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Jack O'Connell does fine work in the middlingly impactful Unbroken |
Director: Angelina Jolie
Cast: Jack O’Connell (Captain Louis Zamperini), Domhnall
Gleeson (Lt Russell Phillips), Garrett Hedlund (Lt Commander John Fitzgerald),
Miyavi (Sgt Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe), Finn Wittrock (Sgt Francis
McNamara), Jai Courtenay (Lt Charlton Cupernell), Luke Treadaway (Miller),
Spencer Lofranco (Harry Brooks)

Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) was an Olympic athlete, who
set a world record for the fastest lap in his final lap of the 1936 Olympics 5000
metres final (despite finishing 8th overall). Signing up for service
in the war, his bomber crashes and (after surviving 47 days in an open lifeboat
in the Pacific) he is captured by the Japanese. There he experiences the
brutality of the POW camps – and earns the enmity of Mutsuhrio Watanabe
(Miyavi) one of the camp’s officers, who beats him mericilessly. But through it
all his determination never wavers, neither does his humanity. He remains
Unbroken.
The attraction of the resilience of the human spirit never
wavers – and many of us suspect we would break, making our admiration and
respect for those that don’t all the greater. That admiration is easily bound
up in O’Connell’s wonderful performance as Zamperini, dripping charisma powered
by kindness, humanity, decency and self-respect. O’Connell dominates the film,
and is also the key to its successful moments – the camera always comes back to
him, and his eyes wind up telling much of the story. Without him the film would
struggle to make a real impact.
Which is part of the problem with it – it doesn’t make the
impact you feel it should. Jolie’s direction is technically accomplished and
very skilful, and the film is beautifully shot and filmed by Roger Deakins.
There is barely a foot wrong anywhere in its make-up – but for some reason it
doesn’t come together into something that carries real force. Maybe this is
overfamiliarity with these stories, maybe this is too much professionalism and
expertise crowding the emotion out, maybe it’s just that there isn’t enough
story here for it to really work. But for whatever reason, this is a film that
winds up leaving you colder than it should.
Its finest sequence coves the isolation on the boat, the
struggle with sun and sea, without sufficient food or water, a marathon
endurance test that claims the life of one of the three men who undergo it.
Jolie’s film captures the strange claustrophobia of a tiny world – one lifeboat
– in a huge expanse of nothingness. These scenes are compelling in a way the
later prison camp scenes just aren’t.
The camp scenes are of course tough and brutal in a way (although
some have – perhaps justly – complained
that they are so beautifully and elegantly filmed that their impact is
dramatically reduced, with every shot of the camp turned into some sort of
renaissance-lit masterpiece) but they don’t hit like they should. Yes what
Zamperini and the soldiers go through is dreadful and awful beyond measure, but
nothing here seems to really capture that. It’s sort of something we understand
but don’t wind up feeling from the
film.
Perhaps that’s because the one thing the film does capture
really well is the powerless drift of POW life. The soldiers have no control
over their fates and no way of escaping it, This all gets captured in the
brutal bullying of Watanabe – but the film never manages to make either him or
his rivalry with Zamperini compelling, leaving me unsure whether he was
intended as a representative cipher of the appalling system rather than a real
character.
Unbroken won’t
exactly disappoint but it won’t exactly thrill either. While I do feel not
enough credit is given to Jolie – and a male star would have got more praise –
this is also a film that feels too much like a Hollywood prestige picture, too
much like an important film straining for those Oscars. It forgets the heart
and doesn’t engage our feelings.
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