The Impossible

Written at the time of the film's release...

Disaster Relief
or
The Tides That Bind

It truly is an amazing story, fully befitting the title The Impossible. The heart-and earth-rending circumstances surrounding the 2004 tsunami are the stuff of nightmares.

The Bennett family* is spending Christmas 2004 in Thailand. They're Australians living in Japan: she's a wife/mother/home-maker for now, a doctor by trade; he's a something or other, attached to his phone and worried about losing his job. The kids are twelve, seven, and five, respectively with the oldest, Lucas, a bit of a pre-teen jerk to everybody—little brothers and parents—and has a bad case of "the surlies" with a lot of growing up to do.

Thailand at Christmastime 2004 is the perfect time to do it. Their seaside resort is pristine, perfect. They spend Christmas lightly bickering, worrying, and considering the future. Man plans. God laughs.

What they can't anticipate is the earthquake that rocks Southeast Asia, or the resulting wall of water that comes crashing through the resort, pushing everything out of its path, slamming everything up-shore, sucking it back to the ocean and then, hammering them again, turning the tidelands into a raging river in both directions, scattering everything in random paths.

That includes the Bennetts. When Mom Maria rises above the wall of water, battered and bleeding, she sees Lucas being carried away to the ocean.  The two desperately risk safety and stability to connect and stay within reach, despite being tossed about like so much silt. When the waters subside they scrabble in bare feet amid the carnage of uprooted vegetation, rubble and broken bodies. 

Maria's leg is torn apart, flesh ripped from bone. A makeshift tourniquet keeps her together, and Lucas becomes parent, keeping her focused through her shock and finding high ground and supervising her trip to a triage center, a hospital drastically ill-equipped to deal with the wreckage of such a catastrophe. What has become of the rest of the family is anybody's guess, but that is for another time, if they can spare it from just surviving.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona (in the credits, he's "J.A. Bayona") manages to keep the focus micro, while presenting a macro canvas. That in itself is an amazing accomplishment, but he has an amazing talent for making things personal and visceral, the scenes of the struggle swept up in the ocean waves is tough to watch, and the inundation of the victims in the tsunami's path, as experienced by Maria is a surreal nightmare of images, that convey panic and horror simultaneously. 

The details of everything, especially the personal crises of the peripheral victims is in plain view, as much a part of the story as the Bennett's struggles. Their crisis is central, but the individuals' own efforts in providing help to other survivors is reflected by the help they get back. It's a story of one family, but the efforts of all the survivors, native and tourist, to help each other through the overwhelming havoc is knitted throughout the story in an overall arc that is inspiring, and something of a tonic in this movie season.

Watts, McGregor and The Impossible Belon family

* Much has been made of the fact that the Belon's (who are Latinos) are being played by Anglo actors,  something that is much pooh-poohed by Maria Belon.  But, one has to ask: why did a production, headed by Spanish-speaking artists, make such a decision, other than for "sellability?"  I only bring this up, as there is a pattern here, what with the similarly anglicized Argo.  Are Latinos not allowed to be featured in movies because it might hurt the box office (I say this while ruefully noting that a Latino actor and black actor are "inserted" into the all-white Gangster Squad—if one is to be accurate one way, shouldn't one the other—and yet I thought Mackie and Pena were a nice touch, and they're always welcome to see). Yes, as Maria Belon says, the story is "universal"—it has more to do with family than what race that family is.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona, 2018) I didn't go see the latest installment of the "Jurassic Park" series when it was in theaters because its predecessor Jurassic World didn't do anything new, but merely switched out new characters for the old (with the exception of Jeff Goldblum), and continued with the idea that, despite the mayhem from three previous movies, someone—or some conglomerate—would still think it was a good idea to create a theme park around living, breathing, carnivorous, and entirely untrainable giant lizards. Then, they went with the crazy idea that someone—especially Chris Pratt's Owen Grady—could train veloci-raptors and—because science fiction reality isn't enough—that one could create NEW dinosaur types by tinkering with their DNA. There is just so much evidence that this is a Capital B-Capital I-Bad Idea on so many levels, but the movie had to track away from the original's "naivete of visionaries" theme to the naivete and craven greed of corporate interests. You can always count on corporations to do the wrong thing when a buck is concerned. So, the initial under-pinning of "just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should" gets lost in a message so obvious and ever-present, any novel new idea gets swamped by it.

