Empire of the Sun
I've said it before, I'll say it again: this is one of Spielberg's best, unjustly neglected. Perhaps it would have done better at the box office if he had made it a few years later, after Schindler's List, not before, but I don't think so. Of his three WWII movies, this one is the most unusual and the one that defies expectations the most. Based on J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, with a script written by Tom Stoppard, this was Spielberg using his gift of directing a child (thirteen-years-old Christian Bale in his first big screen role, aging from eleven to fifteen in the movie, and the fact I had first seen him there caused me to react to the first Batman Begins photos not with mmm, Bruce, but "oh, it's little Christian all grown up *g*) - and no matter how you stand on his oeuvre, he's really one of the best of the business in getting child performances - in a way that went directly against what you expected from him up to this point. In a way, Jim is the anti-Peter Pan. This is a story about the death of innocence (as Spielberg phrased in an interview), not the preservation or triumph of it. What's more, that most beloved (and overused) of Spielbergian motifs, father-son bonding (or sons finding a father figure) is given its sharpest, most disillusioned twist (and that includes Minority Report and its noir treatment of the mentor). And that Spielbergian weakness/soft spot/however you want to put it, the upbeat (and/or) sentimental ending? Not there.
Empire of the Sun is set in Shanghai and one of the thirteen internment camps the Japanese put European and American citizens in during WWII. The early sections in the international settlement in Shanghai, where Jim and his parents are living their privileged lives, have a creepy unreality; you get the feeling these people live under glass (which Spielberg sometimes uses as a literal motif, as when the Graham family is being driven to a party and Jim watches everything through the car's windows). Jim - still Jamie in this first part, and the change of name later is significant - is that tricky balance to get right, spoiled but not monstrously so (i.e. it's easy to play, say, Dudley Dursley if you want to get "spoiled rotten" across, but far more difficult, and Christian Bale achieves this, to go for a "takes his good life for granted, but isn't malicious" element. Nor is he Little Lord Fountleroy. It doesn't occur to Jamie to give something to the beggar outside the door, for example. There is no effort to make him adorable or particularly endearing; one rather feels for his beleagured Amah (the Chinese nurse).
Reality then intrudes, literary, with the Japanese, on the day of Pearl Harbor, going after the Westerners, and as Jim gets separated from his parents, he's still very much a child, going home first, where in a almost silent scene you get a rejection of every "devoted servant" stereotype there ever was as Jim encounters the Amah and another servant taking something of the furniture and demands to know what they're doing. The Amah, whom we've seen so far following him around from choir practice to bicycle time to forbidden nightly snacks in the kitchen, goes to him, looks him in the face, and slaps him. Then she turns around and leaves without haste (and with the furniture). You could say Jim gets slapped in the face from this point onwards till he arrives in the internment camp, and sometimes after.
When he's nearly starving, he comes across two Americans, and there we get into the next round of defying expectations. For these two aren't exactly lovable rogues or plucky heroes (though they are survivors). The first thing they do is to search Jim for anything valuable (and keep what he still has in his school boy uniform), then they check out his teeth (white, whole, and by the way, something I hadn't noticed in the cinema but did notice upon rewatching is the realistic detail of Jim's teeth getting from white and standard to brown and uneven in the course of the film) and then they try to sell him (no buyers). A while ago, I talked with redstarrobot about how cynics are popular only under the assumption that they never hurt anyone important and really have a heart of gold and come through for the hero, a la Han Solo. Well, the one Jim desperately tries to make himself valuable for and sort of bonds with, Basie, played by John Malkovich, is the anti-Harrison Ford type. Basie is nice to Jim (indeed dubs him Jim instead of Jamie) when it doesn't cost him anything. He exploits him throughout, and when the opportunity arises for something better, which it does twice, ditches him without a problem. Considering this film was made in 1987, when people probably were expecting something of a Harrison Ford type from Spielberg for this role, or, to quote a cinematic precedent, a William Holden type (as in Bridge over the River Kwai), that must have felt like a slap in the face. A confirmation of the uneasy suspicion that the ruthless survivor might just really be that and will not come through for you. That he's not equipped with a soft inner core or a heart of gold for his few friends but won't hesitate to sacrifice his friends, too. That he is, at heart, not a wealth of unexplored depth but hollow.
