This movie
taught me a few valuable lessons, especially after listening to director David
Fincher’s commentary track. I love mysteries, especially the classics that are old fashioned, linear, following a
detective uncovering clues to crimes as they occur or those of the cold case
variety. A rich and powerful family concealing their dirty secrets. Scenes are
salted with juicy suspects, and there is an enormous amount of exposition
required in order to be fair to the viewer so that we experience what the
detective does.
The genre
is more difficult to carry off than a straight thriller, in which we share the
culprit’s point of view as well, and the tension comes not from anticipating a
whodunit reveal, but in the hero vs antihero chase. The viewer need not think
too much to figure things out; just sit back and veg out while the bodies pile
up.
The straight
mystery genre has retreated in recent years because filmmakers have no
confidence that audiences have patience or willingness to concentrate long
enough to solve complex puzzles. The genre includes long periods of relative inaction,
which the best filmmakers used to fill with character and something called “suspense.”
But today’s
action films jettison suspense and resort to characters derived from comics and
video games whose traits are so familiar, there is no need to develop them
further. The only mystery left is how many henchmen are going to be wasted on
route to the violent CGI laced climax.
The mystery
genre has gone the way of the western and the musical comedy. It barely
survives on TV, in formula police procedurals and gimmicky quirky takeoffs of
the Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes models.
Added to
those hurdles, Steven Zallian’s script adapts the first of Stieg Larsson’s
Swedish best seller series of books which already had been translated into many
languages, including English, and also made into a hit film in Swedish. The
book and film was much admired and the solution of the mystery had been widely
told. The lead characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomqvist, had already
become “iconic” characters and were repeated in Larsson’s sequels.
So Fincher
had many problems to solve.
He doesn’t
solve all the problems. In fact, he adds another one. The casting of Stellan
Skaarsgard (Ronin) as one of the suspects was a problem for my enjoyment of the
mystery. He is too important an actor to be a minor character. This is a clue
that any devotee of the film genre should see. I was able to discern quickly
that he was the killer.
The Harriet
mystery runs up against a similar problem. Harriet is presumed to be dead and
we are told that the aim is to find out who killed her. But she disappeared
forty years ago, and no body was ever found. In this genre this always raises
the probability that we are being deceived: she is not dead, but is one of the
other characters and that other secrets are beneath the disappearance.
A third problem lies in the need to
make the plot relevant to today’s concerns. Sexual abuse (all abuse but
particularly, of girls or women) is a popular cliché of modern crime films. Sex
perverts / serial killers are also rampant in today’s mystery-thrillers. The
character of Lisbeth is iconic because of her attraction as a sort of superhero
to girls and women. She is damaged as a victim of incestuous sex abuse and we
know, while watching her suffer additional abuse, that she is going to have her
revenge.
We know
more about her than any other character and she is an extreme symbol for
empowered young adult females and a warning to anyone who isn’t. At 12, she
killed her tormenting father and since, has been a ward of the courts until, at
23, she has become a far more complex character. She is “different” looking –
punkish, gothy, facial piercings, and of course tattoos.
She wears
her anti-social almost autistic attitude with a brooding arrogance that
teenagers adore. She is intelligent, gifted with a photographic memory, and
techno-hip nerd genius who can hack into any computer or security system to
gain access to data she needs to solve the case. Of course she hates authority,
macho males, judgmental adults.
She is
bisexual but defensive, closed off emotionally, and fiercelt private. She has a
tenacity borne of rage and obsession about justice and retribution. This makes
her a worthy heir of the Sherlock Holmes brand of sleuth.
Salander’s
character is so fully formed and fascinating that the other characters are mere
sketches. Even Blomqvist, played by Daniel Craig, a male actor with great presence,
is almost reduced to a sidekick, who must be saved by her. This in itself is
something of a breakthrough in fiction.
The “damsel
in distress” is no more. GONE GIRL took the femme fatale to another level.
