'Men of Honor': True Blue Underneath By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, November 10, 2000

Cuba Gooding Jr. faces his Navy mentor (Robert De Niro) in "Men of Honor." (20th Century Fox)

The formula is a favorite from the '40s and '50s called the biopic, subcategory military, sub-subcategory underwater. The duty is what professionals who risk their lives for their countries live with each day and don't much talk about, much less see featured in the movies of the aughts. As for sergeants, all right, the Navy calls them chief petty officers.

In "Men of Honor," the petty officers walk around on the bottom of the deep blue sea; that medium, when it's penetrated, doesn't stay blue for long – it turns soupy, dank and cold. They're not lithe scuba heroes, throat-slitting SEALS, fast-boat hot dogs or anything sexy or glamorous: They're blue-collar working guys encased in canvas, leather and lead, umbilicalled by chain and oxygen hose to a surface craft, their heads locked in what appear to be upside-down brass spittoons with lenses. They don't blow up anything; they weld, they reassemble, they heavy-lift, they scavenge, occasionally they rescue, and a lot of them die doing this very dangerous work.

And, until 1951, they were all white.

Thus "Men of Honor" tells the story of the first of them who was black, and the hell he went through to achieve the rank of master chief petty officer (the highest noncommissioned officer rank) and be classified a master diver. That he endured near-unbearable institutional racism in the Navy of the '50s and '60s seemed only to stiffen his resolve; that he lost a leg, though bothersome, meant he just had to work that much harder. He knew where he was headed, and he got there.

Carl Brashear, played with damn-the-torpedoes earnestness by Cuba Gooding Jr., was a Southern sharecropper's son who watched the dust and labor eat the soul of a father who wanted for him only that he get out. (Carl Lumbly, who plays his dad, is fiercely, if briefly, poignant.) Carl escapes via a Navy that insists that, as a man of color, he is suited only to frying burgers or shining officers' shoes. Whether it's shoe leather or skin color, black is always at the bottom.

But one day, the young cook catches a glimpse of the man he wants to be, inconveniently wearing the scowling, grizzled mug of Master Chief Leslie "Billy" Sunday, and hidden again by a diver's helmet. Sunday (played by Robert De Niro in a spitting frenzy of high bull-goose macho) is a legend; he's the Navy's best and bravest diver, and before Carl's amazed eyes, he performs a feat of stupendous heroism, defying a preening officer to save another man's life and nearly exploding his own lungs in the process.

And when Carl finally persuades the Navy to send him to the diving school at Bayonne, N.J., where Sunday is the ranking NCO and de facto commanding officer, he makes a dispiriting discovery: While Sunday is and always will be heroic and commanding, and Carl will always love him for his courage and strength, Sunday is a pure-D racist.

Their relationship is really the heart of the picture, which fibrillates through a number of ordeals as old-style Hollywood license inflates, deflates or romanticizes to melodramatic purpose. At diving school, Carl earns his rating even though sabotaged by jealous white officers and bitter fellow enlistees. His way is patience, courage, hard work and endurance, ending when he spends 12 straight hours underwater in numbing cold to pass a final test.

At that point he wins forever Billy's respect and mentorship, though it costs the senior NCO his job and rank. The two then intermingle through typical '40s-movie montage style that tracks Carl's rise and Billy's fall. Not only is his career in disarray, but so is his marriage (to Charlize Theron, as a rich girl presumably attracted to his guts quotient, which is off the charts) and he tumbles toward alcoholism and violence. Carl ends up hunting for lost H-bombs in the Mediterranean while playing tag with Soviet subs; Billy watches in the custody of the two Shore Patrolmen taking him to trial.

In ways other than style is the movie an artifact from a lost age: It is built around moral assumptions difficult to locate in movies today. Primary among them is the concept that the institution is more important than the man. These two fellows aren't revolutionaries or subversives; though both are mistreated by (in Carl's case) the old Navy and (in Billy's) the new Navy, they still love the sea service, believe in it, and want merely to be able to risk their lives in freezing murk 800 feet beneath the sea for it, then drop by a sea-dog hangout for brewskis at the end of the duty day. No one in this film can even conceive of asking the following question, which is so post-'60s: If the organization is this corrupt, is it worth their abject loyalty?

Sometimes director George Tillman Jr. goes overboard. An ambitious career officer (David Conrad) is conceived as if trailing an oil slick; he scoffs at old-fashioned notions of honor and duty as he tries, over and over, to destroy each man's career. Carl's domestic life with his wife, Jo (Aunjanue Ellis), is rather sugary in the old Hollywood way, and a final confrontation in a courtroom simply seems preposterous, turning, as it does, on one hero's ordeal in completion of a 12-step program.

But "Men of Honor" proves one thing: They still can make 'em the way they used to.

"Men of Honor" (128 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for the language of the Navy.