Jim becomes something of a survivor himself in the course of the film, of course, and the kid who ran away screaming from a young Chinese thief early on is later on able to save a British doctor's life in the camp by interferring and amusing the Japanese soldier in the process of beating the doctor into a pulp. Something he keeps throughout is his fascination with aeroplanes (and this is where one is reminded Jim is a youthful J.G. Ballard alter ego), and as the camp is next to an airfield, you get, as an ongoing red thread, some moments of wordless and language-less bonding between Jim and one of the Japanese pilots (starting out as an adolescent who, like Jim used to, plays with model airplanes, ending up as a pilot on a last suicide mission which doesn't take off because the plane is too wrecked). The last encounter with said pilot, after the war is already over, also marks what I don't think has a parallel in any other Spielberg movie, the utter rejection of the father figure (and not in favour of a "good" father, either), after the Japanese has been shot by an American soldier in a misunderstanding of his gesture towards Jim. Jim goes after the hapless American soldier, and when Basie, who has come back, restrains him and asks him "haven't you learned anything from me?", Jim replies "Yes, I've learned that people will do anything for a potato". Basie then basically repeats one of the dreams Jim had spun for him earlier in the camp, a life together, and it's amazing what young Christian Bale manages to convey with a look and the expression on his face. (Also, applause to the directorial restraint and the scriptwriter's restraint.) We don't need any additional dialogue to know that this is it, and that it's over between Basie and Jim.
Death is ever present in the film, with dead bodies in the camps who get their shoes and eating cups taken away at once, but of the dead bodies thrown Jime's way, three are given particular attention - one woman in the makeshift camp hospital whom the doctor tells him to give CPR to, Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson - among other things, this film is a "spot this British actor!" game) who dies of exhaustion on the march away from the camp, and the Japanese pilot, who when Jim tries to revive him as well for a brief moment turns into his own dead body, or rather, in the body of the school boy Jamie from the beginning of the movie. By that point, Jim's face is haggard and he has the thousand-miles-survivor-of-hell stare. Incidentally, Spielberg, who (as has been recently proven in Munich) really can't do sex scenes manages to get Jim's awakening awareness of the other sex across delicately, by the way he watches Mrs. Victor, with whom he lives for a while, and there is a brief, eerie and sad sensuality when she drinks the water he brings her from his hands. But Thanatos is really more important to the loss-of-innocence subject than Eros here, and it fits that when Mrs. Victor dies, Jim sees, briefly, impossibly, the white flash that he later will believe was the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I have become death indeed.
At the end, he is reunited with his parents - whose faces he confesses earlier on to the doctor he can't remember anymore - but the reunion is not a sentimental happy ending in anything. When his mother, disbelieving, identifies Jim-with-the-thousand-miles-stare among the children and adolescents, we see him very slowly unfreeze and awkwardly, equally disbelieving, touch her lips with his fingers, look at the lipstick, then touch her hair ever so slightly. He doesn't say a word. But he finally closes his eyes. After having seen too much to ever be a child again, it's the one mercy the film extends. We see Shanghai again, as in the beginning, and the film ends.
A word about the music: as usual, John Williams wrote it, but there is no epic "theme", which fits the film. Instead, he and Spielberg went for something very different, taking their cue from Jim being a choir boy at the beginning (before he declares himself to be an atheist, precocious kid, and I wonder whether that contributed to the film being a flop in the US?) and use those kind of hyms by the high, clear voice of a boy throughout. It's most haunting when Jim - who has forgotten so much else of his earlier life - sings for the Japanese pilots on their last morning - and fits that strange thing about Shanghai, which I've visited since first seeing this film; Shanghai is full of late 19th century European buildings which the English and French left there, and the weird juxtaposition of imported Europe into Asia which is basically what Jim is expresses itself perfectly through this device.
Empire of the Sun is set in Shanghai and one of the thirteen internment camps the Japanese put European and American citizens in during WWII. The early sections in the international settlement in Shanghai, where Jim and his parents are living their privileged lives, have a creepy unreality; you get the feeling these people live under glass (which Spielberg sometimes uses as a literal motif, as when the Graham family is being driven to a party and Jim watches everything through the car's windows). Jim - still Jamie in this first part, and the change of name later is significant - is that tricky balance to get right, spoiled but not monstrously so (i.e. it's easy to play, say, Dudley Dursley if you want to get "spoiled rotten" across, but far more difficult, and Christian Bale achieves this, to go for a "takes his good life for granted, but isn't malicious" element. Nor is he Little Lord Fountleroy. It doesn't occur to Jamie to give something to the beggar outside the door, for example. There is no effort to make him adorable or particularly endearing; one rather feels for his beleagured Amah (the Chinese nurse).
Reality then intrudes, literary, with the Japanese, on the day of Pearl Harbor, going after the Westerners, and as Jim gets separated from his parents, he's still very much a child, going home first, where in a almost silent scene you get a rejection of every "devoted servant" stereotype there ever was as Jim encounters the Amah and another servant taking something of the furniture and demands to know what they're doing. The Amah, whom we've seen so far following him around from choir practice to bicycle time to forbidden nightly snacks in the kitchen, goes to him, looks him in the face, and slaps him. Then she turns around and leaves without haste (and with the furniture). You could say Jim gets slapped in the face from this point onwards till he arrives in the internment camp, and sometimes after.
