:)
Posted on 12/27/2014 6:33:18 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that “Unbroken” had been directed by somebody who wasn’t Angelina Jolie. It easily could have been. This tale of wartime adventure and survival, adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s nonfiction bestseller, definitely called for a big-name Hollywood director, but it would have been highly plausible – maybe more plausible – as a project for Ron Howard or Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood than as the second film for the star-turned-director best known as the female half of the world’s most famous celebrity couple. Would it be getting less attention if one of those guys had made it, or more respect? Both, perhaps? How is our perception of the film being shaped by the unique fame and unique cultural status of its director, and by our desire to project meanings onto her unusual career transition?
I totally understand, and share, the longing to believe that Jolie can step behind the camera and compete with the big dogs in a nearly all-male field, at a level where making a movie is a lot more like running a small company than like painting a picture. Let’s be clear about this: She can. “Unbroken” is a rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It’s entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill. If made 40 years ago, it would have been a leading Oscar contender and a huge hit, whereas today it’s a bit “meh” in both categories: It will likely get several Oscar nominations but won’t win anything big, and it might have trouble attracting eyeballs in the overcrowded holiday season.
We can say the gender of a filmmaker doesn’t matter or shouldn’t matter, but we aren’t even close to that place yet. There are still almost no women among A-list Hollywood directors; even Kathryn Bigelow makes her films relatively cheap with independent financing. Ava DuVernay, whose civil-rights drama “Selma” also comes out this week, may be the next one. If any female movie star of anywhere near Jolie’s prominence has gone on to direct major films … well, no one has and there’s no clear parallel. (Yeah, Ida Lupino made one movie, and there are a few examples in European cinema. The point stands.)
The aura of specialness around “Unbroken” has provoked various unhelpful reactions that have little to do with the film itself. On one hand, there is boosterism and solidarity: An awesome breakthrough for women! On the other, there’s sneering condescension: Not bad, for a privileged girl working with play money. A fairer way of framing Jolie’s blow for gender equality is to say that she has succeeded admirably in making an old-fashioned adventure movie just as capable and unmemorable as if one of those old dudes I mentioned above had made it. Indeed, Clint Eastwood – with whom Jolie worked in “Changeling” – is pretty much the obvious career model, and “Unbroken” is almost exactly like one of the proficient and pointless middlebrow dramas Eastwood has been making since he quit acting.
According to some reports, the story of real-life World War II hero Louis Zamperini, played by fast-rising British star Jack O’Connell in “Unbroken,” was considered possible fodder for a Hollywood feature as long ago as the late 1950s. Indeed, it might have fit better in that era than in this one, considering that Zamperini’s saga is like a one-man display of How America Won the War. A kid from Southern California whose Italian immigrant parents spoke no English, Zamperini emerged from teenage delinquency to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics (the same games in which Jesse Owens won several gold medals) as a long-distance runner. In the war, Zamperini survived a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean, spent more than six weeks adrift in a lifeboat and endured several years in an especially brutal series of Japanese POW camps.
How to understand Zamperini’s stranger-than-fiction true story, either in life or in the movies, is open to debate. We could say that some people find reserves of courage and strength within themselves that most of us don’t possess (and will never have to search for), and leave it at that. There’s no moral to be found there, necessarily: Zamperini was young and strong and lucky, and outlasted circumstances in which thousands upon thousands of other strong young men died. If his story appealed to Hollywood filmmakers, first of all, because it’s a rip-roaring adventure that keeps shifting from one episode to the next, like an Indiana Jones movie, there was also another reason. It can be described in platitudinous terms as being about the resilience of the human spirit, while none-too-subtly making the point that human spirit runs just that little bit stronger in Americans than other people.
It’s almost surprising that a version of “Unbroken” wasn’t made around 1959, with Tony Curtis playing Zamperini and someone like Stanley Kramer directing the film. But it didn’t happen and the whole story receded into history for many years. Zamperini attended the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan, meeting with some of his captors from the POW years. That brought his story back into the media spotlight and eventually Hillenbrand, the author of “Seabiscuit,” figured out that Zamperini was still alive and wrote a best-selling account of his adventures, which in turn became a hot Hollywood property. (Zamperini died last July, at age 97, but not before he had seen an early cut of Jolie’s film.)
As a movie, “Unbroken” is entertaining enough, but feels a bit like an afterthought. It has terrific cinematography by Roger Deakins and a long-in-development script whose credited writers include Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese (“Beloved”) and William Nicholson (“Gladiator”). It has airplanes and sharks and roaring crowds above swastika banners, and a sadistic Japanese soldier (the notorious Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe, a real-life war criminal) played with lubricious zeal by Japanese rock star Miyavi. Some people have claimed to raise various political objections to the movie, but I can’t get interested to that degree. My problem is that “Unbroken” melts into every other POW movie, and every other lifeboat movie, that I’ve ever seen. A week after seeing it, I’m not sure whether I’m remembering “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” or “Life of Pi.” O’Connell is meant to make a vigorous impression but just comes off as another square-jawed, pseudo-Nietzschean hero. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten him mixed up with Hugh Jackman in “The Wolverine,” which is more worth watching in any case.