DRAGON TATTOO now eliminates the manic pixie dream girl.
As in
Batman, there is not enough oxygen for Commissioner Gordon or anyone else to
fascinate viewers. The best superheroes face a supervillain. Batman has The
Joker and Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger showed important that was.
A problem
with the sort of superhero who is supposed to be existing in a real world —
rather than a Gotham or Metropolis — is that real world crimes like sexual
abuse are too real. These predators are not trying to take over the world like
a Bond villain. They do not come from other galaxies or times or mythologies.
They are not foreign terrorists with beady eyes.
In real
life, the abusers may be our priests, bosses, teachers, neighbors, or even
close nurturing loved ones we trust and need.
Batman
trumped Superman by acknowledging his dark side in seeking vengeance rather
than the lukewarm ideals of “truth, justice, and the American way.” Now, Liam
Neeson (TAKEN) kills the abductors of his daughter. He is the follower of Clint
Eastwood (DIRTY HARRY) and Charles Bronson (DEATH WISH). These also spawned
movie franchises that traded on the populist revulsion with violent predatory
criminals that dominated the law and order demands the 1970’s and 80’s and
continue to provide answers to such fears and wishes. Salander satisfies the modern audience’s lust
for revenge against male victimizers of women.
One reason
for the popularity of these revenge movies is the widespread belief that justice
is denied in the real world. Media saturation assures us that our justice
system can’t prevent or punish these predators. This is not a new phenomenon.
The gangster movies of the 1930’s were “torn from headlines” about real life
criminals like “Scarface” Al Capone, Bonny and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face
Nelson.
Villains of
literature often represent current social nightmares. Grimm’s tales codified
the fears of town dwellers about dangers lurking in the forests. Victims of the
early flickers were often the familiar ones of stage melodramas, landlords who
held the mortgage and leered at the maiden with an offer to save her family by
yielding to his lust.
Immigrants
who lived in crowded tenements and others who were moving from the country to
the city found plenty of other predators there. The rich, the powerful, the
reckless playboys, the factory foreman; all were sources of villainy that the
moving pictures exposed as sexual predators.
In the
early 30’s, the era known as “pre-code,” the early talkies revealed a new kind
of woman, one who overcame the label of victim by using her sexuality to survive
and even to dominate her would-be predators.
UNBROKEN
After so
many recent movies that revel in the violent pleasure of serving the cold dish
of revenge, it would seem that a film that prizes forgiveness of even the most
heinous crimes might be refreshing and uplifting.
But, sorry,
not this one.
As I
watched it, I knew I was being led into hatred of the villains (particularly
the lead villain (Corporal Watanabe), and now, after being told to forgive, I
do not feel redeemed. Rather, I admit to resenting being deprived of the
satisfaction that the revenge films accords. But I don’t feel guilty about that
feeling in this particular case and I’ll explain why.
Unbroken is an Angelina Jolie directed
film of the Laura Hillenbrand best seller about Louis Zamperini, the
Italian-American 1936 Olympic runner, B-24 bombadier, survivor of 47 days on a
life raft and two plus years as a POW in Japan.
Eschewing
the usual disclaimers (“based on” . . . etc.), Jolie opts for a bold claim
that it is “A true story” - period - as her preface. My research suggests that the phrase is
accurate . . . as far as it goes.
She shows the details of his ordeal at sea in vivid detail, which is
disturbing and impressive as a document of the man’s will to live. But that is
merely a first act to his sternest test: the years of his captivity, including
unending sadistic abuse and mistreatment by Corporal Watanabe, the evil camp commandant
who wants to break him. The
dramatization ends with the liberation at the war’s end, and Zamperini’s
welcome home to his family.
The
character traits that allowed him to survive are laid out clearly enough in
flashbacks to his youth. A child who is naturally stubborn, introverted, and
contrary, he fights bigoted school boys and is on the way to reform school
until his older brother convinces him to try the track team. To impress girls,
Luis agrees, and then finds he has a talent for long distance running. His
brother adds the element of discipline by pushing him to levels beyond his
apparent limits.
