"Empire Of The Sun"

If there is one thing Steven Spielberg is good at – among many others – it is the difficult task of conveying childhood emotions and mindsets without simultaneously infantilizing his adult audience or talking his child audience down. It is a rare gift that he showcased splendidly in 1987’s “Empire Of The Sun”, in which he revealed Christian Bale to the world.

In many respects, “Empire Of The Sun” could be seen as the quintessential Steven Spielberg movie. It has just about every trait associated with his cinema: A child as a protagonist or prominent supporting character, parental separation (in this case, the child is separated from both parents), parental surrogates, a prominent featuring of World War II, a sweeping camera, prominent lighting, and, most prominently, a strong love of flying objects – in this case, planes.

 

That love of planes is what primarily identifies Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a spoilt young English boy living in English-occupied territory in China. It is the cause of his first encounter with Japanese forces, as he plays inside a real plane, pretending to shoot at his toy plane, in one of the film’s most gorgeous scenes. The camera alternates between first-person subjective shots and close tracking shots, as it might in a scene of an actual flight. It is a perfect example of Spielberg’s ability to make us feel his characters’ experience, particularly childhood wonder. John Williams’s score couldn’t be more perfectly placed, neither superfluous nor used as a last resort to make the audience feel what lesser directors and editors might fail to have conveyed with images. It is as if the music conducts the images just as they conduct it.

 

Love of planes in “Empire Of The Sun” is also the cause of Jim’s separation from his parents during a crowd panic as the Japanese army breaks into the city. Just as the previous encounter, it involves real planes – the astounding-yet-menacing swarm of Japanese fighter planes looming over the city, seen from Jim’s point of view, the camera slowly drifting from right to left as he is– and the toy plane Jim drops in the moment’s excitement.  In three shots of varying degrees of closeness, the damage is done and Jim’s bond to his parents is severed.

 

From then on, Jim is lost in a world and conflict he does not understand, surviving through luck, resourcefulness and unrelenting optimism. Even in a now-empty house that officially belongs to the Japanese, Jim still rides his bicycle and eats in the dining room, trying to act as if nothing much has happened. But the outside world and its chaos are inescapable, and Jim soon finds himself in the company of an amoral, cynical smuggler named Basie, played by John Malkovich in an efficiently droll, smug performance that recalls Robert Mitchum’s devil-may-care roguish anti-heroes.  After making the mistake of visiting his house again when it has been taken over by practicing Japanese soldiers, they all find themselves in an internment camp. This is the heart of the film.

 

Basie is effectively a cross between J. J. Sefton from “Stalag 17” and a less-romanticized Han Solo, a rugged individualist put in a position where his “survival at all costs” attitude seems indeed very justified. Yet he seems to have a soft spot for Jim. Perhaps he admires the boy’s resourcefulness and refusal to give up, or maybe he simply finds good use for his small stature and speed. Indeed, Jim quickly becomes the camp’s equivalent of Red from “The Shawshank Redemption”, the go-to boy for finding and trading stuff. Basie acts as a father figure of sorts, in that he teaches Jim how to survive and make the best of his bad situation. The camp’s father figure is Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers), Basie’s opposite number of sorts: His education is similarly practical – he teaches Jim Japanese – but also more human, as he tries to counter Basie’s influence. In a key scene, Jim tries to help him perform CPR on a dying woman but only succeeds in bringing blood back to her brain for one second. Rawlins has to pull him off to convince him when to stop.

 

I have said that the internment camp is where the film’s heart is. It is true both in that it contains the film’s greatest strengths as well as its greatest weaknesses. Said weaknesses are mostly due to a large amount of cuts made to the film, which are particularly obvious here: Robert Stephens’ face appears for one shot, in which Jim wakes up at the camp under his observance. He is never seen again. Miranda Richardson plays Mrs. Victor, with whom Jim becomes acquainted, but her character drifts in and out of the film, giving the impression of playing a larger role in an uncut, longer version of the film that might be lying in a vault somewhere.

 

The film’s greatest strength lies without a doubt in Christian Bale, whose performance is simply one of the best I’ve ever seen given by a child in a film. He carries the film almost singlehandedly, with a rare earnestness that humbles most of his adult costars. Like Jim, he is constantly on the move, his eyes always focused. He helps turn some of the script’s worse lines good, particularly an early conversation with his father about God being in our dreams and unnecessary lines meant to bring more emotion out of a scene where the mere actions are enough. The film is it at its best when Bale and Spielberg’s camera work in harmony to communicate his sense of wonder even at the darkest of times, such as the extraordinary air raid scene, in which Jim climbs to the top of a building to gaze at the planes and the destruction they bring, before collapsing in the arms of an alarmed Dr. Rawlins to reveal that he cannot remember what his parents look like.

 

 

The film’s most famous scene is without doubt Jim singing the Welsh lullaby “Suo Gan” when witnessing a pre-flight kamikaze ceremony. A scene so deeply moving it transcends the moral problem it presents with a western protagonist serenading enemy pilots (could we imagine a similar scene today, in which a western hostage of jihadists would serenade suicide bombers about to carry out a terrorist attack?). The song beautifully underscores the tragic absurdity of the fighters’ suicidal ideology. The shared love of planes comes in play again: It is something he and the enemy share, and that is present through much of the film, notably in the distant friendship Jim strikes up with a young kamikaze. Perhaps the message, that a shared passion can overcome war rivalries, is a bit naïve but it is effectively conveyed. Spielberg would later use it in a grimmer, more pessimistic and bittersweet way in “Saving Private Ryan” with the character of the German soldier who loves “Steamboat Willie” and whom Jeremy Davies gets spared, only to shoot him dead at the end when he finds him back in action.

 

Another beautiful and morally complex scene comes in later, though it is undermined by the aforementioned cuts made to the film: As the war nears its end and the camp is evacuated, the detainees come to a stadium filled with stolen & forgotten property, including the Grahams’ old family car – a very oneiric image. Most detainees leave, but Jim chooses to remain by the dying Mrs. Victor’s side As she expires, the Hiroshima bomb is dropped miles away in a beautiful flash of light. The juxtaposition of a personal, close death and the deaths of thousands never seen would have carried more weight had we gotten to know Mrs. Victor better. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Nevertheless, the close-up shots of Christian Bale’s face keep the scene beautiful. Which is why it is morally complex: Can it be right to make the unseen deaths of so many people beautiful?

 

But I have gone on and on describing the film, and yet I still feel I have not done it proper justice. Is it one of Steven Spielberg’s best? Perhaps not. It’s obvious cuts make it feel incomplete, like a land with unexplored patches. Yet it is precisely its incompletion that give it a staying power. Perhaps it could be best described by the expression of Spielberg’s mentor and other great child director François Truffaut, a “great sick film”. If nothing else, see it for Christian Bale’s outstanding performance. Why it wasn’t nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the 60^th Academy Awards is beyond me.