Film review: Angelina Jolie's Unbroken - a powerful war drama
Actress' second outing as a director shows her to be a talented filmmaker
Starring: Jack O'Connell,Takamasa Ishihara
Director: Angelina Jolie
Category: IIB (English, Japanese and Italian)
Is all well in the Pitt-Jolie household? After husband Brad Pitt's turn in brutal war film comes Angelina Jolie's , a powerful and relentless prisoner-of-war camp drama which doesn't shrink from showing the inhumane treatment meted out by the Japanese to their captives. The actress's second film as a director shows her to be a talented filmmaker, and one unafraid to take on a subject like human cruelty and treat it in an unconventional way.
is a true story based on the picaresque life of Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), a young Italian-American runner who represented the US at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi-ruled Berlin.
When America entered the second world war, he joined the air force as a bombardier, flying missions against Japanese bases.
The film opens with such a mission, in which the B-24 Liberator bomber that Zamperini was on board has to crash-land. Then it flashes back to show his early life, in which he suffered ethnic discrimination in the US, and his time at the Olympics, before moving forward to detail his reassignment to Hawaii.
While on a reconnaissance mission, the rickety warplane Zamperini is in crashes into the Pacific Ocean. He survives, but is set adrift in a lifeboat, style, in a storyline that makes up a significant portion of the film. After being strafed with machine gun fire by a Japanese bomber, he's picked up by a Japanese ship, and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Japan.
Zamperini's experiences in two hellish prisons under the cruel camp commander Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Takamasa Ishihara, better known as musician Miyavi) — nicknamed "The Bird" — make up the bulk of . In spite of many beatings, his spirit remains broken.
The drama is partly scripted by Joel and Ethan Coen, working from Laura Hillenbrand's bestselling biography, and has more in common with an art house feature than a mainstream movie. Most commendable is the lack of melodrama and sentimentality. There are hardly any cloying moments, and the brutality of the camp is depicted matter-of-factly. By the time Zamperini reaches the second camp, where the Japanese use prisoners as slave labour, the blood, grime and suffering has reached such a level that the film touches on surrealism.
is not flawless. One error Jolie made was to put The Bird's cruelty down to personal psychological causes when, in fact, the Japanese military command encouraged brutality towards prisoners as part of a systematic military plan. Secondly, the script, possibly drawing on a similar pairing of David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto in Nagisa Oshima's (1983), adds a homo-erotic/sado-masochistic touch to the relationship between the delicately featured Watanabe and Zamperini that detracts from the main theme.
Also on the war: The Imitation Game's Benedict Cumberbatch on Alan Turing
Although it's grimmer than most war movies, Zamperini's refusal to give up leads to many small victories and some uplifting moments. And despite its subject matter, is not a depressing film.
