Unbroken: Of Breaking Promises

     Two stars.
     If I had not read the book, I would have rated Unbroken higher. The problems with this film are two-fold, one practical, the other Hollywood's unfamiliarity with spiritual matters.
     As for the practical problem: There is simply too much story for a feature film, and thus Jolie and her screenwriters, including the gifted Coen brothers, predictably focus on the action elements: the Olympics, the air battles, the castaways, the prisoners of war.
    The spiritual matters problem is the greater one and dovetails with the first: Apparently, because of the time constraint, the thread which holds Louis Zamperini's story together -- that of his hard-fought spiritual redemption -- is handled with a series of text cards at the end of the movie.
     A storyteller's first duty is to theme, not story. In fiction, anything goes so long as the events advance the theme. In non-fiction, however, the facts which illuminate the theme are disrespected at the filmmaker's peril.
     The theme of Zamperini's life is his spiritual journey, not his physical one. Thus, Louie's adventures in the War merely serve to put him on a spiritual path, and the most powerful moment in the book -- in which he floats in an otherworldly calm sea where he has a spiritual epiphany about the beauty of creation and his place in it and then makes a solemn promise to God that he will never forget Him -- is the key moment upon which Louie's spiritual theme turns and it begs the question of his entire life: Will he keep his promise?
     The events that follow are important only to the extent that they advance this theme. Unfortunately, the greatest test of Louie's life was not being tortured at the hands of a sadist in a Japanese POW camp; it was him forgetting his promise to God after the War, when life was relatively easy. Zamperini's basic toughness and resilience voiced in this oft-repeated refrain, "If you can take it, you can make it," served him well during the difficulties he faced adrift on the ocean or imprisoned as a POW, but after the War, his physical strength could not keep him on his spiritual path. He descended into alcoholism, abuse of his family, and foundered in a Sargasso Sea of directionless despair. And when he finally gave into his wife's patient entreaties and attended a Billy Graham revival, he put up his greatest fight yet, resisting God's still, small voice.
     Yet when he finally hit bottom and finally opened his heart, Louie received God's strength and finally got back on his path and fulfilled the theme of his life.
      I wish that portion of Louis's journey had been in the film. It would have powerfully demonstrated a fact of which we're all aware: that a man's greatest strength is not holding a railroad tie over his head for a half-hour on pain of death. It's having the courage and resolve to find God  and, once found, learn His will for our lives and do our part and keep our promises to Him.
     That these crucial elements of Zamperini's story were glossed over is why Unbroken, while a fine film, will not be a classic like A Man for all Seasons or The Mission or It's a Wonderful Life.
     All in all, however, given the enthusiastic atheism of director Jolie and her screenwriters, the film is nevertheless fairly faithful to the source material... up to a point. And that is the point: they forgot the theme and focused instead on the story.
     But the air battle sequences are astonishing.

The Iron Lady: Rust from the Inside Out

If it seems strange to make a film about someone you hate and then give the movie the respectful tag line "NEVER COMPROMISE," you're right. It is strange.

But that's Hollywood: torn between the basic economics of filmmaking (you need to coax the great unwashed to voluntarily pay to watch your movie) and your own "artistic" mores (you live in an echo chamber populated with people exactly like yourself: uneducated, overpaid, frightfully inexperienced men-children who, like all adolescents, are still angry at their parents (read: society's grown-ups) for making them eat their broccoli.) I don't fear a nuclear Iran as much as I do a teenager who's just been denied the car who has his finger on the button.

So why make a movie about Margaret Thatcher at all? The facts (those damned, rascally things) all line up behind her: she turned the British economy around, reformed its health care system (lamentably reversed later), faced down overreaching unions, protected British citizens and property by going to war in the Falklands, and, along with a wise pope and a "cowboy" American president, tossed the Soviet Union on the "ash-heap of history."

Now how are you gonna hammer an authority monger (she looks like your mean 9th grade English teacher, doesn't she?) who's been proven right time after time?

You use a theatrical flashback device to put it all in "perspective." Instead of just simply following her through her storied (and flat-out fascinating) eleven years at No. 10 Downing Street, why not view everything she ever did through the distorted lens of largely invented mental decline?

But don't stop there! Make her loving, uber-supportive husband, who had the misfortune to predecease her, into a sad buffoon who comes back from the dead to mock her and to gainsay the choices she made in life that he, when he was alive, fully supported, like, oh say, running for Parliament?

That's it! Now you've got the hang of it! What else can you do to diminish the second greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century?

