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.
Imagine the shock value if the first time Stalin learned of our nukes was when we blew his sorry hide into eternity. It would have spared a lot of grief for us and for eastern Europe, since eastern Europe was going to be enslaved by that nutcase.
After reading the book, there should be no argument about the correctness of having nuked Japan in order to force their surrender.
I read a book once about 2 POWs who were in Japan when the bombs were dropped and the surrender came. They didn’t know much what to do until the allies got there and these 2 guys visited Nagasaki. They were horrified and didn’t think that the devastation was worth their lives.
I asked my FIL who was also a POW in Japan at the time and he said “Hell, yes they should have bombed them.”
I’m not aware of many Japanese prison guards who moved to the U.S. after the war. On the other hand, the U.S. deliberately let thousands of Nazi collaborators settle in this country, thinking they would be helpful as spies and informants (and of course as scientists) against the Soviet Union. It was only in the late 1970s that the public became aware of this, and the government began rooting out some of these former concentration camp guards.
That they shouldn't be seen in public?
Jolie ? She made me waste two hours of my life
More than that she took this perfect American hero story that we need right now and turned it into something unrecognizable
And she’s getting praised for it.
I blame auto-correct!
At the time of the atomic bombs, Japan still had over a million armed troops in China. They would have fought to the deaths; the bombs undoubtedly saved many Aliied and Japanese lives.
I think many of the scientists from the Axis countries were very different people from concentration camp guards. If not for the Cold War, we probably would have been more harsh with the scientists as well; the reality was that the fall of Berlin just started another phase of warfare.
Concentration camp guards had little use to anyone; I doubt we knowingly gave sanctuary to any of them.
The Chinese would concur; they suffered more than anyone else at the hands of the Japanese. They shed no tears for them.
I’m no troll.
I’ve had my kids watching the 2nd season of 24, ‘Band of Brothers’, all except the 9th disc, ‘Apollo 13” the Marx brothers, the Thin Man, ‘Shooter’, and I have shown much of these to my ninth grade lit class.
And they go yearly to the POW symposium where the former residents of the Hanoi Hilton come and tell their stories, and we serve them lunch.
Kids want details. They want motivation, purpose, theme, honesty, if they’re not busy with Will Ferell comedy, Korean soap operas, Greg Gutfeld’s take on world affairs, video games, sports, eating, texting.
They have no time for anything else.
Kids will not like this film. And they would love Zam’s story, and they would get a lot out of it. But they’re not getting Zam’s story in this film. The Coen bros portray his entire motivation as eating pasta. Which it is not. Kids are not going to read the book.
The Allies had already determined that Stalin would have Poland (and much of eastern Europe); while Patton was griping that he couldn’t get fuel for his tanks, the fact was that the decision had already been made above that he was not to drive into Berlin.
The post-war hostilities in Greece illustrated the deals made before the war ended; Stalin sacrificed Greek communists because they weren’t in his spoils. Britain then fought alongside monarchists and such to restore Greece to a non-communist state.
Stalin was not much of an ally; he waited until the final months of the war to attack Japan. While Wake Island, the Philippines, etc. fell, he and the Japs had a cease-fire which lasted for years.
Now THAT’s a great flick. The kids love it, too.
No one ever said every conservative was a brainiac.
Loved ‘lone Survivor’, so did the kids. Sent my nephew the book.
Mark Wahlberg, when he’s not busy with silly movies, portrays war stories better than anyone. He got to know Marcus, has respect for him, and told his story without wasting the opportunity.
And kids love the film.
Yet the Japanese government and the Japanese people are complaining about the movie. Because the movie depicts the Japanese army as a marauding barbarians, with no conscience. The problem is and was, is that we didn’t tell the Japanese people of the cruelty and barbarism of their soldiers during WW2, we we did with the German people. Truth be told, the way the Japanese army’s “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” would make Hitlers “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” seem like a Sunday school picnic. Except, we swept all of their crimes under the rug. Except for a very few that we hung for “WAR CRIMES” in the pacific campaign.
No idea what that means.
I’ll tell you what I tell others who ask how to compete with video games, etc, for kids’ minds in lit class.
In story telling, when the kids have to read classic lit, but it includes current events and contemporary stories and ones of recent history, like this one, introduce them to the characters. how do they all relate to the central action or the central character.
What motivates them? In a good story, the motivations and behaviors and decision making will be consistent with his character, his growth, either to the good or bad, if he’s a main character, or will be predictable or reasonable if he’s not a main character, and will assist the action in a logical way.
No one, not kids, have to be a braniac to follow a story, and that’s all it is.
They don’t ask, ‘oh, for what purpose toward the theme of man versus the world did he make that decision?’. They ask, what did he do that for? Why is he doing that? Why didn’t he shoot that guy?, why did he let them kill that guy? What does he see in her? Why is he friends with him? etc.
My kids watch superhero movies. They know which ones are a waste of their time and which ones capture their attention. And they are very sophisticated about it, sharing ideas with other superhero nerds.
Superhero stories are simple, logical, with a lot of added characters of good and evil. They are greek myths, essentially, which were devised to make sense of the world.
Kids watch them to make sense of the world. THey don’t know that, but they do.
This Zamperini story is wonderful. It’s a true story of heroism. Kids would love it.
This Coen Brothers movie doesn’t tell his story. No motivations. No other characters, no growth, little decision making. They leave out the most interesting tale of moral dilemma which kept the kids who read it talking for many conversations.
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.
We honored the agreement because while the western allies were fighting the decimated remnants of the best Axis troops, there were four Axis soldiers on the eastern front for every one facing the allies in the west. When Stalin had pushed the Axis out of the USSR, he wanted eastern Europe as payment for continuing the war (so we wouldn’t have to face those troops from the east).
The saturation bombing was killing too many civilians; the atomic bombs killed less people than the firebombing of Tokyo, and accomplished more.
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