3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for war violence, brutality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.26.14
Depicting the human spirit’s
strength and indomitable resolve can be a tough sell in the visual realm of the
big screen, because so much of that ability is an inward, fundamentally mental
challenge.
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| Dismayed to have come to the direct attention of sadistic concentration camp guard Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Takamasa Ishihara, right), Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell) is subjected to a series of increasingly brutal and humiliating ordeals. |
And yet we’ve been blessed, this
month, by two powerful films that convey precisely that heroic struggle: the
first one devoted to a quiet academic who refused to yield — Stephen Hawking,
in The Theory of Everything — and now the equally authentic saga of a scrappy
athlete driven by equal measures of grit and stubborn fury.
As with Eddie Redmayne’s bravura
performance in Theory, director Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of author Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken is fueled by equally riveting work from British actor Jack
O’Connell, whose until-now obscurity on these shores is certain to vanish
forever. O’Connell is the heart, soul and raw guts of this film, and he
achieves the near impossible: He genuinely makes us believe that fresh-faced,
Southern California-based Italian immigrant Louis Zamperini could have survived
— nay, triumphed over — a series of heart-stopping ordeals that clearly would
have felled, and killed, lesser men.
Hillenbrand is the meticulous
biographer who in 2001 dazzled readers with her first book: Seabiscuit: An
American Legend, which went on to become an equally popular 2003 film.
Hillenbrand acknowledges that her research into that famed horse frequently
uncovered references to another famous Californian who “could give Seabiscuit a
run for his money.” That led to an eight-year “chat” with Zamperini, but only
by phone; Hillenbrand didn’t want to meet him in the flesh until after her
second book was published.
Unbroken: A World War II Story
of Survival, Resilience and Redemption hit bookstores in 2010, subsequently
spending 185 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list. It was a
natural for film adaptation, and therein lay the challenge: how to bring Zamperini’s
amazing story to cinema.
Jolie’s smartest move was casting
O’Connell in the lead role, and the young actor absolutely rewards her faith.
But while Jolie clearly approached this project with both passion and
sensitivity, her directorial touch is too remote: We often feel like distant
observers, rather than being intimately connected with these men, and their
plight.
