Steven Spielberg (1987)

I first saw Empire of the Sun around 1991 (on VHS) and hadn’t seen it again until this month’s viewing at BFI.  Although it was among the handful of films I wrote a note on in the 1990s, I didn’t look at that until after the BFI screening.   My reaction is more negative now (as it was revisiting The Color Purple, Spielberg’s previous film, also after an interval of twenty-odd years).  But the following includes the original note (Take 1), as well as thoughts provoked by this second viewing (Take 2).

Take 1

 A common complaint about the film of a novel is that the picture lacks the novelist’s controlling voice and vision.  Even if you’ve not read the book, you may suspect this has happened in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation (with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard) of Empire of the Sun – J G Ballard’s semi-autobiographical story of an upper-class English boy, separated from his parents and surviving in an internment camp after the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1941.   The director’s voice and vision are clear and confident enough at the start, as Spielberg describes the British community’s relationship with their Chinese hosts and the impending breakdown of this bizarre colony.   The early sequences, shown from the point of view of the resourceful boy hero, Jim (Christian Bale), give the cinematography (by Allen Daviau) and editing (by Michael Kahn) an exciting vibrancy.  The first warning signs are in the protracted scene in which Jim is parted from his father and mother:  this episode, although vivid, is emotionally unconvincing.  It anticipates other bravura set pieces, which become increasingly hollow as the director’s grasp of the story slackens.

Spielberg wants continuous exciting incident.  As soon as Jim is in the internment camp, the action jumps forward to 1945 and this attenuates the central theme of how the boy’s exhausting exuberance develops into a physical and mental resilience that helps him survive the soul-destroying routine of captivity.  Once Spielberg’s work loses its psychological focus, the zest and clarity of his storytelling diminish too.  His fine track record with child actors is enhanced here:  the depth of thirteen-year-old Christian Bale’s characterisation is remarkable but this makes it more frustrating that the film gets nowhere near to conveying the complexity of Jim’s admiration for the Japanese, or how his imagination sustains him in the oppressive reality of the camp.  John Malkovich has some good, sly moments as the conman Basie, a fellow prisoner.  The cast also includes Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, Joe Pantoliano, Leslie Phillips and Robert Stephens but none of them really has a chance to register.  Rupert Frazer and Emily Richard, as Jim’s parents, register as merely dull.  John Williams’ score is too reminiscent of his music for ET.

Take 2

Empire of the Sun is strangled by Spielberg’s relentless attempts to make it epic.  Even in the absorbing opening to the film, nothing seems to occur naturally – as something the camera happened to record.  Everything looks placed on screen, designed to make a particular point:  the unaccountably ominous beggar at the corner of the avenue in which Jim’s family lives; the rooftop snipers in the centre of Shanghai – they are killed and their corpses dragged away, leaving symmetrical sweat marks on the concrete.  Spielberg inflates the images – each one has to be a technical achievement – but the high-pressure direction doesn’t yield expressiveness.  Jim and his parents go to a Christmas party for the British community:  it’s fancy dress and Jim wears a Sinbad outfit.  He wanders out into the grounds of the house where the party is taking place.  After sending his toy aeroplane into the air, he wanders further out, into the surrounding countryside, and is fascinated to discover the shell of a real aircraft.  He eventually reaches the crest of a hill and finds himself face to face with a company of Japanese soldiers.  The encounter is mutually astonishing – for the soldiers and the Caucasian Sinbad they behold – but Spielberg can’t make you feel the astonishment:  the composition sits inertly on the screen.  You can almost hear Spielberg’s sigh of relief as Jim walks back, in response to his father’s anxious calls, in the direction whence he came.  The director can then create a more conventional picture of the silent, sinister soldiers watching the boy’s retreat.

Something similar happens after Jim is separated from his parents and returns to the deserted family home, now with a ‘property of the Emperor of Japan’ sign on the front door.  The sequences that follow make clear that having the place to himself has its liberating as well as its frightening side.  Jim careers on his bicycle through the empty rooms.  He finds an unopened box of liqueur chocolates.  The latter discovery epitomises the dynamic shallowness of Spielberg’s approach.  Jim sets about the chocolates greedily in order to make the moment eye-catching.  It later transpires that he’s been self-controlled enough to keep some of the liqueurs, which he offers to others, as – well, sweeteners.  The bike is a bigger problem.  In combination with Jim’s love of flight and dreams of taking flight and certain phrases in John Williams’ score (which is often overblown), the vehicle gives the impression – problematic in the wartime setting – that Spielberg hasn’t quite got ET out of his system.

The recurring theme in his films of a child separated from one or both parents is obviously at the heart of Empire of the Sun yet its dramatisation lacks impact.  In the early stages, this is largely the result of the characterisation of Jim’s parents.  Rupert Frazer is merely wooden as the father.  Emily Richard is odder:  she gives the mother a streak of barely suppressed neuroticism; in her relatively relaxed moments, she’s remote.  There’s no exploration of either of these qualities or suggestion that Jim is affected by them.  At the business end of the film, groups of parents and children stand in an orphanage, face to face but a few feet apart, looking anxiously to recognise each other.  This is badly staged.  The children are evidently carrying out a directorial instruction to scan the adults opposite with desperately searching eyes and their eye movements are uniform.  When one mother eventually cries out to her daughter and breaks from the line of grown-ups to embrace her, the other parents follow suit – not as if this cry of recognition has pierced their self-control but as if, like the children, they’re doing as they’ve been told.

