Brashear earns deserved credit in ‘Men of Honor’

Max Jacobson

Friday, Nov. 10, 2000 | 10:36 a.m.

Grade: *** 1/2

Starring: Robert De Niro, Cuba Gooding Jr., Charlize Theron.

Screenplay: Scott Marshall Smith.

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Rated: R.

Running time: 129 minutes.

Playing at: UA Green Valley Cinemas, UA Showcase 8, UA Rainbow Promenade 10, Century Desert 16, Century Cinedome 12 Henderson, Rancho Santa Fe 16, Regal Cinemas Sunset Station, Regal Cinemas Colonnade 14, Regal Cinemas Texas Station 18, Regal Cinemas Village Square 18.

Carl Brashear isn't a household name such as Jackie Robinson or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but he's an American who has helped history change course. "Men of Honor," starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding, Jr., chronicles Brashear's life. It's a remarkable story about a remarkable life, and one with a powerful message.

Brashear (Gooding, Jr.) is black and the film depicts his quest as the first of his race to become a Navy diver. In order to achieve his goal, he overcomes almost inhuman hardships, including intense race hatred from his fellow aspirants. It's a harrowing journey, one filled with injustices that make you want to scream.

The film opens with a poignant scene depicting Brashear's sharecropper father, plowing his Kentucky field with the help of a mule team. Every inch of his hands are scarred and torn. When Brashear finally goes off to join the U.S. Navy, his father tells him pointedly, "don't come back here, don't ever come back."

Soon after, Brashear is a defiant cook on the U.S.S. Hoist, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. One day on a whim, he jumps into the ocean for a swim, an activity restricted for the white enlisted men. He lands in the brig, but later the ship's commanding officer Captain Pullman (Powers Boothe) rewards him, and his Navy career begins to take a different turn.

A few years later Brashear surfaces at Navy Dive School in Bayonne, New Jersey, where instructor Master Chief Billy Sunday (De Niro) rules the roost. Sunday is a legendary diver, an unrepentant racist and a major troublemaker. And he makes no bones about wanting to short-circuit Brashear's ambitions from the get-go.

What follows is a sort of "An Officer And A Gentleman," in reverse. In that film, you had a black man, Louis Gossett, Jr., trying to derail a white man, Richard Gere, in his quest to become a Naval officer. Here the dynamics are opposite, and more believable.

Despite a strong performance by Gooding, De Niro carries this film with a bravura performance. Gooding states his passion for becoming a diver when he says plaintively, "this is what I was born for." De Niro was born to play this role. No one on the screen today can play a maniac or a raging-bull master chief better.

But nothing is as simple as it seems.

Later on when things have changed radically for both men, the De Niro character takes a different hue, one that could be viewed as an allegory for changing race relations in this country. Through bravery, excellence and honor, Brashear makes an end run around the "hateful little man" Sunday has been all his life. In doing so, he changes Sunday forever, winning his respect and even his allegiance.

There is poetic justice in this. Without blacks and whites serving and fighting together in the U.S. military, there may never have been a civil rights movement, much less school desegregation, voting rights, or any other basic right that blacks have today. It takes shared values and close contact for people to bond and acknowledge each other's human qualities. It also takes a special man such as Brashear to pave the way.

This is far from a perfect film, but at least it is one with something to say. The film is filled with gratuitously written roles like the one played by the ever-present Charlize Theron as Sunday's long-suffering wife, by newcomer Aunjanue Ellis as Brashear's long-suffering wife, and by Michael Rapaport as a stuttering white enlisted man from "W-W-Wisconsin," who is Brashear's only friend, annoyingly named Snowhill.

There are also, in spite of the real-life Brashear serving as a consultant for the film, one or two glaring technical errors. One, pointed out by a retired colonel in the audience during a screening, was having a captain running a military board of inquiry while a pair of admirals sit idly alongside him.

But in the end you leave "Men of Honor" feeling uplifted, and a sense of pride in the continuing experiment we call America.

Jackie Robinson paid a price for breaking baseball's color line; he died in his early '50s. But Carl Brashear had an illustrious career as a master chief Navy diver, and he's still alive and kicking with one leg in the new millennium, a real-life Superman.