Review: Tom Hanks lends steady, sober hand to taut naval drama ‘Greyhound’

Greyhound

Director: Aaron Schneider

Cast: Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Matt Helm, Matthew Zuk and Elisabeth Shue

He’s Forrest Gump. He’s Mr. Rogers. He’s Woody.

But with all the famous titles Tom Hanks has owned, few have fit as snugly and as smoothly as “captain” — whether it’s fending off Somali pirates in Captain Phillips, landing a plane on the Hudson in Sully, finding his way back to Earth in Apollo 13, or commanding WW II troops in Saving Private Ryan.

Now Hanks, our square-jawed Everyman, “America’s Dad” even when his characters don’t have children, is playing a captain again, in the taut new naval thriller on Apple TV+ — yet another of his forays into World War II, this time in the treacherous North Atlantic.

And let’s face it, there’s something soothing merely in the sight of Hanks wearing a helmet that says “CAPT” in these days when the world feels like it’s turned upside down (to quote from another big streaming film of the month, Hamilton.) As one character tells him as the war is just beginning: “The world has gone crazy, Ernie.” Indeed.

Greyhound is a passion project for Hanks, who penned the script and whose interest in World War II has taken him from Saving Private Ryan to Band Of Brothers to The Pacific.

Here, he focuses on a lesser chronicled part of that war: the Battle of the Atlantic, which started in 1939 and ended in 1945 with Germany’s defeat.

As the film tells us in the credits, Allied losses included 3,500 merchant ships and 175 warships sunk, and more than 72,000 crew members and troops killed (some estimates have the human loss even higher.)

Based on the novel The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester and directed by veteran cinematographer Aaron Schneider, Greyhound is perhaps not so much a thriller as a very spare, economical drama — a tightly focused account of one voyage, from one perspective: that of Captain Ernie Krause on his warship, the Greyhound, leading a convoy of 37 supply vessels to Liverpool.

All the background you really need to know is that the supplies ferried along these routes were crucial to the Allies: they included arms, food and other crucial staples. But the ships had to forge a treacherous path across the sea, particularly the so-called “Black Pit, ” the section of ocean not reachable by air cover from either US or British forces.

So for 50 hours here, the ships need to fend for themselves against the Germans and their U-boats. Enemy forces taunt the Greyhound with radioed threats — “You and your comrades will die today, ” they warn. The voyage is both monotonous and terrifying. For hours nothing can happen, and then within minutes, all hell can break loose, sometimes on multiple fronts.

Krause is a stalwart, religious man who keeps his emotions to himself. When we meet him, it’s February…