Film Review: PEARL HARBOR ** (out of 5)
A romantic triangle involving two handsome flying aces in love with the same pretty nurse, plus a spectacular reenactment of Japan’s surprise attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
It was said recently (by Time, I think, or Newsweek) that Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, the producing-directing team responsible for the new and improved Pearl Harbor, are chiefly interested in the Poetry of Destruction. And it’s true, it’s true, they are, they are interested, but not enough to let it stop them.
Authentic poetry, whether it’s of the literary or cinematic persuasion, is shaped by interlaced images which bear related thematic connections, even poems about destruction, like, say, The Iliad. Poetic images subvert reason, arouse unexpected emotions, descend beneath the surface of reality for truths that may or may not have a name in the daylight world. And even within the specialized arena of epic mayhem, there are good poets, mediocre poets, and bad.
Most often in their careers, Bruckheimer and Bay have been bad poets of destruction. Their movies are loud — no, thundering — hyperkinetic paeans to the orgasmic scream of tire rubber echoing in urban alleys, cars flying ecstatically through the air into other cars, massive fireballs roiling above the landscape, inanimate objects everywhere given to wild disintegration, all of it sprinkled with a pseudo-hardboiled dialogue that no human ever spoke (except while standing in front of a camera), calculated to make us laugh between inevitable disasters.
Apparently bored with their own boring action-adventure formula, they have moved solemnly into what is for them the uncharted territory of historical drama, and in so doing have lifted their aspirations to become mediocre poets of destruction. Pearl Harbor works overtime to smack us with pretty pictures, preening with an earnest reverence for reconstructing the physical reality of the all-important 1940s. Bruckheimer and Bay are in a somber mood, befitting their subject matter, a romantic mood, and they are out to make us really feel something at last. A somber romantic melancholy sort of wild disintegration.
Half of the film is taken up with the meet-cute romance of Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale, two gorgeous movie stars on the rise, each making a smart career move in being photographed for this careening oversized load. Quick as you can say, “seen it before,” Ben interrupts the idyll, going off to the American wing of Britain’s RAF because he just can’t wait to get into the air and, dammit, fight somebody. There’s a war on!
While people did do such things in 1941, the engine of this narrative is already sputtering, its pilots losing altitude into a fog of contrivance. Not that Affleck and Beckinsale fail to sell it; they do what they can. But no one is as simple as this couple, and no one ever was. The temptation to reinvent the forties in the collective memory as a simpler, unambiguous era is always strong; Americans yearn to believe in clearly earmarked villains and heroes, and in a sense of moral purpose suffusing the battlefields of Europe, the Pacific, and the bedroom. But it just ain’t so, and adults know it (most of them, anyway). The technological options were simpler, the pace of some things, like work and shopping, was a little closer to human, but people were just as riddled with pathologies and irrational moves from moment to moment as they are now, as they were in antiquity. The news just didn’t travel quite as fast.
Enter the logic of the Disney machine: we will provide $135 million, and a relentless promotional campaign that will enter the consciousness of every living creature in North America; you will provide a WWII the whole family can enjoy, or at least, the whole family over 12. If there’s sex, it must be clean, greeting card lyrical, and passionless, with nothing showing below the neck; if there’s violence, it must be distant, sanitized, made elegant or jazzy; if there’s something offensive to contemporary middle American values, pluck it out; actual onscreen pain and/or death is to be severely limited.
Bruckheimer and Bay’s Pearl Harbor offers up a 1941 in which the experience of combat reverts to “Boy’s Own Adventure” heroics (of a kind that made enlisted men of the forties laugh), not a single person smokes (not even FDR, a famous smoking President if ever there was one), all American hearts beat with homespun nobility, and while people occasionally drink to get drunk, it’s an anomaly, they’re not really like that normally. It’s all about the end of innocence, in a fantasy America where no one ever had a murderous thought until those goldarned Japanese ruined our tranquility.
None of this would be so objectionable if it didn’t have the sticky sweet taste of insincerity and marketing calculus. Like all bad poets who want to turn serious, Team Bruckheimer-Bay look everywhere but inward for inspiration, loading the film with cynically composed romantic images straight out of high school diaries, a swelling orchestral score continuously taking up the slack on the unearned sentiment, and screwball comedy banter borrowed from films of the thirties and forties. Throw in a few dogfights above the English Coast, just to keep the taste for thrills in our mouths until the big moment. Oh, and a plot twist with, ahem, a best friend and an unfortunate misunderstanding.
