Because of a heavy work schedule and other
distractions, I only made it to Pearl Harbor after the film had already been in
release for several weeks. About the best thing I can say about this typically
pumped-up-to-the-max saga produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who seems to have found
the director of his dreams in Michael Bay, is that it turns out not to be as bad
as I had feared it would be, considering some of the heavy shrapnel it took from
the critics.
Anyone who has no problems with the worst
military disaster in American history being reduced to the dimensions of Armageddon, which itself reduced the end of the world to the dimensions of a
cheap serial, would have no problems liking Pearl
Harbor. In fact, I would have
been really astonished if Michael Bay had suddenly developed an interest in
psychological drama. I certainly didn't expect to see Wong Kar-Way's In the Mood for
Love--or, for that
matter, even Fred Zinnemann's skillful adaptation of James Jones's novel From Here to Eternity
(1953), whose action culminates in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Great
historical events have resonances capable of lasting for centuries. Years ago, I
shocked an acquaintance who was an executive at United Artists by praising The
Battle of Britain, which had just been presented at the San Francisco Film
Festival. In retrospect, I certainly think I overrated the film, although it was
a good example of a solidly produced British movie, with able direction by Guy
Hamilton, good performances--including Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief
Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding--and a brilliant job of cinematography by Freddie
Young.
Nevertheless, I think it was the
story of the heroic defense of England by the RAF that influenced my judgment.
In the same way, the event of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Air
Force in 1941 looms large behind the movie Pearl
Harbor, however inadequate the
movie might be as a depiction of that event. I have gone into Pearl Harbor on
ships of the United States Navy several times, and the experience can only be a
very affecting one, even for a person like myself who has never served in the
Armed Forces.
However, Bay and his
screenwriter, Randall Wallace, have in good Hollywood fashion packaged the story
of the Japanese attack and its aftermath with a highly forgettable melodrama
about two fliers who have been buddies since their childhood in Tennessee, Rafe
McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), and who both fall in
love with the same Navy nurse, Evelyn Stewart (Kate Beckinsale). Early in the
film McCawley goes off to England to fight as a volunteer. When he is shot down
in action, he is presumed dead by everyone--including Evelyn.
In
the meantime, the presiding deity of scenarists has providentially arranged for
her to meet Walker in Hawaii. He offers her a shoulder to cry on; she offers her
virginity which the noble Rafe had left intact on the eve of his departure from
Europe. (Did Bay and Wallace get their idea of American sexual mores in the
period from reading the Production Code?) The plot predictably thickens when
McCawley rises alive from the waters of the English Channel and makes his way to
Hawaii on the eve of the bombing, just in time to nobly deck Walker in a barroom
brawl.
A
relationship like this is a classic Howard Hawks subject--I'm particularly
thinking of the Gary Cooper-Robert Young-Joan Crawford triangle in Today We Live
(1933)--but Bay no more has the ability to explore the nuances of an unwritten
masculine code that can have a far more binding force than that of positive law than
he has the ability to remake Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin. But this attempt to
revive the spirit of movies past is just as awkward and ineffective as is the often
mawkish use of Technicolor® to convey the image of 1940s America.
Although
I hardly have conventional tastes in movies, Pearl Harbor inadvertently makes a
good case for old-fashioned linear narrative. Bay's strategy in making a motion
picture is to go off in every direction at once. His inability to
simply follow a straightforward piece of action was already evident in the the
sequence in which Rafe's plane is shot down, but it achieves dire proportions
with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Where Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger (in In
Harm's Way) managed to condense the event into something like ten coherent
minutes of screen time, Bay seems to truly prolong it from here to
eternity--all to no good purpose.
Moreover,
there is a complete lack of distance in the movie. Everything
has to be viewed as closely as possible, a procedure exemplified by a bravura
CGI shot in which the camera follows a descending Japanese bomb right down to
the deck of a ship as it explodes. The director's idea of how to
generate empathy is to hurl the audience into the middle of the action. If it
had not been coined for other ends, the term "pathetic
fallacy" might be used to characterize the movies of Michael
Bay. His idea of how to communicate the chaos of the attack on Pearl Harbor is
simply to make a chaotic motion picture. The brilliantly staged scenes of the
attack on the Vietnamese village in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse
Now Redux, if they served no other purpose in being revived,
should serve to show up Pearl Harbor for the woeful excuse for a movie
that it is.
Affleck, Hartnett, and
Beckinsale are reasonably innocuous in their respective roles, but I would
hardly described what they're engaged in as acting--they're more like highly
paid fashion models doing an ad in 1940s military drag. Yet, surprisingly
enough, Pearl Harbor includes two quite solid performances: by John
Voight as President Roosevelt, and by Alec Baldwin as General James Doolittle.
In fact, for me, the best moment in the entire film
occurred when FDR--at a meeting with his advisors after they tell him a
bombing raid on Japan is out of the question--insists on standing up
unassisted to emphasize his resolve. The scene is very well staged,
and Voight is the one participant in Pearl Harbor likely to get an
Oscar® nomination for his work.
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E-mail Dave:
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