Well, along comes Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and it recycles Spielberg's (rare) sequel film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, like so much re-captured DNA, with only a few changes to people, places, and things.

In that, the ne'er-do-well nephew of park creator John Hammond decided that, despite the disasters evident in the first film, he would ship a bunch of the dino's over to the U.S. (that wasn't in Crichton's follow-up novel, but Spielberg really wanted to have rampaging T-Rex's tromping through city-streets before some hack did it) for profit—because it worked so well having them on Isla Nublar.

Again, very bad idea. But, it's the exact same premise of Fallen Kingdom. This very bad idea is predicated on the issue that the volcano on Isla Nublar has decided to go super-nova, and so a mission is undertaken—by Hammond's business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to save as many different dino-types as possible and put them on a new island—don't most large  islands have volcano's?—where they'll be safe to wander around without trampling any tourists (and, evidently, there are dino-preservationists who, since we've already messed with the natural order of things, think we should protect dinosaurs because they're so warm and cuddly, fit right into our eco-system, and besides "what could go worng? This is how Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) gets roped into the thing and this movie.

And if she's onboard, she'll get Pratt's raptor-trainer to coax "Blue" the remaining raptor from the last movie to get into a cage, or even sit on his lap, for the long flight to the new paleological digs.

This would be all fine-and-dandy (if a Bad Idea), if the intent was to actually re-locate the dinosaurs. But, no, it's a ruse by those shadowy corporate interests to auction off species for their potential uses of weapons of mass-stomping (they probably didn't show King Kong as the in-flight movie). Again, Bad Thing to do, but, then, a sequel was a bad thing to do, as well—so, one can imagine that such a thing might be possible.

The movie does have one nice little wrinkle to it that might be considered an interesting idea, and that is how they employ the standard "spunky little kid" into the scenario, which does utilize the "just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean you should" theme to its maximum and logical conclusion. It is the one interesting idea in this sorry mess.

It is a sad thing to see, especially considering the director. J. A. Bayona has made a couple of really good, if not especially profitable films—A Monster Calls and The Impossible. Both of them are miles apart in genre and subject matter—one based on a popular children's book and the other on a true incident that occurred during the catastrophic tsunami in Thailand in 2004. It must have been tempting to take this talented director and try and goose his box-office appeal with a franchise-piece. But, it might have better served the director (and movies in general) to have allowed him to merely go with his muse and develop a project of his own leanings to create something truly unique as has been seen in his work in the past.

That might have been a GOOD idea.

A Monster Calls

When the Bough Breaks
or 
That's Ent-ertainment!

Seeing a lot of depressing films can really put the zap on your head. Makes you not want to write about them. Makes you not want to see anything for awhile. But you have to resist that urge.

Because you might miss something brilliant.

Something like A Monster Calls.

A Monster Calls didn't do any "business," really. It had that icky "The BFG" feeling, the kind that keeps away audiences, even family audiences, because it seems it might be too frightening or nightmarish to families who don't think twice about taking their kids to The Avengers or some lumpen play-doh-pixel animation that won't inspire sleepless nights—for kids or their parents (Hey, Hollywood, Mom and Dad gotta sleep!) That stuff is safe, like sugar-water; it keeps them bouncing on the seat-springs for 90 minutes and when the rush is over and done with, then it's safe to put 'em in bed, with their revenge-fantasies and sermon-stories cavorting like empty calories in their heads.  And in the morning, they burst like bubbles, because there's nothing challenging there. At least, nothing like real life.

Who needs that, after all? For that, you can stay home.

Conor O'Malley (Lewis McDougall) is having a nightmare—the one "with the darkness the wind and the screaming." In it, he is in a blasted landscape, a graveyard that has opened up, more grave than yard now, and he is desperately clinging to something hanging over the edge. A look into the pit and he sees his mother (Felicity Jones...of Rogue One) desperately grasping his arm, trying to keep from falling into the abyss. But, he can't prevent it; he's just 12, somewhere as the narration tells us "too young to be an adult; too old to be a kid."

