This weekend is the twelfth anniversary of the disappearance of the 70-foot, longline swordfish boat, the Andrea Gail, which went down in the last days of October or the first days of November. For the past week, I’ve been watching a rented VCR of The Perfect Storm, the movie version of that disaster, based on Sebastian Junger’s 1997 novel of the same name. Before the movie even begins, you know it’s going to be special. As the Warner Brothers logos appear in turn, and we are told that this is based on a true story, we hear the slow, pensive...