Sometimes you have to attempt to erase your preconceived
notions of a movie before you go in to see it. With The Impossible, Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s retelling of the
true story of a family of five that survived the devastating 2004 tsunami in
Thailand, I had plenty. The trailer did the film no favors as far as I was
concerned. I made two predictions when I saw the trailer: 1) the film would be
an appalling depiction of that terrible tragedy for its focus on a rich white
family that made it through while hundreds of thousands of poor dark-skinned
people died around them; 2) the film would be a cloying and phony emotional tug
at the heartstrings, cynically designed to extract false tears from the
audience. I was wrong on the second, but absolutely dead-on accurate on the
first.
