Unbroken.

Lighter, Jonathan E.

It took both Coen brothers and two additional screenwriters, plus the directorial wand of Angelina Jolie, to turn Laura Hillenbrand's four-million-copy bestseller Unbroken (2010) into a respectful but banal film that plods soullessly for over two hours while saying little that is fresh about being a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II--one of the book's primary themes. Hillenbrand's absorbing biography recounts the life of Louis Zamperini (1917-2014)--an American distance runner in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Seven years later, as an Air Corps bombardier, Zamperini survived one crash landing followed by his plane's ditching into the Pacific, a month and a half adrift in a rubber raft, and more than two years of atrocious confinement by the Japanese. But compared to Hillenbrand's vigorous account, and aside from two or three effective sequences, the cinematic Unbroken (2014) is a plotless, leaden exercise indeed. The epilogue summation of Zamperini's postwar life suggests a film that could be considerably more compelling than the one actually on screen. Indicating the picture's sensibility is the recurring, faint golden haze that movies like the regrettable Memphis Belle (1991) employ to impart nostalgia, even for a past that was horrible, as it most certainly is in Unbroken (2014).

In spite of Zamperini's new marriage, his immediate postwar years were another trial--marked, as Hillenbrand reveals, by revenge fantasies, nightmares, alcoholism, and difficulty in holding a job. Jolie mentions none of this. The change came in 1949 when he experienced a religious conversion at Billy Graham's Christian Crusade. Like Englishman Eric Lomax in Jonathan Teplitzky's The Railway Man (also 2014), Zamperini traveled to Japan to forgive his torturers in person. He regained control of his life, wrote memoirs, and became an evangelical speaker. The distance star returned to Japan years later to run the torch relay for the 1998 Winter Olympics--at the age of eighty-one.

One man who refused to meet with Zamperini was Sergeant Matsuhiro Watanabe, the story's antagonist. Watanabe, called "The Bird" by Allied prisoners, ruled both camps in which Zamperini was held during most of his two-year captivity. Wanted for war crimes in 1945, Watanabe nonetheless emerged from the shadows in the 1950s, when American interest in Japanese war criminals had long been dissolved by the realignments of the Cold War. (He died wealthy and unrepentant in 2003.) Hillenbrand's Watanabe is a repressed homosexual sadist who finds release in singling out the indomitable Zamperini for special tortures amid the atrocious treatment routinely inflicted on war prisoners by the Japanese. (Watanabe, who was twenty-five in 1943, is played by a shrewdly cast, disconcertingly innocent-looking Takamasa Ishihara.) Unbroken is not the first time that repressed homosexuality has been invoked to explain military excess: it motivated another Japanese commandant in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and the American Sergeant Callan in The Sergeant (1968), not to mention the more prominent examples of T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia (1964) and General Cummings of Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead (1948).

Unbroken does manage three excellent sequences. The first is the opening B-24 raid on a Japanese-held island, very believably fabricated even if these particular four-engine, fifty-thousand pound bombers make little more noise than a buzzing Cessna. The second sequence comes when Zamperini's crew is forced into the ocean, ironically while scouring it for some downed American airmen. (Hillenbrand reports the grim likelihood that, in 1942-43, as many American crews were lost on such patrols as were rescued.) To a viewer, miles of open sky and the decent marksmanship of the American gunners make the island raid look potentially survivable from the beginning. But later, as the big shadow of Zamperini's plane steadily widens over the vacant sea and the crew rush to launch rafts, the increasing sense of helplessness becomes overwhelming. Later there's Tokyo before the fire bombings of 1945, its downtown as bustling as Manhattan, its people stylishly dressed and civilized; its office buildings fitted out with quiet elevators and high-gloss lobbies--hardly the iniquitous alien capital never quite revealed in movies like Thirty Seconds over Tokyo or Pearl Harbor. Eventually we see the city in ashes.

The flimsy characters of Unbroken, however, including Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), never rise to the level of these episodes, partly because the Americans are mostly at the mercy of either the ocean or of Watanabe, whose freedom of action makes him marginally more interesting than his protagonist victim. But even Watanabe is a mere bundle of evil traits compared to the developed personalities of commandants like Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) in Grand Illusion (1937) and Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

In place of interiority, Jolie intrudes flashbacks. Suddenly we see Zamperini in Torrance, California, a delinquent son of Italian immigrants. But Louie Zamperini can run. His older brother turns him into a high-school and then national collegiate star, advising "If you can take it, you can make it," the slightly equivocal platitude that Jolie determines to prove above all else. When the going gets immeasurably tough, we flash back again to Louie's training on a dirt road in

California. Eventually he's in a labor camp, abused till he's barely able to drag a six-foot railway tie along the ground, but his never-quit defiance lets him hold it over his head for many minutes (thirty-seven according to Hillenbrand) at Watanabe's furious command. It is a plainly impossible feat for anyone, even though Zamperini looks like Atlas morphing into Christ and back again. His fellow PWs stop work in the golden afternoon to stare and murmur "You can do it." And, of course, he can.

The real Louis Zamperini was taken seriously ill just as filming was completed. Laptop technology enabled director Jolie to bring him a screening of his life, which Zamperini, then ninety-seven, watched from beginning to end, knowing he was on his deathbed--surely the only person in history to have had that experience. Jolie modestly declined to reveal Louis Zamperini's reaction, but Laura Hillenbrand, who consulted on the film, has said he was "delighted."

Note

Three prominent experts in "endurance, survivalism and torture" consulted by the New York Post seriously doubt Zamperini's memory of the magnitude of certain events: http://nypost.com/2014/12/21/ is-aN-of-the-powerful-tale-unbroken-really-true/ (accessed January 21, 2015).