J A Bayona (2012)

At the start of The Impossible a legend explains that this is the true story of one family caught up in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.  All the words of the legend then disappear except for two:  ‘true story’.  In telling how the Bennetts, a British family holidaying in Thailand, are separated by the tsunami, survive, and are reunited, J A Bayona and the screenwriter Sergio G Sanchez face the problem that the impossible in real life verges on the inevitable in movies.  It’s hardly surprising they want to encourage the audience to keep remembering that what they’re seeing really happened.  The Bennetts – father Henry, mother Maria, and their three sons Lucas, Thomas and Simon – arrive in their luxury coastal hotel on Christmas Eve.  You know what’s going to happen on Boxing Day and you’re therefore impatient for Bayona to cut to the chase.  Although the prelude to the disaster doesn’t occupy much screen time, it lasts long enough to be irritating – especially as Bayona favours obvious, ominous atmospheric touches:  except for a brief conversation between Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) just before their lives change dramatically, you learn next to nothing about the family’s character and concerns.  (Henry, who’s based in Japan and presumably works in the corporate sector, reveals to his wife that he’s worried about the security of his job.  Maria, who has interrupted her career as a doctor to raise the three boys, suggests that she might return to work and the family return to England.)

After the tsunami hits Bayona concentrates for some time on Maria, whose injuries include a serious leg wound, and Lucas, and the movie becomes involving.  The mother survives thanks to her brave and resourceful teenage son, who’d seemed a pain in the neck in what we saw of him earlier.   They hear a child crying; although Lucas at first insists they must look after themselves and ignore the cries, Maria persuades him to do otherwise and the pair takes a traumatised but physically uninjured infant boy called Daniel under their wing.  Some Thai peasants eventually rescue the trio and Maria, with Lucas, is subsequently driven to a hospital; once they’re already on their way, they realise that Daniel is not with them.   The roadside seen from Lucas’s point of view during the truck ride provides one of the strongest sequences in The Impossible – the continuing straggle of corpses and lost, dazed, more or less naked tourists has a surreal quality and is more powerful for being presented matter of factly.  However, the sequence is also a reminder that Bayona focuses almost exclusively on the Westerners in the area (the raison d’être of the salt of the earth locals seems to be to help the tourists); and this isn’t the only respect in which The Impossible is commercially calculating.   The film was made by two Spanish production companies and the technical crew, as well as the director and writer, are Spanish.  A closing legend on the screen reveals that the Bennetts are based on a Spanish family called Belón.  (Perhaps turning the Belóns into an English family is meant to make the change less crude than Americanising them would be.)  These eager-to-please-the-market decisions are probably understandable, given the state of the Spanish economy, but they put the true story on which the filmmakers insisted in a rather different light.

So too does the narrative development of the movie, once Bayona leaves Lucas – distraught that his gravely ill mother has disappeared from her hospital bed while he, at her encouragement, was elsewhere in the hospital, trying to help others find their missing loved ones.  From this point, when it’s revealed that Henry and the two younger boys have also survived, the mechanics of The Impossible become more exposed.   This is immediately frustrating:  Lucas is so horrified that Maria’s been taken away that you don’t believe he would be pacified by the kindly nurse who intervenes when he goes crazy by what had been his mother’s bedside:  Lucas calms down simply to allow Bayona to switch focus for a while.  Henry’s search for his wife and eldest son is relatively uninvolving:  Ewan McGregor clambers around hazardous locations shouting their names.  Henry decides to leave the two younger boys in the care of others as he continues his search – with the result that he then gets separated from Thomas and Simon too.  As the cross-cutting between the Bennetts’ locations intensifies, the film feels increasingly false to the events on which it’s based.  Once all five of the Bennetts are in, or in the street outside, the same hospital, their intuitions or glimpses of one another’s presence are tantalising and dramatically effective yet the context of the drama – a natural disaster which (according to Wikipedia) killed 230,000 people in fourteen countries – makes this kind of suspense offensive.   All the Bennetts survive; as a bonus, Lucas sees Daniel again, with a man who we assume is Daniel’s father.  The family enjoy the perks of being the principals in a mainstream movie.  The closest we get to confronting bereavement (as distinct from seeing dead bodies) in The Impossible is through a man of Henry’s age searching in vain for his wife and daughter, and who lends Henry his mobile so that he can phone Maria’s father in Britain.  The fact that this man’s loss matters is a tribute more to the actor who plays him (Sonke Mohring) than to the script or direction.

J A Bayona, although he seems not a particularly sensitive or imaginative filmmaker, does a competent job.  He’s good at including details that will come in handy for later, more resonant effect (the can of Coca-Cola that Lucas wants to drink from the minibar in the Bennetts’ hotel room, a brief shot of Maria’s naked breast as she gets changed, and so on).   An image of floating lanterns released into the air by the hotel guests on Christmas night isn’t subtle but it’s very beautiful; a later panoramic view of corpses and coffins, revealed as the camera pulls back, is likely to stay in the mind.  The music by Fernando Velázquez keeps cuing us to be choked up, unnecessarily so.  There are too many heartwarming moments in the story – so that the primary reunions don’t stand out in the way you feel they should – but it’s very hard not to be affected by these, whatever you think of Bayona’s manipulation.

The Impossible is mostly very well acted.  While it’s true that much of what Naomi Watts has to do as Maria is play someone physically in extremis (Maria hardly has the time to think about her situation), Watts’ sustained intensity is impressive.  Ewan McGregor is moving when Henry breaks down during his first phone call home.  The two younger boys (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast) are both good:  Thomas’s caring for Simon for the first time in their lives supplements Lucas’s larger discovery of responsibility for others.  Lucas’s experience is more richly convincing than might be expected – for example, when at first he finds his mother’s semi-nakedness and her wounds unbearable to look at.   Sixteen-year-old Tom Holland gets this across strongly; while you’re often aware of his acting, Holland carries a large part of the movie, and successfully.  He’s particularly good at suggesting how bolshiness and bravery may be somewhat related, and at expressing Lucas’s discovery of how elating it can be to help other people (and how much it can subdue your own problems).  The growing sense that Naomi Watts gives us that Maria’s relationship with her eldest son is in some ways stronger than the one with her husband is confirmed in, and gives an edge to, the film’s final scene.  Geraldine Chaplin is vivid in her cameo as an elderly woman who watches the night sky with Thomas and talks about the death of stars.  It’s hardly surprising when the boy asks her age:  she says nearly 74 but Chaplin’s beautiful, deeply weathered face suggests someone centuries if not light years old.  (She is in fact 68.)

1 January 2013