His running
style is a metaphor for his character, or at least good training for his coming
crises: to come from behind in distance races after his opponents have
exhausted themselves. He is able to draw upon a reservoir of strength to endure
tremendous pain.
In the
prison camp, he is given another key piece of wisdom. When he expresses his
hatred for the tormenting Japanese sadist and desire to kill him even if he
would be executed for it, a fellow prisoner tells him that his job is to
survive; that will be your victory, your revenge.
A brief
epilog tells (not shows) us that after the war he became a Christian and turned
from revenge to forgiveness. It shows the real man at age 80 running in a race
in Japan. He lived well into his 90’s. We are told (not shown) that Watanabe
escaped punishment by evading capture and then obtaining amnesty. We are informed that he refused to meet with
Zamperini later in life to accept his prisoner’s forgiveness. We are meant to
infer that his captor was the broken man.
My own
cursory research expands on these facts. While not controverting any of the
claimed “true facts,” the facts which were not included in the film include
some which might have challenged the intended theme and thus made a more
meaningful movie.
Apparently,
after the happy ending depicted in the movie, the courageous and mentally tough
Zamperini suffered from nightmares for many years, part of what we would now
call post traumatic stress. He survived that, too, by finding religious faith.
He became a part of Billy Graham’s Christian crusades, lecturing about his
ordeals. Through his conversion, he decided to forgive his tormentors in order
to find peace. He claimed that some of the prison guards he later met and
forgave became Christians as a result. He lived a long and useful life.
The epilog
of Watanabe’s journey, however, would not fit into such a nice Hollywood
ending. He was interviewed later in life, when Zamperini’s story was being told
to the next generation in Japan. Like the Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele,
Watanabe had come from a wealthy family. After years in hiding, he had become
respectable, wealthy, comfortable.
When
interviewed in the mid 1990’s, he was unrepentant about the harshness of his
treatment of American prisoners, asserting his mantra that they were enemies of
Japan and deserved no better. He owed no apology and did not seek forgiveness. He
thus justified his cruelty and denied any sense of defeat.
I think
that might have made a better story. Certainly, it is one that would have
elicited more interest — for me, at least. I have been fascinated by stories
involving the frustrating search for Nazi war criminals to prosecute. I hate
the fact that leaders of nations and churches abetted the crimes, concealed the
criminals, and conspired to deny justice to victims and escaped even societal censure.
They not only survived. They went on as if nothing happened, while their
victims lived with the nightmares and sense of guilt that the criminals never
faced.
I am
appalled by the arguments that excuse those who committed such heinous crimes
as soldiers following orders. I don’t understand how amnesty can apply to such
crimes or how a statute of limitations can estop prosecution for murders of
hundreds, thousands, or millions, when it there is no limitation in law for
punishing a murderer of one person.
I spent a lifetime
defending accused murderers and specialized in finding arguments against
executing them as punishment for their crimes. Yet, I never argued as a matter
of principle or morality that no person ever deserved to die for crimes. The
issue for me always depends on the individual, the motives, the procedure for
finding the truth, the rules and evidence and fairness of the system devised to
make the decision.
One
self-truth I have to admit is that I am Jewish. The Holocaust is very personal
to me. When I am forced to see the proof of the worst crimes ever perpetrated,
I cannot deny that those responsible — and I mean ALL of those responsible —
should be prosecuted and punished by their execution.
The purpose
is not revenge, not a biblical notion of an eye for an eye, or as a matter of
lynching from hatred and rage. My purpose would not be as a deterrence. It is
really a simple matter of justice.
And so I
would not forgive Sargent Watanabe. Even if forgiving him provides closure for
his victim and even if giving him amnesty serves the purpose of Japanese –
American politics. Not even if he did express remorse. To me, his crimes are
unforgivable and civilization should demand that he forfeit his right to exist.
