Unbroken
(2014)
(SPOILERS) It’s easy to see why the life of Louis “Louie” Zamperini was
snapped up as a movie property, since it sounds on the “too eventful a yarn to
possibly be true” side. Competing (and winning bronze) in the 1938 Olympics,
adrift for 45 days after his plane crashed and enduring hell in Japanese prison
camps, surviving, marrying, suffering PTSD and financial woes before devoting
his life to God as he promised he would, making peace with (most of) his
oppressors and then at age 80 running with the Olympic torch in Tokyo. Except
Angelina Jolie’s film Unbroken, from
a screenplay by the Coen Brothers, Richard LaGravensese and William Nicholson,
adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken:
A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, covers only
the first three of these, and gets bogged down in the final one to such an
extent that rather than exploring the man we only experience a surface
reflection through his repeated tribulations.
Unbroken covers
the other details in a couple of sentences over the end credits, showing
footage of the actual Louie with the torch. It rather begs the question, with a
title like this, why the makers think they’ve done enough with his story. This
is a long film, but it feels limited and constrained once it pitches into the
prison camps before the halfway mark, where it remains.
We have little idea of who Zampa is as a person, other than
flashbacks showing him as a tearaway who could tearaway (there’s something
pseudo-Forrest Gump about the
sequence; “Run, Zampa run”, and what ten-year-old exclaims “I’m nothing, let me be nothing!”; talk
about existential crisis). The flashbacks generally are inserted in the de
rigueur manner that announces this will succumb to the problems most biopics
do. In a sense, it stops short by finishing with the end of the war, whereas
many a biopic will carry on regardless in a linear array of prosthetics, but there’s
a balancing act necessary here that Unbroken can’t get right.
Jack O’Connell’s crowning moment as Louie is designed as his
raising, defiant, an unconvincing bit of prop wood over his head while
malicious Japanese warden The Bird threatens to have him shot if he drops it.
The music swells up at this Louie’s bravery and indomitability, but all one
takes away from the scene is corniness. There’s a great deal of difference
between a scene being factually correct (although this makes it look like he
held the timber for half a day, rather than half an hour) and whether or not it
translates to screen effectively.
Perhaps Unbroken
would have worked better as a mini-series? It bears the structural imprint of
Nicholson, who provided determinedly un-mould breaking screenplays for Sir
Dickie (king of the traditional – or dull, if you prefer – biopic). One can discern
nothing of the Coens at all, which would be a triumphant disappearing act if
the script’s quality were assured.
The thing is, there’s half a good movie here. I found the
adrift sequence – complete with machine-gunned shark – compelling in a way the Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence-lite internment
ordeal wholly isn’t. Maybe part of this is that Louie isn’t a man in isolation;
the absence is really felt when he is separated from Domhnall Gleeson’s Phil, the
latter never to return. It feels like a clueless snub to audience investment in
the character when we are told in the coda that Phil survived the war too and
he and Louie became lifelong friends, as if the makers were oblivious to what
was working and what wasn’t in the picture.
Jolie as director has taken some hits, but her basic
handling of the material is solid and sensitive, aided admirably by Roger
Deakins’ cinematography (there is a bit too much gorgeous framing for something
intended to be so arduous, perhaps). Alexandre Desplat, possibly the most
variable composer winning Oscars today, lays it on with a trowel, and this is
very much in the ill-advised war score category of Monuments Men. But he’s also responding to Jolie’s inability to
hang back, her urge to over-varnish.
I don’t know how many prisoners actually lined up to punch Louie
in the face, but if it’s as many as depicted it’s a wonder he had any face
left. During the aforementioned plank scene, Louie flashes to wondrous moments
of running, and one can only think unintentional parody. Likewise, the
unnecessary cut to the actual guy in 1998 is a Spielberg Saving Private Ryan move (albeit that was fictional), and as ill
advised without the tissue that comes in between. Louie may not have wanted his
conversion to be part of the picture, so as not to put unbelievers off, but
what we end up with is this suffering being all the man is, without even much
insight into him during that experience.
It’s the one-note nature of the brutality endured by Louie
at the behest of Miyavi’s “The Bird” Watanabe that sinks the picture. As noted,
it’s not whether the essentials are true or not; it’s how they work
dramatically. Miyavi is suitably unnerving, but he’s basically just a movie
monster. No one else during this sequence makes much impression; Garrett
Hedlund gives a decent enough showing in an underwritten role. As great as
O’Connell has been in most things, he’s only ever okay here, and so glaringly not Italian looking you wonder why they
even bothered trying to boot polish his hair and tan his skin.
Jolie can definitely put an effective sequence together, as
the first hour of the film shows, but she needs someone advising her against
indulgence, the sort of indulgent that leads to Coldplay fogging over the
closing credits. She shows considerable wisdom at times (Jai Courtney doesn’t
make it beyond the plane landing in the drink) but Unbroken’s material required restraint, and more still a
screenwriter who could inlay the man and not just his keynotes.
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