Don’t the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in this movie? Well, yes, eventually they do, about an hour and fifteen minutes into the billowing suds, after a way is found to move the three principals to Hawaii, and then Bay draws on all his training in music video to deliver a stops-out, forty minute, impressionistic roller-coaster symphony of truly incredible CG effects, astounding stunts and pyrotechnic magic. It’s his best work by far, hewing closely (but not religiously) to events as they actually happened, and after about five minutes it feels mostly like an E-ticket ride at DisneyWorld, where the dangers become plastic and transparent after the third sharp turn. The exuberant editing rhythms and brilliant staging begin to recall nothing so much as the climax of Star Wars (1977), while the historical reality of Pearl Harbor, a tragedy that led to unimaginable suffering for everyone, victors and vanquished, over the next four years, dissipates in a bottomless display of big-budget hubris.
The immediate aftermath of Pear Harbor included several days of a civilian population driven mad by understandable paranoia, and a scapegoated Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet hung out to dry for the sins of all.
Nope. Too negative.
The film goes on for another hour, transferring Affleck and his buddy to yet another special mission (which really happened, of course, but who cares by now?) so the film can end on the upbeat note of a modest U.S. victory, assuring the audience America eventually struck back, as if no one knew that.
At least the Japanese are portrayed as a people caught in the spider-web of the historical moment, just like the Americans, although the choice to avoid demonizing them had as much to do with demographics as it did honorable storytelling. The Japanese are huge consumers of Hollywood fare, and Pearl Harbor will have to perform spectacularly in the global market to break even.
Steven Spielberg, America’s reigning poet laureate of cinematic destruction, once theorized that the Vietnam War had altered the consciousness of audiences, suggesting that we will no longer sit still for mere false heroics and neatly crumpling bodies. But then, he likes to take creative risks occasionally. The audience tends to interpret realistic violence as too disturbing and graphic, and Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) was a true theatre of cruelty, a Homeric cinema of horror and death that tested his theory to new limits, weaving the experience of — whoa, wait a minute — actual soldiers into the narrative. That’s what good poets generally do: they thoroughly study their subject matter, then enforce a strict, imaginative subjectivity in drawing out its realities, layers and meaning.
Bruckheimer and Bay don’t care about that crap. They just want to make an expensive high energy film that turns a big profit, meaning-schmeaning. Pearl Harbor, the most egregiously oversold movie since Star Wars, Episode I (1999), is likely to fulfill their desire, just as their other films have, just as tomorrow the crowds’ll be lining up for Space Mountain all over again, proving Spielberg doesn’t know everything. But that doesn’t make Team Bruckheimer-Bay into poets, even of destruction. That’s a distinction that should be reserved for storytellers who do their homework on human nature, and are changed by it, and express that change in their imagery.
Pearl Harbor
produced by Jerry Bruckheimer; directed by Michael Bay; screenplay by Randall Wallace; director of photography, John Schwartzman; edited by Roger Barton, Mark Goldblatt, Chris Lebenzon and Steve Rosenblum; music by Hans Zimmer
with: Ben Affleck (Rafe), Josh Hartnett (Danny), Kate Beckinsale (Evelyn), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Petty Officer Doris Miller)
3 hr., 3 m.; Buena Vista Pictures, rated PG-13
release date: May 25
NOTES:
BIG-BIG SHEW: the film’s $135 million tab is the largest to be greenlighted by any studio in history, a figure that ballooned to a mind-bending $345 million before all the effects were collated. Now, there’s risk-taking for you.
MR. HOLLYWOOD: Jerry Bruckheimer has been in business as a producer since 1975, and at one time made some interesting films, especially his first, Farewell, My Lovely, with Robert Mitchum, the most faithful adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel ever made. He teamed with producer Don Simpson for 1983’s runaway sleeper hit Flashdance, which made both men famous in the industry and secured his formula of sure-fire, dumbed-down entertainment. Simpson-Bruckheimer produced a long string of eighties blockbusters like Top Gun (1985) for Paramount, then moved across town to Disney in 1991.
Simpson died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 51, of an accidental drug overdose, but Bruckheimer has continued the tradition of the partnership, annually supervising old-fashioned, smart, slick and empty product for the groundlings, often collaborating with Michael Bay. Bruckheimer holds steady at number 25 on Premiere Magazine’s yearly list of Hollywood’s 100 most powerful players.
OTHER PEARL HARBORS: As a genuinely defining moment of the 20th century, the attack on Pearl Harbor has made many film appearances in the intervening sixty years, notably: John Ford’s Oscar-winning documentary December 7th (1943), one of the first acknowledgements that African-Americans were making a decisive contribution to the war effort; I Bombed Pearl Harbor (1960), a Japanese film little seen in this country starring the great Toshiro Mifune as a pilot whose life is affected by the attack; Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), still the ultimate recreation of the event, a U.S.-Japanese co-production telling the tale from both sides and detailing the historical forces and cultural misunderstandings that came to a head in the mid-20th century Pacific; and, tangentially, as the climax of From Here to Eternity (1953), one of the best Hollywood films ever made.