Conor wakes up from his night-mare and goes to his day-one. He makes breakfast—cold cereal—gets dressed, takes one look in at his mother and trudges to school where he sits in the back of the class, dead-eyed, rather be drawing, and notices the askance glare of the bigger bully who will beat him between classes. He's getting it from all sides: his father is absent, living in the U.S. with his new family, but who talks about visits when all Conor wants to do is escape; his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) is coming to visit and she's a brittle, stern woman who has issues of her own, Conor's struggles not being among them, with talk of living with her in her antiseptic memory-steeped brownstone; because Conor's Mum has cancer and the treatments are making her sick and weak...and not making her better—it's time for a more aggressive treatment in hospice.

Conor retreats but he can't go far. Sleep brings the nightmares and his drawings are disturbing things that one night manifests to life in the form of a an animated yew tree (voiced by Liam Neeson)—the one that sits in the graveyard of the local church—that uproots with a burning fire inside it and invades his room at precisely 12:07 am with an ominous warning; he will tell him three true tales and once those stories are complete, Conor must reciprocate with one of his own—and if the story is not true, the monster will eat him.

Pretty simple story, with Grimm elements of the macabre, but A Monster Calls is anything but simple. When the stories begin, the film warps and woofs and spatters into bizarrely wondrous illustrations that morph into surrealism and suggestivism to tell their fairy-tale stories of kingdoms and wizards and differing points of view, but each of them have an edge that defy fairy-tale logic and mannerisms, don't hew to myth but to behavior and the complexities of psyche, paths that confuse and confound Conor, shaking him down to his his own core-beliefs of childhood, uprooting his own naivete and the expected behavior of youngster-hood.

Dad comes to visit, but he can't stay long, and before you know it, he's just a memory, leaving the situation of his ex-wife and son behind to return to life in the U.S. Mum moves to the hospital, and Conor to his grandmother's, where he is a stranger and a bit of a burden, an outsider but not a center of concern. The only one who seems to notice him and pay attention to him is the Monster, who tells Conor that, rather than the Monster coming to him, maybe it is Conor who summoned his presence to him.

A Monster Calls is an anti-fairy-tale, which does not comfort; it is a kid's movie not for kid's and that they won't understand—maybe be fascinated with the graphics and the out-sized emotions, but it ultimately will run against the grain of a child's expectations of easy solutions and happily-ever-after. But, it is also a film that is so much made up of the anxieties of a child's world that is much too large for them to be comfortable in, even if they grow five times their size. The embedded stories are not safe and, though they toy with issues of good and evil like a fable, the palette gets all mixed-up and smeared with the light and the dark. The images (created by the FX-house glassworks Barcelona) are beautifully painted nightmares (they also did the Tree-Monster FX although a bit more photo-realistically) that shift along with the attitudes inhabiting its characters.

Kids don't know id's, even while they are acting out on them all the time. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, even if they don't know exactly why they are feeling what they are feeling. Children don't know the secrets of adults (most times because one of those secrets is that they're being protected from them by their parents)...that time is short, life is hard, and that eventually yesterday's outnumber tomorrow's. Kids don't need to know that time is the ultimate bully and it will beat you up and it won't wait for recess to do it.

Life is hard. That's the reality of it, but a child is sheltered from the more harsh realities of life. A child barely knows life that they should know anything about death. Nor that, at the moment of their birth they're carrying an hourglass and time is running out for the first second. Children shouldn't know that stuff. They're fed stories that conclude "...and they lived happily ever after," when there are actually no guarantees on the "happily" and a definite negative on "they lived...ever after." The curse of original sin (from the biblical stories) may not be from the tree of knowledge, but born of the knowledge of death. Death thus becomes childhood's end even as it is for another. Life is cruel that way.

No, not cruel; Life is merely indifferent. And as I've said about indifference here before, it is the opposite of love.

As I said, maybe not for children—they can't comprehend the future. But, for adults, with memories of the past, it is amazing. And if those memories involve loss, there will be tears...over the painful dichotomies of life...and death...and how both can be embraced. A Monster Calls is that special.

Right down to its anti-fairy tale roots.