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.
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.