But just as often it isn’t.
Just back from seeing “Unbroken.”
It’s a story about surviving. And that is an important message.
I guess others may have wanted more action and a bigger story.
However, surviving was his war experience (as it was for so many).
Ping for later read
I don’t know you personally, so I am not going to comment on what you would find strange or not. But I do have evidence of what you find strange in others, so I can comment on that.
I personally find the use of the term “fetish” in conjunction with this story to be “strange”. It has overtones of sex, obsession and compulsion.
If he or you say she “fetishizes” it because she, as the director, spends an inordinate amount of time on the privations he suffered in the raft, and the abuse suffered by this man at the hands of his captors, I would counter by saying it is a key factor in the way the story must be told, and is in fact told in that fashion, in the book.
If he said she obsessed on it, I would still disagree with her, but accept the word. To people like the critic, words supposedly have meaning, until someone puts them on the rack about their use of a word, and then they whine and say they are being misinterpreted, which is a favorite liberal tactic, and is often used by people on this very forum.
I could be forgiving in my interpretation of the critic’s use of that word in a key point of his criticism, but why on earth should I give any quarter to someone like that who so obviously won’t give any quarter to the object of his criticism unless that person was standing in front of him? (In which case, I could imagine the wimp groveling)
You see what you wish to see through your own eyes, and that is fine. But you come across as derogatory to anyone else who might see it differently.
Saw the movie and loved it. They struck very close to the book.
I did not use the word fetish.
I responded to it as it was quoted and then repeated to me.
You don’t know me.
Ok
but you don’t know what you are talking about because you didn’t red the thread. If you had you’d know from where the word originated. I should expect people here to not only bring in such references, but to also attribute them to me
So just get off my case.
This film is a stupid weird boring horrible depiction of a great story and a missed opportunity.
some one brought in the coen brothers to do the screenplay. They specialize in the weird - oh brother where art though, millers crossing and fargo.
Weirdness. So lay off
If you haven’t seen it you should not be talking to me at all about it.
I don't see how it would be possible to tell the story without showing the violence and most of the book was, indeed, a torturous experience for Zamperini and his fellow boat and prison mates.
Personally, in listening to the book is it amazing to me that the prisoners didn't just turn on their guards and murder them in their beds regardless of the consequences that would have followed.
Another conclusion that I made is that cultures are not equal. I was very uplifed by Zamperini’s later religious conversion, dedication to doing the Lord's will, his willingness to forgive, and the positive outcome that this conversion had on the remainder of his life.
There are some (including some in this forum) who think her direction of this film and the resulting product is a crime against humanity.
I doubt that it strays so far from the actual story that is unrecognizable, as some say.
Without having seen it yet, I am going to grant up front that the focus of various points in the movie may be more or less than what actually happened in reality or what was relayed in the book. But I would be willing to bet money it isn’t “unrecognizable trash”. It is just a fact of life that a movie can never, ever convey the richness of a book. It just cannot, in my opinion, if the book is well written.
For a good example of a travesty, waste of time, waste of money, and total conversion of a great book into an offensive, unrecognizable, unmitigated trash as a movie, refer to “The Monument Men”.
What was an interesting, great (and true story) was bastardized and Hollywoodized to the point it was indeed unrecognizable. That was a story that should have been told, because most people simply don’t know about it.
And “Unbroken” should be told to a wider audience as well. Most Americans are unaware of this man’s experiences, and I take my hat off to the author who wrote the book, and Angelina Jolie who spent a good deal of time and money to tell the story on film. But I will say that, even though I have not yet seen the movie, I will be astonished beyond words if it is “unrecognizable”.
It is a story of redemption that should be told, even if it isn’t told perfectly to everyone’s liking. I personally think that part of the book dealing with his postwar experiences is the most powerful part of the story, but given how much of the book is actually devoted to them, I don’t expect it to be the full focus, because his story lacks power without the context of the hardships he encountered.
The younger generation should get off my dam lawn.
Does this author have any heroes besides Lenin, Stalin and Marx?
You didn’t see the movie and you are arguing with me?
Monument men was a stupid depiction and made fun of the war. It wasn’t a story drama nor comedy.
It was a waste of time
Unbroken makes monuments men look like a great flick
His postwar experiences just floored me, but I suspect they will spend less time on that than I hope they would.
If he had ended up drinking himself to death, his story would still be an amazing one, but nobody would really know about it.
That he redeemed both himself and his brutal captors, is a message to bring a fullness to the heart and tears to the eyes.
I lived in Japan and the Philippines as a kid, and when I learned about the Bataan Death March (because we lived near the route, and saw the markers on the roads) I began to read up on the allied POW experience in the Far East, and it was a real eye-opener for me. It was around that same time that I read “I Cannot Forgive” about the Holocaust and I think was 11 or so when I read that. It was nearly unbelievable to me. But it gave me an introduction to what man can do to other men.
The one book I read that left an impact on me was a large volume, don’t remember the name, but it covered all aspects, the brutality, the horrible transport ships, the sub and air attacks by their own side, the starvation, the cold, it seemed so different from what read had happened in the European theater to allied troops.
