A story about men with a job to do in an isolated world that moves along its track outside the ken of most of the world it serves.
I'm friends with, or acquainted with, a handful of Great Lakes freighter crewpeople and, no, in the modern day they don't f-bomb nearly as much as Stan and Fred do while avoiding whatever the hell their jobs are on the boat. But we all know a Stan and a Fred, puffing out their chests, blowing their hot air and stirring up whatever they can. We all know a Joe Litko, who abandoned his dream to the needs of making a living before he even fully understood what it was.
We all know the Fireman, insanely devoted to the one minute detail of his job even if he doesn't fully understand the why of it.
We all know Third Mate Collins, with bluff and bluster pretending to an authority he doesn't quite have.
We all know Skippy, slowly and painfully coming to grips with the realization the world no longer values his hard-won knowledge and skill.
The conversation between Collins and Skippy in the freighter's wheelhouse -- in which Collins cannot understand why anyone would find his world interesting, but dismisses Skippy's half-unwitting realization (the wake diverges but appears to converge, and so it appears to parallel ...) that they, the men of the Seaway Queen, are all stuck in a tiny, mobile world that slouches ever on, unchanging and eternal -- is one of my favorite moments of the film.
And we've all been Dale, looking on and gradually gaining respect for a world that is strange to us.
No, there's little in the way of plot in this look at a laker's everyday life, and there's no need. It's one character sketch after another, with Dale gradually maturing, just a little, appreciating what his shipmates have to offer, whether it's a little or a lot.
The Rashomon-like stories of what happened to Gugliani the Night Man -- growing ever more fanciful as each lakeboatman tells it -- combined with the reality of what did happen serve as a lampshade to hang on the movie as a whole, a look into a world that is perhaps not what we romanticize it to be, but interesting nonetheless.
I admit I bought my DVD of this movie because the movie version is set aboard Seaway Queen, once the pride of the Canadian fleet before she was scrapped and the fleet to which it belonged was absorbed into another. I spent a fascinating afternoon aboard the Queen when she was wintering over in Huron, Ohio, in January of 1991, and shot the bull with the shipkeeper in the very galley depicted in the film.
I like this movie better than a lot of my freighter friends do, and I get that a lot of people are put off by the cussin'.
But a look beyond the f-bombing will be rewarding.
Review of Lakeboat
