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Deep Water

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by Kerry McLeod
Back in 2003, when feature documentaries were still a relative newcomer to the great British cinema-going public, and British feature docs were a total unknown, a film called Touching the Void was released. It found not only critical acclaim, but great popularity and the possibility emerged of grand-scale stories finding the big screen and big audiences as a documentary.

Now, in 2006, a new feature doc has emerged from Pathé and APT Films, in association with Darlow Smithson (the production company behind Touching the Void). Deep Water is the gripping story of the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Sailing Race: the challenge to complete a solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the globe with the possibility of winning a £5000 cash prize. More than that, it’s the story of competitor Donald Crowhurst, whose incredible and tragic story became nearly as famous as the race itself.

Crowhurst was a 36 year-old father of four with financial problems and an ambition to prove himself. He raised the money for his boat from a local businessman on the condition that if he failed to complete the voyage he must pay the money back: truly a gamble for a man on the verge of bankruptcy, possibly nonsensical for someone with little experience of sailing. The film meticulously retraces his preparations, which were beset by problems, and deftly builds a growing feeling of foreboding through the sequences of interviews and news archive. When Crowhurst eventually departs (on the absolutely final day permitted) he makes depressingly slow progress to begin with, and worst still, develops leaks in his state-of-the-art Trimaran. He has to face the fact that he would not survive the Roaring Forties and that to give up means certain bankruptcy. His solution? To radio back a series of record-breaking distances covered each day, which his PR person happily embellishes before passing on to Fleet Street, while he drifts in the Atlantic going nowhere fast.
Crowhurst’s delicate construction grows increasingly elaborate as he rejoins the competitors on their journey back across the Atlantic, as if he’d completed the circuit around Cape Horn with them. He aims to return home an honourable loser but in another, remarkably pretty cruel twist of fate, this is not to be: one of the competitors, an eccentric Frenchman Bernard Moitissier who eschewed the offer of a radio, preferring instead to catapult his messages onto the decks of passing ships, decides to just keep on going and travel the world again, leaving only one other contender, Nigel Tetley, in for the prize. But Tetley’s ship breaks up off the Azures and who has to be rescued. Faced with the prospect of returning home a champion to face the scrutiny of the panel, and then to be branded a cheat, Crowhurst’s log books and diaries reveal an increasingly fragile grip on reality. Eventually, his boat is found drifting in the Atlantic, with no sign of Donald on board.

The film’s biggest success is its portrayal of Donald Crowhurst, the complex figure at its centre. Without the benefit of testimony from the man himself, the film uses incredible archive recovered from his boat and since thought lost, together with his notebooks and the testimony of family and those close to him, to construct a three-dimensional, fully sympathetic character.

There’s a moment in Touching the Void, where Simon Yates cuts the rope of his climbing partner, on which the entire thriller narrative rests. What’s different with this film is that there are so many of those ‘moments’; moments when Crowhurst could have made a different decision and change the outcome completely, and this is what makes the film so gripping and moving at the same time. It’s also a story of its time and the film benefits from that; the media of the Sixties is accessible enough for all the competitors to be given cameras and recording equipment providing a rich archive source. Yet the society presented is as yet undefined by its media culture, publicity is left up to those on Fleet Street. Today we can imagine Donald Crowhurst ‘The Cheat’ returning home a hero of sorts – a celebrity certainly – turning his misfortune into a financial fortune.
Deep Water (PG)
UK 2006
Dir: Jerry Rothwell and Louise Osmond

Deep Water is released in cinemas across the UK on Friday 15th December 2006.

Related Pages

Interview with Deep Water producer Al Morrow click here.

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