One woman and the sea

Press, 20 December 1988, Page 11

One woman and the sea

A.K. Grant

on television

On Sunday afternoon One screened “Against the Tide,” a film commissioned from Te Hokioi Film Co by TVNZ. It was an account of struggles with the Min of Ag and Fish waged by Marina Smith, a resourceful and independent Maori woman who fishes in Cook Strait and who kept having her quotas denied or altered or otherwise mucked around.

It was a good story and well-photographed, but the commentary and voice-over were a bit hard for this particular pakeha to take. Marina is obviously tough and determined, and both the commentator (Tama Poata) and Marina herself kept telling us this, in Marina’s case with a mock-modesty that wasn’t entirely convincing. And the rhetoric of the commentary was a bit over the top sometimes: at one point Marina was described as “a woman who dared to fish in the domain of men.” I mean, that is indeed what she was, but it sounds a bit silly when you put it that way. However the film had the great merit of telling us something about someone actually living and working in this country, and has to be forgiven any

stylistic blemishes for that reason, though I still think “Against the Suits” would have been a better title for it.

One of the essential skills of the television reviewer is to forge smooth transitions between remarks about completely disparate programmes, in this case “Against the Tide” and “Miami Vice.” Ah, I have it: the butterfish of Cook Strait have little or nothing in common with the sharks of the Miami underworld whom Crockett and Tubbs battle against. Last Friday’s episode of “Designer Vice” or “Miami Colour Values” was rivetting stuff, about a bunch of murderous drug-smuggling cops. “MV” is a much colder show than "Hill Street Blues” was: the later, although set in a concrete jungle, was awash with warm human values. There are precious few warm human values in “Miami Vice”: it depicts a white and blue sunlit hell where the only human value is loyalty to your offsider.

Even here, sentimentality creeps in: one of the bent cops, a woman, Montana Stone, turned out to be philanthropically supporting a settlement of

very poor people. She had to die, of course, not because she was philanthropic but because she was bent; but although the story doesn’t bear too much rational analysis when you sit down and really think about it, it whizzes by with such style and panache that you are completely caught up in its progress. And Don Johnson is that rarest of creatures, a sex symbol who can act. Because he can act, he therefore convinces as a sex symbol who can catch criminals and defend the lives of others. Philip

Michael Thomas plays Ricardo Tubbs as a man seething with anxieties, resentments and passions on which he is just barely able to keep the lid. For some reason this makes him less interesting than Crockett, but the two are well-paired. One of my favourite characters is Crockett’s and Tubb’s boss, Castillo, played by Edward James Olmos. He never speaks above a whisper and sometimes it is only by the reactions of those around him that one can determine that he is speaking at all.

This is very cool, and I would love to be able to do it myself, but I guess you have to be someone like Edward James Olmos, or a police .lieutenant, in order to carry it off. Whenever I have tried it I have been met with irritated commands to speak up, or it has been assumed that I have rendered myself semi-para-lytic through drink. When I indignantly deny the latter assertion, I then have to explain why I was whispering in the first place and things get very commplicated. Which shows how dangerous it is to let Art affect your life.