I wasn't going to review "The Impossible," Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona's fictionalized account of one of the worst tsunami disasters in history and the rich white people with accents who take up most of the screen time. While I was curious to see the film, largely because I wanted to see Ewan McGregor run around half-naked, dirty, streaked with blood and sporting a posh haircut, I kept putting it off until I was too depressed to stay at home any longer, and drove to Pasadena and saw the Sunday, 10:20pm showing, alone, with three other people scattered throughout the theatre. That part was awesome. Then I had to watch the movie.
(Okay. I give my mea culpas regarding the glib opening paragraph, riddled as it is with cheap shots. Let's get serious.)
"The Impossible," written by Sergio G Sanchez from a story by Maria Belon, is a conventional film, but it is an excellent Exhibit A for discussing cinema and its relationship to realism, narrative and audience expectation. While viewing "The Impossible," I know for a fact that this is the product of a photographic age; its camera takes me to places never travelled, enables me to see from different vantage points, and permits me to move from one person's experience to another's in a completely different setting.
A text about a disaster provides a superb opportunity to compare and contrast different forms, and what may be represented about the disaster in those different forms. For example, the Broadway musical Titanic enabled an audience to watch a proscenium stage lift to a dangerously raked level, but that was about it. The musical depended upon story, character, song and libretto to bring the disaster to "life." In other words, verbal imagery carried the responsibility of conveying the magnitude of the loss, and, for many theatregoers and Tony award voters, it was a success. However, as an opportunity for vicarious experience, James Cameron's 1997 film (also called Titanic) trumped the play. The cinematography lead viewers on to the ship, hanging from the stern rail, jumping into lifeboats, sinking down, down, down into the icy Atlantic, even below the surface. Of course, Cameron's movie featured, and required, plot, character and dialog (if not show tunes), but it could have been a silent movie and been as compelling a record of life during disaster. (I will not make the obvious joke that it should have been a silent movie, sparing us all Celine Dion. The joke makes itself.) A play maintains a distance between audience and action; a movie can dissolve the "feeling" of distance, if not the actual distance itself. Due to the psychological trick called "suspension of disbelief," a text can create a sense of "You Are There" for a viewer, provided that the quality of the cinematic elements-mise en scene, photography, editing and narrative-work together to sustain the illusion of lived, as opposed to witnessed, experience.
As realism, "The Impossible" triumphs at virtually every turn. (I will confess to a slight skepticism, if not outright disbelief, during the high angle, overhead shots as the tsunami swept over an area of several miles. It did look like a miniature, model town, perfect for Smurfs if not Barbies.)
Had Bayona's film remained a recreation of a tragic disaster, it would have remained pure cinema, a testament to the artistry possible within realism. For better or worse, however, "The Impossible" is an example of narrative cinema, and it accepts the conventions of narrative in order to achieve an expected outcome in capitalist film fictions: the audience must leave the theatre with a happy ending, some resolution of a conflict in order to feel satisfied, and the resolution should be congruent with the expectations built into their daily lives. Family may fight, but family remains strong. Vacations may be problematic, but it's good to go on vacation, preferably someplace cheap but far away. In narrative cinema, a world may end, but the world does not end, as the status quo continues without serious challenge. Without such a reassuring conclusion, a film guarantees its financial failure in the capitalist market. (Of course, one could argue that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) violated that expectation by killing off its heroine, played by Janet Leigh, within the first hour of the film. The rebuttal to that argument consists of the survival of the heroine's lover and older sister, and, more importantly, the containment of the conflict through the incarceration of the murderer; law and order prevails, preventing a disruption of the status quo threatened by the film's first hour.)
In the case of "The Impossible," a family, one family, is the center of the film, not the tsunami itself. The movie asks us never to consider the meteorological origin of the natural disaster: it simply exists, and is either survived or not. What qualifies Bayona's film as "movie," that is, narrative cinema, is its focus on the unity of a family. Therefore, the film begins with the family in crisis. The father worries that the house alarm was not turned on, therefore laying his home to the threat of invasion by outsiders. He also worries that he might lose his job, threatening his family's financial security. His wife's willingness to return to her old job (as a doctor, no less) does not ease the conflict embedded in the drama. Furthermore, the oldest of their three sons is acting out as adolescents do, asserting his independence from the others, distancing himself from his younger brothers, to the concern of the parents. Their plane touches down, and they arrive on Fantasy Island, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. As they did on the plane, the family occupies center stage, with the Thai hotel clerks and anonymous and mostly Anglo tourists as the dance ensemble. At this point, the film could be a play with no problem. The family frolics around the hotel pool in their bathing suits, kicking a ball, writing in a journal, basking in the sun, and we watch this tableau from a safe distance.
