In a final scene of the film “Finestkind,” as the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge slowly pivots open, a father and son cross paths for what might be the last time. One is handcuffed in the back of a police van. The other is outward bound on a fishing trip.
Most in New Bedford know the bridge as little more than a morning traffic jam. But for Brian Helgeland, the 62-year-old New Bedford-raised screenwriter who returned to his hometown to shoot his newest film, the bridge is a symbol of his childhood and his development as a writer.
As a boy, Helgeland rode his bicycle over the bridge. As a young man working on scallop boats, he passed through the bridge as the first leg of a long voyage out to sea. And now, three decades later, the same bridge is also a set in his own film.
“That bridge is a memory, a movie location and a metaphor,” Helgeland told a local audience at an unofficial premiere of the film at the New Bedford Whaling Museum earlier this month.
“Finestkind,” recently released on Paramount+, is Helgeland’s most personal film, he says. It’s his only film about the town that raised him, about the fishing industry, which tempered him through his youth, and about the relationships among brothers, fathers, and sons.
Helgeland grew up in a New Bedford fishing family. His grandfather immigrated from Norway, settling first in Manhattan. He captained a yacht on the Hudson River until the stock market crash of 1929 put him out of work. He and his family moved to New Bedford, where many Norweigans were establishing themselves in the fishing industry. Helgeland’s father became a fisherman. And years later, Helgeland too set out to sea working aboard a scallop boat.
“There is a brutal, stark honesty to it all,” Helgeland said in an interview, of his days growing up fishing out of the Port of New Bedford. “Harbor towns have a complexity to them. They have such an influx of people, of industry, of immigrants. There are always people both arriving and leaving. That’s what makes New Bedford so interesting.”
Helgeland was clear that “Finestkind” is not a memoir. His time fishing did not include a cast of mobsters or stolen packages of heroin. His family’s boat was never impounded by the Canadian Coast Guard. Neither did it explode at sea, leaving him and the crew bobbing through a storm on an inflatable raft.
But there are clear parallels between Helgeland’s life and the characters in “Finestkind.”
In the film, the plot revolves around two brothers doing whatever it takes not to lose their family’s fishing vessel, which is seized by the Coast Guard after violating fishing regulations. Helgeland’s father went through a similar experience after his father died and the family was no longer able to maintain their fishing boat. “It sank at the dock,” Helgeland said.
Helgeland describes the characters in “Finestkind” as composites of himself in his younger years. The film’s protagonist, Charlie, sets out on a scallop boat with his estranged half-brother. The character is set to begin law school, but still feels lost, and is searching for adventure, a connection to his family, and the type of masculinity that seems to only be gained on the deck of a fishing boat.
Another character, Mabel, is also partly based on himself. “That was me, growing up in New Bedford and feeling like there was a bigger world out there but knowing how to get a hold of it,” he said.
Helgeland never planned on becoming a Hollywood screenwriter. When he began fishing, he had recently graduated from UMass Dartmouth with a degree in English literature. He often brought books with him to pass the time at sea. Searching for light reading at the Dartmouth Mall, one book caught his eye: “A Guide to Film School.” He read it and was hooked.
“Cue the music, because the sky opened, heavenly light shone,” he wrote in Time Magazine. “I was stunned to learn that people had jobs making movies and that you could go to school to learn how.”
Helgeland wrote the first draft of “Finestkind” as a 28-year-old film school graduate. He was writing about what he knew, he said: the world of commercial fishing and the historic seaport of New Bedford. But for three decades, he couldn’t move the film to production. A dusty paper script sat on the shelf of his Los Angeles office as his career evolved, from low-budget horror flicks to box-office hits such as “Mystic River,” “42,” and “L.A. Confidential,” the latter of which earned him an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.
Elements of New Bedford and the fishing industry worked their way into his films over the years, he said. At one point, he even flirted with the idea of remaking “Moby-Dick.” But he wanted to tell the story of his hometown — with all the gritty details that tend to take a back seat to the salty accents and coastal aesthetic of other fishing films (usually shot in quaint fishing villages on the North Shore).
In summer 2022, Helgeland finally got his chance to film his New Bedford story. It was a homecoming.
The character Mabel’s home in the film, above R&B Liquors in the North End, is just a block from the Coggeshall Street apartment where he grew up. To shoot the scenes at sea, he and the cast went out on a fishing vessel owned by his friend, Ivan Mjolhus, who Helgeland fished with while growing up. Helgeland shucked a scallop for the first time in over 30 years, and the crew ate fresh scallops dredged up from the Northern Edge. A brigade of New Bedford fishermen and dockworkers appeared as extras.
On one of the final days of filming, the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge that defined Helgeland’s youth was shut down for the day to shoot the film’s final scene.
“I am Homeward Bound in a way I could never have imagined,” Helgeland wrote in Time.
Email reporter Will Sennott at wsennott@newbedfordlight.org.
What’s the name of the movie
Finestkind is the name of the movie.
My sister a schoolteacher, was married to a Capt. of a New Bedford scallop dragger. He made his way here from Estonia. He dragged the ocean for 50 years! This movie touched my heart. He worked HARD to support his family. One son is a Dr., and one is a serious tiler. Thank you for showing people what the fishing life is like. Loved seeing the New Bedford streets on T.V.