When he's nearly starving, he comes across two Americans, and there we get into the next round of defying expectations. For these two aren't exactly lovable rogues or plucky heroes (though they are survivors). The first thing they do is to search Jim for anything valuable (and keep what he still has in his school boy uniform), then they check out his teeth (white, whole, and by the way, something I hadn't noticed in the cinema but did notice upon rewatching is the realistic detail of Jim's teeth getting from white and standard to brown and uneven in the course of the film) and then they try to sell him (no buyers). A while ago, I talked with redstarrobot about how cynics are popular only under the assumption that they never hurt anyone important and really have a heart of gold and come through for the hero, a la Han Solo. Well, the one Jim desperately tries to make himself valuable for and sort of bonds with, Basie, played by John Malkovich, is the anti-Harrison Ford type. Basie is nice to Jim (indeed dubs him Jim instead of Jamie) when it doesn't cost him anything. He exploits him throughout, and when the opportunity arises for something better, which it does twice, ditches him without a problem. Considering this film was made in 1987, when people probably were expecting something of a Harrison Ford type from Spielberg for this role, or, to quote a cinematic precedent, a William Holden type (as in Bridge over the River Kwai), that must have felt like a slap in the face. A confirmation of the uneasy suspicion that the ruthless survivor might just really be that and will not come through for you. That he's not equipped with a soft inner core or a heart of gold for his few friends but won't hesitate to sacrifice his friends, too. That he is, at heart, not a wealth of unexplored depth but hollow.
Jim becomes something of a survivor himself in the course of the film, of course, and the kid who ran away screaming from a young Chinese thief early on is later on able to save a British doctor's life in the camp by interferring and amusing the Japanese soldier in the process of beating the doctor into a pulp. Something he keeps throughout is his fascination with aeroplanes (and this is where one is reminded Jim is a youthful J.G. Ballard alter ego), and as the camp is next to an airfield, you get, as an ongoing red thread, some moments of wordless and language-less bonding between Jim and one of the Japanese pilots (starting out as an adolescent who, like Jim used to, plays with model airplanes, ending up as a pilot on a last suicide mission which doesn't take off because the plane is too wrecked). The last encounter with said pilot, after the war is already over, also marks what I don't think has a parallel in any other Spielberg movie, the utter rejection of the father figure (and not in favour of a "good" father, either), after the Japanese has been shot by an American soldier in a misunderstanding of his gesture towards Jim. Jim goes after the hapless American soldier, and when Basie, who has come back, restrains him and asks him "haven't you learned anything from me?", Jim replies "Yes, I've learned that people will do anything for a potato". Basie then basically repeats one of the dreams Jim had spun for him earlier in the camp, a life together, and it's amazing what young Christian Bale manages to convey with a look and the expression on his face. (Also, applause to the directorial restraint and the scriptwriter's restraint.) We don't need any additional dialogue to know that this is it, and that it's over between Basie and Jim.
Death is ever present in the film, with dead bodies in the camps who get their shoes and eating cups taken away at once, but of the dead bodies thrown Jime's way, three are given particular attention - one woman in the makeshift camp hospital whom the doctor tells him to give CPR to, Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson - among other things, this film is a "spot this British actor!" game) who dies of exhaustion on the march away from the camp, and the Japanese pilot, who when Jim tries to revive him as well for a brief moment turns into his own dead body, or rather, in the body of the school boy Jamie from the beginning of the movie. By that point, Jim's face is haggard and he has the thousand-miles-survivor-of-hell stare. Incidentally, Spielberg, who (as has been recently proven in Munich) really can't do sex scenes manages to get Jim's awakening awareness of the other sex across delicately, by the way he watches Mrs. Victor, with whom he lives for a while, and there is a brief, eerie and sad sensuality when she drinks the water he brings her from his hands. But Thanatos is really more important to the loss-of-innocence subject than Eros here, and it fits that when Mrs. Victor dies, Jim sees, briefly, impossibly, the white flash that he later will believe was the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I have become death indeed.
At the end, he is reunited with his parents - whose faces he confesses earlier on to the doctor he can't remember anymore - but the reunion is not a sentimental happy ending in anything. When his mother, disbelieving, identifies Jim-with-the-thousand-miles-stare among the children and adolescents, we see him very slowly unfreeze and awkwardly, equally disbelieving, touch her lips with his fingers, look at the lipstick, then touch her hair ever so slightly. He doesn't say a word. But he finally closes his eyes. After having seen too much to ever be a child again, it's the one mercy the film extends. We see Shanghai again, as in the beginning, and the film ends.
A word about the music: as usual, John Williams wrote it, but there is no epic "theme", which fits the film. Instead, he and Spielberg went for something very different, taking their cue from Jim being a choir boy at the beginning (before he declares himself to be an atheist, precocious kid, and I wonder whether that contributed to the film being a flop in the US?) and use those kind of hyms by the high, clear voice of a boy throughout. It's most haunting when Jim - who has forgotten so much else of his earlier life - sings for the Japanese pilots on their last morning - and fits that strange thing about Shanghai, which I've visited since first seeing this film; Shanghai is full of late 19th century European buildings which the English and French left there, and the weird juxtaposition of imported Europe into Asia which is basically what Jim is expresses itself perfectly through this device.