Then...out of NOWHERE...comes this big, fat, enormous, scary WAVE! and, for the next ten minutes, we are literally swept away. Those ten or so minutes, reprised if re-imagined much later on in the film, are film moments par excellence. As we watch Naomi Watts and Tom Holland (as mother and oldest son, respectively) whirl around automobiles, buildings, dead bodies and sewage (raw or otherwise), we are as close as we ever would want to be to a natural disaster of that proportion. The tight close ups and fluid (pun intended) tracking bring us up against Watts as she speeds into broken tree branches that stab and impale her, and we are breathless with anticipation: will this end? will this end well? will she survive? (Thanks to Janet Leigh, no one can be certain of a star's lifespan in a full-length movie.) There is a built-in moment of suspense when Watts and Holland grab on to a mattress, reach out a hand, almost touch the other's hand, then are yanked away by the currents of nature, and the violence continues for another few minutes. As breathtaking this sequence might be, it is not the entire film, and soon, it must end, and the "real movie" must begin.
As I have established, the family is in conflict from the opening frames of the film; their status as nuclear family is threatened. Suddenly, what seems to be a "real" conflict, the tsunami, has invaded their plot, but it soon becomes clear that the tsunami, as real a conflict as it was to the hundreds of thousands of casualties and their loved ones, is but a trope. The wave "stands for" the economic and hormonal threat to the McGregor-Watts brood, and, instead of a home break-in or a job layoff, the tsunami has split the family apart. The rest of the film dwells on one question: will they reunite or not?
Granted, the filmmakers and actors perform theatrical magic as they take the viewers through the often heartbreaking and sickening journeys of the characters. Pathos haunts the atmosphere as the oldest son is abandoned by his bedridden mother; despair hovers as father gets lost after he sends the two younger boys off to a rescue camp. I hesitate to go into much detail, as audience suspense, and the element of surprise, inform the conventions of narrative cinema, particularly those of the genre of domestic melodrama. One thing is clear, though. In order to succeed, someone must survive the tidal wave, but, preferably, everybody survives.
"The Impossible," obviously, operates on two levels of realism: the realism of the tsunami re-created in all of its turgid splendor, and the realism of the bourgeois domestic narrative. The latter's realism is one part wish fulfillment and one part affirmation of an ideology perpetuated by a capitalist society. It is no coincidence that this film is "based on a true story" of one family's experience with the tsunami, that the "true" family in question was actually of Spanish origin and therefore had more in common with the islander population that was largely devastated by the tsunami, but, in order for the film to be made for a commercial market, the family had to be cast as vaguely English language speaking but firmly anti-Third World. (I say "vaguely" because McGregor is Scottish, Watts is British-Australian and their fictional family resides in Japan. When Watts, before the disaster, expresses a desire to move back "home," one is never sure where that might be: Sydney? Edinburgh? London? Hollywood?) Many critics have complained about the dearth of non-white characters in "The Impossible," and that the natives remain largely set decoration for the pandemonium disrupting Anglo lives and limbs. I would prefer not to repeat that criticism, as it has been said before, and well, by others. What needs to be said, though, is that audience sympathy depends upon familiarity, not just the suspension of disbelief. With familiarity comes identification, and therefore sympathy. This is what film has in common with theatre, and, to a certain extent, fiction: there are leads, and there are supporting players. The audience gets a chance at familiarity with the leads, because they get to journey along with them. The others remain strangers, however kind hearted they are. The Bennett family (aka the McGregor-Watts family) happens to be affluent and pale skinned, as well as the occupants of 92.9% of the screen time. By default, everyone else is reduced to a walk on, and by "everyone" I refer specifically to the non-white population. (Even the choice cameos are given to the pasty-faced: Geraldine Chaplin makes a splendid comeback to the screen in a lovely scene with the two little boys, and a decidedly hot French guy with a cell phone and a bad leg limps his way to our hearts.)
How the tsunami-ravaged island survived its own economic disaster remains unspoken in the film, but it is obvious that a reunion of the family virtually guarantees their financial security if they manage to fly away from trouble and back to the paradise of homeland.
Here are a few observations. Watts and Holland give powerful performances, and awards might be possible, if not hoped for. McGregor does well with his role and his lack of clothing, and is brilliant in one scene while talking to a cell phone. (McGregor, who hit big with Trainspotting, has a "beta" personality, and has established a decent career opposite strong women such as Jane Horrocks in Little Voice and Watts in this film, not to mention those latter-day Star Wars sequels.) The script, editing and music are clearly manipulating the viewers's emotions, with an occasional payoff for the sentimentally inclined. The director demonstrates firm control of mood and mise en scene.
"The Impossible," like the better docu-dramas, might serve as incentive for further historical research, and viewers might learn more about the people who didn't get a chance to board a plane away from the wave-ravaged land.
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