How Did I Talk My Wife Into Seeing This?

THE IMPOSSIBLE

Director: Juan Antonio Bayona

Screenwriter: Sergio G. Sanchez

Cast: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland

When lumping films into categories, there should be a spot for “harrowing;” movies that shake you to your core and have you wondering how much you can take. There are different kinds of these “endurance test” movies of course: grueling slogs through torture porn that leave you questioning your faith in humanity, documentaries like The Invisible War about the prevalence of rape in the military that also leave you questioning your faith in humanity (great doc by the way, I hope it inspires action beyond the petition we signed) or romantic comedies starring Gerard Butler or Katherine Heigl that make you lose faith in humanity altogether.

Then there are those movies whose depiction of human suffering and endurance are so skillful and intimate that one’s empathy with the characters on screen is of a strength and degree that makes the very viewing of the film difficult. That was our experience last night watching The Impossible, J.A. Bayona’s depiction of the true story of a family that survived the 2004 tsunami that ravaged Southeast Asia and killed over 200,000 people. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor portray the mother and father of three boys (with newcomer Tom Holland as their eldest, a 13-year old) visiting a Thailand beach resort for Christmas. They are relaxing by the pool on Boxing Day morning when, with only seconds of warning, a 100-foot wave moving at the speed of a plane hits the beach, wiping out everything for miles and sweeping people, cars, houses, trees and buildings away in minutes.

The tsunami is over in a matter of minutes, but those couple minutes are depicted with such utter realism and chaos and violence that any similarity to other “disaster” movies immediately vanishes. (Goodbye Day After Tomorrow.) In the same way The Cabin in the Woods has made it impossible to take crappy horror movies seriously, so too does The Impossible make it forever unfathomable to revel or take vicarious thrill in cinematic scenes of casual mass destruction. Here Bayona and his fantastic actors accomplish one of the greatest potentials of cinematic dramatizations of actual events by getting us to empathize with the victims of this faraway event that was previously, to many of us, nothing more than some brief news footage and a lot of statistics about casualties and property damage. By following a family through the disaster and sharing with them their fear and desperation as the separated family attempts to find each other amidst the chaotic aftermath, in other words by focusing on the specific, Bayona finds something universal.

Bayona and his screenwriter Sergio Sanchez (with whom he also collaborated on The Orphanage) also wisely avoid the temptation to amp up the drama even further than what is directly caused by the disaster itself. It would have been easy to deepen the characters’ plight by infusing some of the ugliness of humanity that is known to happen in the aftermaths of situations like this but instead, the director recognizes that to do so actually detracts from the effects of the the disaster at the film’s center. Almost without exception, we see humanity at its best in the film: People helping others in their searches for lost loved ones, overrun hospital staffers still caring and kind to everyone in their paths, etc. Early on, as Watts and Holland find each other after the first wave recedes and struggle to get to a place of safety, Watts has to convince her son to respond to a distant cry of a child. “It’s not worth the risk,” the teen says to his already gravely injured mother, to which she implores that they must help someone in need “even if it’s the last thing we do.” This sets the tone for the film as it finds glimpses of hope amongst the carnage, as when Holland starts helping people in the hospital find their injured family members. It’s as if the film is saying that even with everybody at their best, this is how bad things can get in the world. The unspoken plea is thus “Why would we then make things worse with selfish and cruel behavior?”

The film is difficult to watch, make no mistake about it, but in scenes of simple gestures such as a stranger offering his precious cell phone with it’s waning battery power to McGregor so he can make a call to a family member, The Impossible conjures up examples of hope just as powerful as the scenes of destruction that came before.

Movie Reviews--Age 5 Edition

The full text of my five year old's way-way-WAY after the fact review of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole (which I thought she liked at the time): "I didn't like it so much. It's too much Owlish and not too much pinkish or purplish." Well said. I can't really argue.

More Inception blather....

AV Club and Salon critic Sam Adams shares a pretty detailed breakdown of the the actual plot mechanics and chain of events in the movie at Salon.

Meanwhile Jonah Weiner has some interesting insights on the noir-ish worldview of the film over at Slate.

