Empire of the Sun

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR since not long after I got the current DVR, which has been over two years, is Empire of the Sun. I think I left it so long because I've become increasingly reluctant to set down for longer movies unless I've got a long weekend, and with this running a good two and a half hours, I wanted to wait for another long weekend. So that's now, and I finally got around to watching it.

A young Christian Bale (and it's only coincidental that I mentioned him in the Thursday Movie Picks yesterday) plays Jim Graham, who at the start of the movie is living in Shanghai in the autumn of 1941, with the starting date probably being Sunday, December 7 based on the events in the opening. For those who don't know history, China was relatively weak following the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century, with the result that a whole bunch of countries were able to obtain business concessions in Shanghai, along with setting up expatriate communities that were effectively enclaves, immune from Chinese law. Each nationality had its own enclave, more or less, and the Grahams are living in one of those enclaves, living a life that's a fairly high standard even compared to the average person in the UK proper, never mind what the Chinese in Shanghai would have experienced.

Now, the Japanese had already invaded China quite a few years earlier, taking over the rest of Shanghai in 1937, but hadn't attacked the rest of Southeast Asia yet, as places like Malaya (which you may recall from the Claudette Colbert movie Three Came Home) wouldn't be conquered until the beginning of 1942. But the Japanese occupation of the Shanghai enclave coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Some Westerners had already left Shanghai, seeing the writing on the wall, but many didn't, and now that Japan was attacking, there was a mass panic to try to get out now.

In that panic, Jim gets separated from his parents. Not knowing what to do, he goes back to his house, thinking that his parents are going to show up. They were successfully evacuated, so of course they're not going to be showing up at the house, and the technically orphaned Jim has the run of the place, at least for a couple of days until the food runs out. He goes outside to try to surrender to the Japanese, but they don't comprehend what's going on, and who cares about an orphaned kid, even a westerner?

Down at the river, Jim is taken in by Basie (John Malkovich) and Frank (Joe Pantoliano), two Americans who having been living the sort of life that would be the real sort of life Bob Hope and Bing Crosby would have faced in the Road movies: conning their way through, but nothing romantic about it. Young Jim is nothing more than a burden, at least until he's able to tell the Americans where his neighborhood is and that there's stuff they can loot there. Unfortunately, by this time, the Japanese have occupied the neighborhood, so all three are taken to an internment camp 100 miles up the river.

Amazingly, not long after this point the movie fast-forwards to 1945. We of course know that the war is about to end, but of course the characters aren't so sure of that, even if they might have had some inkling that the tide of the war in the Pacific had already turned. Jim looks remarkably good for somebody who's spent the last three years in an internment camp, even if everybody else looks at least somewhat the worse for wear. Jim is helped to survive in part by Basie, who has been using those con-artist skills he learned on the outside to be a sort of William Holden in Stalag 17, as well as the doctor for the westerners, Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers). In turn, Jim tries to help a woman prison, Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson), although it seems she's reached the frail enough stage that she's going to die before the camp is liberated.

Except that the camp doesn't really get liberated in the traditional sense. Americans attack the camp, and the Japanese respond by sending all of the prisoners on a forced march that's likely to kill a bunch of them. The marchers wind up at an outdoor storage facility that includes some of the Grahams' household goods, which have held up as well as Jim, this again being amazing since the stuff was probably left outside for years. And wouldn't you know it, but this coincides with the American atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Jim, despite having been separated from all of the other prisoners, is technically free, but is he going to be able to survive until help can arrive?

Empire of the Sun is a movie that's physically beautiful to watch, thanks to director Steven Spielberg and his cinematographer having a good grasp on what would make for good imagery. However, the story seems surprisingly flaccid. The movie is based on a book that is supposedly based on the real reminiscences of somebody who had survived one of the Chinese internment camps, but it feels rather clichéd at times. It also doesn't help that the movie is 153 minutes when it probably could have come in under two hours with a better script. Still, the actors do the best they can with the material; John Malkovich is good while Christian Bale shows potential already even if he doesn't quite have the range yet for the darker portions of the script -- not that many child actors did, and Bale was all of 12 when the movie was filmed.

So Empire of the Sun is a bit of a mixed bag, which is a shame for a movie that requires such a time investment.