11

IN the course of 24 hours, the people egging on Master and Commander showed me the film at a private screening, took me to dinner at the New York Yacht Club, gave me a book which tells about the making of the movie, and mailed me a DVD which includes a trailer of the movie itself and a sparkling 30-minute narrative featuring the two boats central to the film. Yes, sure, there are commercial motives: The people who brought off the heady enterprise sank $135 million into it. But I (and others at the screening) felt a supra-material desire in our hosts that word be got out about this filming of Patrick O'Brian's work. The disinterested pleasure is on the order of the pleasure the designers of the Empire State Building got from seeing people come just to ogle at the magnificence of it.

Enthusiasm for the movie is readily communicated, because the two hours of the film are a magical distillate of the author's accomplishments in describing life at sea, at war, in great storms and long doldrums. There are the vivid satellite characters, but Captain Aubrey is the heliocentric figure, and Russell Crowe, who plays the part, has won, for this performance alone, permanent theatrical standing. He portrays a complex figure embodying the best that might be said of the seafaring commander of a British man of war, master of men and of the elements that men confront.

The entrepreneurs have gone to great pains to tell you how Peter Weir's movie was made. The literature and DVD take you inside the enterprise, tell you about the complexity of the challenge and how the filmmakers met it. This includes the tale of acquiring a vessel that lent itself to reconfiguration as a 19th-century ship of the line in Newport and sailing it (through 70-mph winds) to Baja California, and of the special training given to the actors, 50 of them stuntmen who danced about in the ...