Unbroken Christmas 2014 SPOILER!! He is abused. He doesn’t break. He doesn’t die (until this year at 97). “Unbroken” (2014), directed by Angelina Jolie, tells the very remarkable and very true story of Louis Zamperini. Zamperini was well on his way to becoming a pre-teen professional hooligan when his brother got him into running. Within a few short years, he was the fastest high school runner in the country and on his way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. This was supposed to be a warm-up for the next Olympics in Japan but instead, he became a bombardier in the Pacific theater of WW2. This is where the movie picks up the story. In fact, the movie covers only his war years. It gives a few key childhood incidents and one Olympic moment in flashback. The rest is flying, crashing, surviving on the ocean (47 days) and c. 2 years in the sort of captivity that we now have laws against. It is a “true-hero” genre movie. “Unbroken” is not a great movie. It is an adequate or even good movie—of a GREAT story. This is the second real-life-hero story Jolie has done (after “A Mighty Heart”), and the first she’s directed. It is a remarkable and thoroughly enjoyable freshman effort from someone showing real talent (in spite of Sony Corp snark). “Enjoyable” here, I hasten to add, has nothing to do with “pleasant,” even though Jolie has not attempted the heights of verisimilitude in Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ. It’s hard to know if she intended to contrast the almost magical beauty of the different natural backgrounds with the surely demonic evil of the human foregrounds. She makes nothing of it, so it might just be novice naivete. Thankfully, the suffering and abuse receives a similar sort of Cover Girl make-over as the ocean and jungles, as if it’s all been photo-shopped just a bit. Jolie, like Drew Barrymore, has survived her wicked-wild-child years to become a stable, capable, woman, able to give her considerable talent greater and greater rein to flow. Also like Barrymore, she’s choosing projects that reflect her sense of redemption. This is not just true of the hero-story, “Unbroken,” but the genuinely inspiring redemption story, “Maleficent.” I confess, I wanted to see this movie but it was not my first choice. However, I’m very glad I did. My real interest in it was to see if Zamperini’s quite outspoken faith found any foothold there. I was not disappointed. Zamperini was a self-made man curious about the Catholic devotion of his pilot and best buddy (Domnhall Gleeson’s “Phil” Philips) and not shy about bargaining with God while lost at sea. The movie ends with him kissing the tarmac at the Long Island Municipal Airport and looking up to see his family in the crowd. It’s a clichéd moment, as the whole movie is a cliché. But this entirely true story is why we have such clichés and why they are effective. If you don’t tear up over this, you may need to check yourself into managed care (and keep taking those happy pills!). If the movie had ended there, as it easily could have done; then Jolie would have perpetrated as great a fraud on Zamperini as was done to C. S. Lewis by the makers of “Shadowlands.” Jolie, whether from regard for the man, whom she took as a father-figure, or some other sense of integrity, again does not disappoint. She refers to the main events of his long life afterwards with real photos of the people. He married, stayed friends with Philips and ran in the Olympics in Japan ... at 80 years of age as a torch-bearer. Best of all, Jolie informs us he fulfilled his ocean-voyage bargain to devote his life to God, which he said “saved his life.” He returned to Japan to meet with and forgive many of his former captors. She also tells us about The Bird, the chief sadistic guard, who refused to meet with Zamperini. Louie lived his message that forgiveness is better than revenge. Though bland and the tiniest bit preachy, it’s pretty, stinkin’, dog-gone good for Jolie and precisely the meaning Zamperini gives to his own life. This is not a movie to see more than once. It is, however, worth seeing and talking about at length. It purports to illustrate “the triumph of the human spirit” in our central heroic figure. It does so, however, not merely in contrast to nature but in contrast to anti-immigrant prejudice in the US and to sadistic hatred from an enemy in Japan. Ain’t no one here but us humans, and we all have the potential for the one as well as the other. Whether Jolie intended it or not, she has raised a mirror to us all and asked us to go beyond, “who’s the fairest of us all?” The answer is obvious, and somewhat tedious, if that’s all there is. The story she’s told is, instead, a prelude to the much more important question, “how do I become so fair?” Here is where Zamperini tells a much better story than Jolie, because she points at him, and he points at Jesus.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 05:51:56 +0000
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