Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

TCM is getting into its Christmas movie marathon starting tomorrow, December 18. It turns out that two movies on my DVR are coming up one right after the other on TCM, which is why the first post is coming a full day in advance. That movie is Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, which will be on at 2:45 AM on Dec. 19, which is between Sunday prime time and Monday morning.

Tom Conti plays Mr. Lawrence, actually a lietenant colonel in the British Army who is now a prisoner of war in Java in 1942, presumably having been sent there from Malaya or Singapore since those were British colonies while Java was part of Dutch Indonesia, not that that really matters for the course of the story. The nominal commanding officer of the POWs is Capt. Hicksley (Jack Thompson), although Lawrence has just as high a status since he's the one western POW who can speak good Japanese so he can converse with the camp commandant, Capt. Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto). Lawrence, however, is closer to Sgt. Gengo Hara (Takeshi Kitano) among the Japanese officers.

One day, the Japanese capture a British major, Jack Celliers (David Bowie), reminiscent of bringing Steve McQueen into the German POW camp in The Great Escape. Well, except that the prisoners don't really try an escape, since there are no neutral countries to go to, and this isn't an action movie at all. Yonoi plans to have a trial for Celliers and then have Celliers executed, but finds that Celliers seems to have the same sense of honor that Yonoi has.

That sense of honor is fairly strict adherence to the old samurai code, so when one of the guards screws up, Yonoi decides that the punishment should be death by seppuku, and that the western POWs are going to watch. Seppuku involves not only stabbing oneself in the stomach, but having a second ready to behead you if anything should go wrong, which seems like a really terrible duty to have to pull, honor be damned. The POW's actions at the seppuku, which they're forced to attend, ultimately results in Celliers and Lawrence both being put into separate confinement apart from the rest of the POWs and threatened with execution again.

Life goes on this way, with the feeling that perhaps everybody could ride out the war with Yonoi respecting Celliers, Lawrence and Hara having some respect for each other, and hopefully the POWs avoiding the sort of serious death march that other camps had. But Yonoi gets relieved of duty and the new commandant certainly doesn't like the way things are going.

As I said, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence isn't an action movie at all but more of a character study. This may make it less appealing to some viewers. It was also directed by Nagisa Oshima, a Japanese director who, as I understand it, was considered somewhat of an avant-garde director among the Japanese, and certainly generally less accessible to Western audiences who prefer mainstream movies than, say, Akira Kurosawa.

But for those who are more into foreign films, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a fine choice, filled with excellent acting performances, including (or maybe even especially) that of David Bowie, which may also surprise some people.

If I were going to recommend an Oshima movie to people, I'd probably start with Cruel Story of Youth, which I think generally has a story that's easier to get and has more going on. But Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is definitely worth watching too.