All this fits with the experience of a man who burned for revenge and nearly drank himself to death, only to find God instead. That is what I got out of that book.
Well, okay then. That about says all we need to know about your opinions.
If you haven’t seen the movie then do not question critics
And you have not read what I’ve said so why question it?
I am a combat veteran. Very interested in educating youth on the history of this country and active in doing so. My favorite film is band of brothers which is so bloody and violent in its true depiction of events that many refuse to watch it
This film is poorly written by the Coen brothers
We saw it with an extended family group of adolescents and adults who after the movie, along with the audience, walked out looking at the floor shaking their heads and stating that whoever had not read the book learned nothing of the important aspects of zamperellis life All of them. And a few war vets among them
.
If you don’t want to know what I think then you don’t have to keep talking to me.
You’re wasting my time
“That’s my point. We never should have honored such an agreement. And when Stalin balked, that’s when we should have used the nukes.
My initial response was concerning the post that said we saved millions of lives by nuking Japan. We could have accomplished the same objective with Japan with saturation bombing via conventional means.
If, and it’s a big if, we had waited to reveal our nukes by blowing Stalin into eternity, then that would have saved millions, tens of millions, maybe more, lives.”
Captain Peter Blood (post 70) is to be praised for suggesting Richard B. Frank’s book _Downfall_ (Penguin Reissue May 2001, ISBN-10: 0141001461; ISBN-13: 978-0141001463). Other posters might benefit from perusing it, before offering additional opinions. It is at times disappointing, that forum members have not yet coordinated the depth of their knowledge of WWII with the depth of their moral certitude.
Many opportunities present themselves to unscramble misapprehension. A few specific points ought to suffice:
There was never any question of the Western Allies honoring or not honoring any “agreement” with the USSR about who would keep what. By spring 1945, the Soviet Red Army was the largest armed force on the planet, and its occupation of Eastern Europe was an accomplished fact. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American leaders were quite displeased, and did consider mounting a counteroffensive, but ultimately decided against it: they simply did not have the forces to do the job and did not have the resources to build up more (to say nothing about the chances of convincing the British and American public to go along with it). The Atom Bombs were not yet ready, and huge uncertainty then still existed, over whether any such device would even function as hoped.
Taking LouAvul’s last point next, by 1945 the saving of multiple millions of Communist victims was already impossible. The Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the purges of the 1930s had already happened before Nazi Germany launched its 1941 attack. During the wartime period of Allied cooperation with the USSR, Stalin was heard to remark that various Eastern Front offensives had indeed cost the Red Army many, many lives - but that the USSR lost many more during collectivization.
LouAvul’s second point deserves more attention.
Is it being implied that the nation was somehow committing a greater “wrong” - a decision worthier of higher blame - to kill Japanese by attacking with Atom Bombs, compared to killing Japanese by starvation due to the blockade, by conventional air attack, or by any planned invasion?
In December 1945 or thereabouts, Harper’s magazine published the results of a poll it conducted a little after VJ Day. Polled individuals were asked if the number of Atom Bombs employed by the United States during the war was (a) too many, (b) too few, or (c) about right. Results indicated a large majority (on the order of 80 percent) agreed with alternatives (b) or (c). A startling number (some 25 percent) of poll-takers offered the unsolicited opinion that the war had ended too soon: it would have been more agreeable to them if more Atom Bombs had been dropped in anger.
The moral arbiters of that day (educators, the clergy, academics, scientists, intellectuals) were shocked, and embarked on a campaign to re-educate the unwashed masses.
Today - 69 years on - it can be said they’ve largely succeeded.
Most citizens now find the mere existence of Atom Bombs to be a moral downcheck against the nation’s record, their use in wartime a uniquely odious crime against the rest of humanity, their retention in the military inventory an ongoing blot upon the acceptability of the nation’s moral state.
It appears a sobering number of forum members agree with that assessment.
In doing so, they have turned the moral equation precisely upside down: they make the claim it is more important to be moral, than to be effective. The result can never be defensible, especially not in war. Without effectiveness, defeat follows, and all talk of morality (or lack of it) ends.
Quite apart from that inversion, it is intensely disagreeable that today’s pampered, prissy, comfy, overly refined, childishly impatient Americans take a moral stance of such lofty condescension. They dare to second-guess at leisure decisions made generations ago, by people long dead, under the burden of unprecedented responsibilities. Time pressed urgently but their knowledge was contradictory and their data incomplete. All of it transpired at the culmination of a serious war; they chose to employ whatever weapons might come to hand.
Gainsaying their actions now does nothing but diminish us.
Maybe you don’t get it...
I do believe you responded to me first, stanne.
The feeling is quite mutual.
:)
I have been a big fan of Richard Frank's work (particularly "Guadalcanal") but have never read downfall. Next on the list!
My dad, who entered service as the war was coming to a close, made the newspapers around here back in 1995 when he delivered the Memorial Day speech in his hometown, and vigorously defended the dropping of the bomb on the 50th anniversary year. (There was a lot of that pious moral blathering going on that year, IIRC) I have always been inclined to let the validity of the decision lie in the context it was made, and I think that is enough.
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