This was Spielberg’s first experience with a predominantly British cast.  He seems too ready for some of them to emulate the kind of acting – by the book, sometimes stiff, often hollow – familiar from David Lean epics.  (It was Lean, according to Richard Schickel’s 2012 study Spielberg: A Retrospective, ‘who first stirred Spielberg’s interest in Empire of the Sun’.)  Nigel Havers’ performance, as a medic internee, is a good example of this:  the doctor has his wild-eyed moments but the intensity switches on and off for just as long as the camera requires – or, rather, for not quite long enough to prevent you spotting the mechanism at work.  The force of that reliably superb character actor David Ryall – in a seconds-long cameo as a racist guest at the Christmas fancy-dress party – is colossal because its vivid reality contrasts so sharply with the unfelt playing of others.

Among the few Americans, John Malkovich was all the rage when this film was made and Spielberg overdoes the build-up for him:  in his early scenes, Malkovich’s face is kept partly, deliberately hidden from view.  Basie – a hustling merchant seaman whom Jim first runs into on the streets of Shanghai, before their time together in the detention camp – has a lot of lines:  you sometimes feel for no better reason than to show off Malkovich’s undoubted verbal dexterity.  It’s a little ironic, given Spielberg’s own natural preference for image rather than word, that the actor says most in a couple of Basie’s wordless, ambivalent looks at Jim.  Joe Pantoliano overdoes hectic desperation, as Basie’s loser sidekick Frank.  Ben Stiller, in what was only his second movie role, makes a strong impression as another American internee.

Empire of the Sun is, however, the story of Jim Graham and the actor playing him is asked to shoulder the burden of human interest throughout a film that runs 153 minutes.  Although he’s not a favourite of mine, it’s no surprise that Christian Bale has gone on to sustained success in Hollywood:  as Jim, he proves himself an exceptional young actor.  This isn’t a case of an inchoate child talent being educated (in the literal sense of the word) by a skilful director.  Nor is it an instance of a precociously competent kid doing the necessary, although Bale has the presence of a trained actor.  He goes further, especially in the early scenes – his Jim is persuasively eccentric and imaginatively searching.  Bale makes the audience sympathetic towards the intrepid, quick-witted boy as a personality.  He also – and more unusually – makes us interested to know more about Jim as an individual intelligence.  It’s a pity that we never do and that the narrative comes to depend on Christian Bale’s unflagging energy as a performer, rather than Jim Graham’s extraordinariness, to see us through.

What’s more surprising about the failure of this film – especially in long retrospect and in the light of Spielberg’s subsequent achievements – is the weakness of the storytelling.  The 1945 part of Empire of the Sun reduces to a succession of incidents without any underlying themes holding them together.  Spielberg isn’t prepared to engage with the uncomfortable aspects of how Jim becomes, under Basie’s tutelage, an expert survivor.  There’s virtually no sense of erosive routine in the camp.  Even allowing that the aging and emaciation of prisoners of war over four years is inherently difficult to realise on screen, it’s particularly unconvincing here.  Spielberg’s propensity for high-octane sentimentality produces some bizarre moments in the climax to the movie.  The character played by Miranda Richardson (who, to be fair, has her moments) dies just as the atom bomb falls on distant Nagasaki.  Jim, seeing a flash in the sky, believes that it’s the woman’s soul ascending to heaven.  He then discovers the true explanation.  Spielberg sticks on the soundtrack at the point of the flash the lovely sounds of the boys’ church choir in which Jim sang a solo at the start of the story.  Since this music also features at points where its use is not ironic, it’s confusing to hear it as a cue to Jim’s spiritual misapprehension.

The display in a deserted sports stadium of the former possessions of the British community that  have been appropriated by the Japanese – including Jim’s parents’ swanky car – is spectacular all right but Spielberg is unable to bring out the surreality of the display.  There’s nothing extraordinary or individual about the woman who sits playing a piano in the middle of all these emblems of a vanished society.  Jim’s final encounter with – and moral rejection of – Basie, although it’s very well played by Christian Bale, is stupidly bombastic (Jim’s bumping into Basie and his cronies again, after they’d escaped from the internment camp, feels daft anyway).   The film looks set to end about eighteen times before it actually does.  Spielberg finally closes on a shot of Jim’s discarded suitcase floating in the river at Shanghai.  The suitcase contained cherished memorabilia and Jim hung on to it for a long time before eventually chucking it in the river, thus marking the death of childhood.  I always felt sure Steven Spielberg’s opening shots of coffins floating in the same waters would come in useful, sooner or later.

26 June 2016