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.
Saw it yesterday. Great movie, very inspiring. How could I ever bellyache about anything ever again. Great movie for young people. The greatest generation endured so much and now we wind up with people who pull a gun because their cheeseburger wasn’t in the bag. Imagine what the WWII survivors must think of today’s society.
We’ll be seeing it today.
I’m glad you used this story to bash the younger generation...
Best Picture (1975 Oscar nominations for films from 1974)
The Godfather Part II - Francis Ford Coppola
Chinatown - Robert Evans
The Conversation - Francis Ford Coppola
Lenny - Marvin Worth
The Towering Inferno - Irwin Allen
Highest-grossing films of 1974
1. Blazing Saddles Warner Bros. $119,500,000
2. The Towering Inferno 20th Century Fox / Warner Bros. $116,000,000
3. The Trial of Billy Jack Warner Bros. $89,000,000
4. Young Frankenstein 20th Century Fox $86,273,333
5. Earthquake Universal Pictures $79,666,653
6. The Godfather Part II Paramount Pictures $47,542,841
7. Airport 1975 Universal Pictures $47,285,152
8. The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams Sunn Classic Pictures $45,411,063
9. The Longest Yard Paramount Pictures $43,008,075
10. Benji Mulberry Square Releasing $39,552,000
Saw it. Libs always marginalize women. It was a great film. Jolie did a fine job.
My son sprung me from “senior living” on Christmas day, and took me to see it.
I read the book as soon as it came out, and doubted that the movie would do it justice. My son hasn’t read the book, and asked if I thought he should. I told him that he should as soon as he could.
The movie stands on it’s own, but I doubt it was because of Jolie. I think the credit is due to the Coens, et al.
The movie hits the high points of the book, and does it well, but there is so much more that isn’t covered. I highly recommend reading the book after seeing the movie. I felt differently about Nagasaki and Hiroshima after doing so.
Mr. O’Hehir doesn’t sound like a very happy person.
Still debating if I want to see it in theaters yet. Japanese behavior during WWII tends to raise my blood pressure and give me toothaches.
I saw it on Christmas. Great movie!
God is alive and Nietzche is dead- of syphilis!
There in nothing remotely Nietzchean about Zamperini, he was a proudly self-confessed Christian. Father, Son & Holy Ghost-- the whole nine yards.
More than anything else this fact infuriates and informs the boring snark that is Salon.
I got bored by the previews. Every scene dragged. Maybe the movie is cut better.
In what way? More against or more for?
Not to muddy the issue, but I always believed that the bombs saved millions of lives, both American and Japanese. And my father was then on a troopship in the Pacific, a young, fresh solider straight from Fort Dix boot camp, bound for Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of Japan.
Saw it. How could I ever complain about anything again? I’ll just remember the torture I endured sitting through two and a half hours of Angelina’s and the Coen bros collective view of zampirini a life which was a little mischievousness followed by a rather inexplicable success in the Olympics with a sudden airplane ride peppered with ridiculous Helen Keller jokes and getting shot at by, we suppose, the Japanese, and two hours of the 70+ day raft drift during which he fights with his raft mates in an out of a British then bad Italian accent all the while sporting a perfectly sculpted goatee
Oh and then another toe tapping lay interminable view of him in pow camp getting abused by a cross dressing Japanese pop star whom the younger audience members know as such and giggle at
His motivation for survival is, not the logical devotion to family and faith, noted in the book, and for which makes fun of his raft mate, but getting home to his mother’s gnocchi recipe
Kids will have zero idea from this torture inflicted on them what he was doing there, what the war was about, motivations, relationships among the troops, other characters in the war, or why anyone would recommend this movie to anyone
It is torture
And Jolie is getting a complete pass on this
No
I just finished the book today and will be seeing it this afternoon. I hope the movie does the book justice. The things that he and the other prisoners had to endure is beyond imagination.
I gave it a nine out of ten.
There is something else at work here. This is the third review I have read that seriously belittled the movie while saying “Yeah, Louie Zamperinin’s story is impressive and all and he went through a lot, but...” and then follow it with some kind of criticism.
In one movie, a wimpy grease spot of a guy in his twenties complained that Angelina Jolie “fetishises” Louie Zamperini’s suffering. It must have been a new word he read in a dictionary.
I don’t know squat about Angelina Jolie. But I do know about Louie Zamperini’s story...an American story, and an unbelievable, remarkable one.
The reviews I have read seem to take personal issue with her in some odd way. I think they are taking issue with the fact that she directed it.
I dislike most film reviewers, beginning with the greatest dislike for Siskel and Ebert, they kind of personify my dislike for their craft.
As for the movie, I haven’t seen it yet, but I will.
Glad to read your post. I’ve wanted to see the movie and read the book but haven’t yet. When I saw where this article came from, I immediately consulted the Freeper Comments for the truth. I got it. As usual. Thanks.
who cares that it was directed by a woman? why do libs, who claim we are all the same no matter the color, gender, nationality, always seem to point out such things as color, gender and nationality?
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