Film Review: “Unbroken”

Aside from the obvious, universally known classics, now and
then a particular book or movie qualifies as a necessary work, something not
only entertaining but instructive, a useful addition to the culture’s knowledge
of the world and itself. Although her “Seabiscuit,”
which suggested that a racehorse led America out of the Great Depression,
succeeded both in print and on film, Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” achieved a
greater literary success, and the picture it inspired tells a far more
compelling and important story.

Directed by
Angelina Jolie, the movie deals with some of the same material as “The Bridge
on the River Kwai,” “King Rat,” and most recently,
“The Railway Man,” the plight of World War II Allied POWs in Japanese prison
camps. The astonishing epic of extraordinary suffering and more extraordinary
courage confirms the truth of Mark Twain’s dictum that life is indeed stranger
than fiction, because life has no need to be probable.

The hero —
and for once, the word is appropriate — is Louis Zamperini
(Jack O’Connell), who served as a bombardier on a B-24 in the Pacific. Growing
up in California, young Louis was something of a juvenile delinquent,
distressing his immigrant parents with his record of fighting, drinking,
smoking, and petty thievery. The picture shows his transformation into a high
school distance runner who sets a national record for the mile and eventually
wins a place on the Olympic team that competed in Germany in 1936.

Zamperini’s past periodically enters the film’s present in
a series of relevant flashbacks that reveal his determination and tenacity,
qualities that emerge in the most extreme circumstances. The first of those occurs
when his barely airworthy plane crashes into the ocean, where he and a fellow
crew member survive heat, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, sharks, and a strafing
for 47 days, only to be capture by a Japanese ship, which takes them to Japan,
initiating a prolonged ordeal of imprisonment.

In the
prison camp, the men perform hard labor, all the while undergoing a constant
series of insults, humiliation, and above all, torture. Apparently because of his
athletic prowess, the commandant, whom the captives call The Bird (Takamasa Ishihara) for his erratic behavior, singles out Zamperini for special treatment. The Bird hopes to break
his prisoner in body and spirit, subjecting him to endless beatings, punishing
him for imagined disobedience and even for obedience, devising new ways to
exercise his power and inflict suffering on his helpless, undernourished,
weakened captive.

As the title suggests, Louis Zamperini refused to break, drawing on incredible reserves
of courage to withstand the brutality and maintain some sense of personal
integrity. He recalls the lessons of his youth, his determination to succeed on
the track, the devotion of his family, his duty to his country and his
comrades; mostly however, the extraordinary will he discovers in himself
sustains him over two years of endless, excruciating pain.

Despite its
length and the large cast, the picture really concentrates on only two men, the
protagonist, Zamperini, and the his antagonist, The
Bird. Jack O’Connell performs adequately as Zamperini,
but rarely displays even a hint of variation in his character’s actions and
reactions; his weak whispery voice serves him poorly except in those moments
when he recalls his family and his past, and displays the weakness he overcomes
to remain unbroken. As The Bird, Takamasa Ishihara’s
pretty, boyish face and precise diction contrast nicely with his psychotic
cruelty, which the book shows much more fully than the film.

Because it
essentially settles into the prolonged conflict between the two men, “Unbroken”
lacks the context of its protagonist’s situation, showing almost nothing of the
prisoners’ days and nights, the ways they found to cope with an intolerable
situation. The repetition of the torture, though entirely valid, grows
increasingly difficult to bear; oddly the scenes of Zamperini
and his crew inside their airplane under fire provide as much intensity and convication as anything in the film, no matter how true.

In the final
scenes, the script summarizes the events that followed the victory over Japan
and the fate of the two men. Named a war criminal, The Bird hid for years until
the United States granted amnesty to all the torturers “in the interest of good
relations.” Some archival footage shows Louis Zamperini
at the age of 80, back in Japan, an honorary member of the United States
Olympic team, running joyfully through the streets with his teammates: unbroken
indeed.

This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2014.