Now those are both pretty favorable looks at the film For a look at the other side of the conversation, I suggest taking a look at Jim Emerson's Scanners blog. Emerson is the editor of Roger Ebert's blog and also one of my favorite film writers. But it seems that every so often he just plain dislikes a movie that a lot of people seem to love and the result is usually several blog posts and tons of great discussion. Even when I disagree with the guy, I love hearing what he has to say.

Some follow-up thoughts on INCEPTION (Super Spoiler edition--BEWARE!)

So I know it's kind of early to post these as most people haven't even seen the film yet, but here are some things I've been chewing on:

• One of my criticisms of the film is the lack of "dreaminess" (for lack of a better word) to the dream sequences. Everything is crisp, structured and rather straightforward which, I don't know about you, is not what my dreams are like. Even when the impossible happens (a cityscape folding itself in half, a literal "stairway to nowhere") it happens with a mathematical precision that seems at odds with the subject of dreams and the subconscious. We even get a breakdown of exactly how the time differences between dream levels work. This seems a bit fussy and anal retentive to me.

  But a comment from Justin Chang's review in Variety got me thinking. He compares Nolan's filmmaking to dreaming, calling it "an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression." So maybe the fact that Nolan structures his dream sequences like James Bond action sequences as opposed to David Lynchian nightmares is intentional. Maybe he wants the dreams to look similar to the "reality" of the movie so that we have difficulty distinguishing between the two. A giant white rabbit or a talking scarecrow would instantly clue us in that we're in dream territory when the trick is to have us there without us realizing it, just like in our own dreams.

  On the other hand, maybe Nolan just lacks the imagination and loopiness required to delve into this territory. As A.O Scott puts it in his Times review, "Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires." Hmm...is it best to just think of the whole enterprise as a classic heist movie with some heady sci-fi trappings. Who knows?

Inception--These Dreams Go On...

Let me first just say how refreshing it is to have a highly anticipated, big-budget summer BLOCKBUSTER coming out that seems to have people genuinely excited for its release based largely on the director of the film. That’s cool. The last director to have such marquee value was probably M Night Shyamalan and he seems to have blown it. INCEPTION director Christopher Nolan, on the other hand, seems to be intent on delivering the goods each time out. With his newest, he’s delivered an intelligent, exciting, cerebral thriller that singlehandedly raises the average IQ of this summer’s movie crop.

I’m basically going to write this using only the barest of plot details for a couple reasons. One is that I wouldn’t want anyone thinking they would like/dislike the movie based solely on the premise. And the other is that it’s a whole lot more fun when you’re not sure exactly where this ride is going to take you. Short version: Cobb (DiCaprio) leads a team of operatives (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy) who specialize in “extraction.” That is to say, invading peoples’ dreams and stealing valuable information contained therein. A shady businessman (Ken Watanabe) hires the team for the dangerous and seemingly impossible opposite task of “inception” or planting an idea in a subject’s mind without them being aware of the outside interference. What follows is a sort of James Bond meets The Matrix thriller as the team invade dreams and battle elements of their subjects’ (and their own) subconscious.

From his debut Following to Memento to The Prestige, Nolan has a gift for making intelligent “puzzle” movies that double as grand crowd-pleasing entertainment. While his version of dreamscapes may be too literal and linear for fans (like me) of the twisted dream logic of directors like David Lynch, his skill in plotting and building suspense tend to make up for it. Our protagonists dive from dreams into dreams-within-dreams and Nolan (along with his skilled regular editor Lee Smith) skillfully weaves back and forth between these different levels as we see parallel action unfold across a spectrum of unconscious minds. This all culminates in some breathtaking setpieces, including some hand to hand combat that seems to take place in constantly shifting gravity.

While working in heady sci-fi territory, it’s often easy to let the concepts and spectacle drown out the emotion and characterization. Fortunately that’s not the case here. Despite a few too many scenes explaining the science of dreaming, Nolan’s screenplay ensures that we care about the players in this drama as much as the action around them. DiCaprio is especially effective as the super-operative whose closet-skeletons may literally threaten everyone around him. Between this and Shutter Island, he plays tortured very well, imbuing his hard-ass agent with a vulnerability that earns our sympathy and empathy right up through the gloriously ambiguous final shot.