I've got it! While you're spending precious minutes focusing on a fictional, distorted present, artfully gloss over the past: misplace a garbage strike by five years (hey, so what if Columbus sailed in 1492, who cares?), show her constantly at battle with her own party members (the same ones who voted their support for her year after year as PM), and, best of all, reduce her signal accomplishment to a long shot of her dancing with Ronald Reagan and a brief newsreel of the Berlin Wall toppling.

Margaret Thatcher was a prime mover in the freeing of almost 300 million people, not counting Britain.

That's 300,000,000, kids. If you piled 300,000,000 pennies one atop the other . . .

But let's just ignore that, shall we?

Here, I must give the obligatory hat tip to Meryl Streep's marvelous mimicry of Mrs. Thatcher. She is amazing, but would have been even more amazing had she had a script that allowed her to play the woman in her prime for more than a third of the movie. Not allowing Streep to stretch her considerable talents for a full 120 minutes as the Iron Lady she indisputably was and instead constricting her to heavy makeup and doddering about in her dreary flat arguing with her dead husband is simply shameful, not only to Margaret, but to Meryl.

But a ray of sunshine: At least I know now how they'll treat Ronald Reagan in his inevitable biopic. After all, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in his latter years. I can see it now: there will be a scene in which Reagan, after joking at a press conference (joking!) that "the bombing of the Soviet Union will begin in five minutes," will sit in the darkened Situation Room, surrounded by his generals, and his hand will tremble (early onset, you know) as he reaches out for a Dr. Strangelove nuke box with a huge, glowing red button on top, cackling evilly, his eyes wild with stupidity and hatred, ready to destroy the entire world, except . . .

. . . some Leftie general will prevent him and save the day. Call Woodstein, stat!

Count on it.

(And they'll wonder why we won't go see the movie.)

Paul: Alienating Religion

Paul is such a trifle, such a mindless mess, that it’s almost not worth parsing, except for the fact that its sins are so representative of Hollywood religion-bashing that they bear scrutiny.

The film itself is mildly funny, a comic take on Starman and E.T. Two British nerds attend ComiCon in SoCal and then hit the road to visit various extraterrestrial landmarks such as Area 51 and the Black Mailbox.

On the road, they encounter a pot-smoking, potty-mouth slacker alien named Paul, who crash-landed on earth in 1947. (Funny how aliens can negotiate interstellar space but always seem to crash-land here. Maybe they are smoking something up there.) Paul is a great missed comic opportunity. He could have been wry, subtle, insightful, and even genuinely funny. Instead he is coarse, profane, hedonistic, and shallow.

Oh, and he’s Jesus Christ if you get rid of all that moral ethos crap.

Heroes need foils, and the film casts about for a proper enemy. At first, it seems, it might be a comic version of “Keys” from E.T. or the SETI researcher from Starman. But the moment he appears onscreen, the Bible-thumping (yes, actually thumping, that’s how lazy the writers are) father of the young female love interest gives it all away. He’s a born-again, rifle-toting (a must, along with Bible-thumping), pick-up driving, drooling moron who is so threatened by the existence of Paul that he must kill him on sight.

Of course, none of the writers of this dreck has an even glancing understanding of “intelligent design,” the theory (yes, Virginia, they’re all theories, now, aren’t they?) that the world is the result of planning by superior beings. It’s fascinating that the people who refuse to believe in an alien who made the world nevertheless find it easy to believe in aliens who stop by to heal our seas and souls before returning home.

Paul’s very existence makes the young woman, suffering from birth with a defective eye, insane. She, like the writers who invented her, cannot possibly find middle ground between belief and atheism. Paul could not possibly be created by the same god who created us—he looks so different! When the Bible says we were made in God’s image, it means literal image, right? Well, if you haven’t set foot inside a church your entire life, I guess you’d think that.

All well and good; attack belief. But why Christian belief?  The answer is simple: Can you imagine replacing Christianity with Islam in the film? More to the point: would they have made a film about a bomb-toting, Koran-thumping father and his veiled, emotionally abused daughter?

Of course not.

And the reason they get away with libeling Christianity is that even though Christians make up more than 90% of America, unlike Islam, they are not prone to murdering those who offend them. So not only are the filmmakers uninformed, they’re also cowards.

When Paul predictably heals the young woman’s bad eye, we’re meant to draw a crayon line between him and Jesus, reducing Jesus to a punch line and elevating the healing powers of aliens—in which, ironically, the environmentalist left actually believe! Their god, the earth mother Gaia, will heal our wicked souls if we just choose paper instead of plastic.

Looked at this way, the religion of the left, statist/environmentalism, is far kookier than that of the right, Christianity has positively impacted hearts and lives for two thousand years, while its modern pagan alternative leaves its scattered, few adherents alienated, angry, bitter, and stupid.

Kind of the way they depict us.