The boy is Jamie Graham, known throughout most of the
film as Jim, a British boy born and raised in the Shanghai International
Settlement whose life is thrown into upheaval after the Pearl Harbor bombing
and the start of the Pacific War. As a coming of age and child in peril story
it is right up Steven Spielberg’s alley when compare with so much of his
directorial oeuvre (and a great deal of his work as a producer, for that
matter). This film followed The Color
Purple, which was his first real foray into heavy dramatic lifting. Where
that film was laden with heavy-handed directing, Empire of the Sun is fleet and brisk. It tackles serious material –
a boy loses his parents at the start of war, lives on his own scrounging off
the leftover canned goods in his wealthy neighborhood, spends four years in a
Japanese internment camp, then goes on a death march after Allied forces begin their
bombing campaign – but fixing the point of view with Jim as he ages from about
nine to thirteen allows for a film that begins with the rose-tinted perspective
of a child and ends with the more world-weary sense of a young teen.
Christian Bale made his feature film debut as Jim and
it’s the kind of mature child performance that carries a dramatic film. The
story is based on J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel, adapted by Tom Stoppard, so Jim figures in
just about every scene. The intensity and depth of character that Bale exhibits
as a grown man playing Batman or a serial killer in American Psycho was evident 25 years ago. He convincingly ages from
a child to a near young adult over the course of the film. In the prison camp,
Jim is a resourceful aid to an American inmate named Basie (John Malkovich),
able to conjure all kinds of tools and contraband. Malkovich was still a young
and not all that well-known screen actor at the time. His style had been honed
in the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, which brings an eccentric
naturalism to a movie that often hovers on the line of theatricality.
Spielberg’s films are, if nothing else, tremendous
entertainments and, being such, usually exhibit a certain artifice. The special
effects call attention to themselves as spectacle in a Spielberg film. In this
particular film, the effects involve battles in the background and fighter
planes soaring overhead in dogfights. He’s a master director of such big
moments with the exception of big crowd scenes which never get past the theatricality
of their staginess. As the people of Shanghai evacuate, I always had the sense
of extras being directed to act a certain way. And his skills as a director of
small human moments tend toward the overblown. In a drama that centers on the
emotional development of a child, he spends remarkably little time getting into
Jim’s head. The most revealing moment in Jim’s passage from childhood innocence
to a teenager who’s witnessed far more than any child should ever have to is
handled with sledgehammer subtlety. As he straddles the recently deceased body
of a Japanese boy who has been his ‘friend’ through the prison fence for many
years, he tries to plead with him and beat him back to life. During this
bedlam, Spiel berg cuts in a shot of the young Jim in his schoolboy uniform
lying there dead in the water. The message is excruciatingly obvious: Jim wants
his youth and innocence back. One of my biggest criticisms of Spielberg’s work
has always been his lack of faith in his audience to discern meaning from
images and competent storytelling to the point that he has to basically plaster
it in neon writing just in case you didn’t get it.
Of course the whole film is visually splendid in a way
audiences had come to expect from Spielberg by that time, but John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, which had opened in U.S.
theaters only two months earlier, covers very similar terrain in a much more
refined and adult manner. Given the choice of semi-autobiographical WWII
stories involving childhood loss of innocence, I would be happy with either
film, but would go with Boorman’s approach more often.
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