Dave's Other Movie Log

davesothermovielog.com

Articles  Contents  Reviews  Guestbook

Pearl Harbor**

Because of a heavy work schedule and other distractions, I only made it to Pearl Harbor after the film had already been in release for several weeks. About the best thing I can say about this typically pumped-up-to-the-max saga produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who seems to have found the director of his dreams in Michael Bay, is that it turns out not to be as bad as I had feared it would be, considering some of the heavy shrapnel it took from the critics. 

Anyone who has no problems with the worst military disaster in American history being reduced to the dimensions of Armageddon, which itself reduced the end of the world to the dimensions of a cheap serial, would have no problems liking Pearl Harbor. In fact, I would have been really astonished if Michael Bay had suddenly developed an interest in psychological drama. I certainly didn't expect to see Wong Kar-Way's In the Mood for Love--or, for that matter, even Fred Zinnemann's skillful adaptation of James Jones's novel From Here to Eternity (1953), whose action culminates in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Great historical events have resonances capable of lasting for centuries. Years ago, I shocked an acquaintance who was an executive at United Artists by praising The Battle of Britain, which had just been presented at the San Francisco Film Festival. In retrospect, I certainly think I overrated the film, although it was a good example of a solidly produced British movie, with able direction by Guy Hamilton, good performances--including Sir Laurence Olivier as  Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding--and a brilliant job of cinematography by Freddie Young.

Nevertheless, I think it was the story of the heroic defense of England by the RAF that influenced my judgment. In the same way, the event of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Air Force in 1941 looms large behind the movie Pearl Harbor, however inadequate the movie might be as a depiction of that event. I have gone into Pearl Harbor on ships of the United States Navy several times, and the experience can only be a very affecting one, even for a person like myself who has never served in the Armed Forces.

However, Bay and his screenwriter, Randall Wallace, have in good Hollywood fashion packaged the story of the Japanese attack and its aftermath with a highly forgettable melodrama about two fliers who have been buddies since their childhood in Tennessee, Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), and who both fall in love with the same Navy nurse, Evelyn Stewart (Kate Beckinsale). Early in the film McCawley goes off to England to fight as a volunteer. When he is shot down in action, he is presumed dead by everyone--including Evelyn.

In the meantime, the presiding deity of scenarists has providentially arranged for her to meet Walker in Hawaii. He offers her a shoulder to cry on; she offers her virginity which the noble Rafe had left intact on the eve of his departure from Europe. (Did Bay and Wallace get their idea of American sexual mores in the period from reading the Production Code?) The plot predictably thickens when McCawley rises alive from the waters of the English Channel and makes his way to Hawaii on the eve of the bombing, just in time to nobly deck Walker in a barroom brawl.

A relationship like this is a classic Howard Hawks subject--I'm particularly thinking of the Gary Cooper-Robert Young-Joan Crawford triangle in Today We Live (1933)--but Bay no more has the ability to explore the nuances of an unwritten masculine code that can have a far more binding force than that of positive law than he has the ability to remake Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin. But this attempt to revive the spirit of movies past is just as awkward and ineffective as is the often mawkish use of Technicolor® to convey the image of 1940s America.

Although I hardly have conventional tastes in movies, Pearl Harbor inadvertently makes a good case for old-fashioned linear narrative. Bay's strategy in making a motion picture is to go off in every direction at once. His inability to simply follow a straightforward piece of action was already evident in the the sequence in which Rafe's plane is shot down, but it achieves dire proportions with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Where Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger (in In Harm's Way) managed to condense the event into something like ten coherent minutes of screen time, Bay seems to truly prolong it from here to eternity--all to no good purpose.

Moreover, there is a complete lack of distance in the movie. Everything has to be viewed as closely as possible, a procedure exemplified by a bravura CGI shot in which the camera follows a descending Japanese bomb right down to the deck of a ship as it explodes. The director's idea of how to generate empathy is to hurl the audience into the middle of the action. If it had not been coined for other ends, the term "pathetic fallacy" might be used to characterize the movies of Michael Bay. His idea of how to communicate the chaos of the attack on Pearl Harbor is simply to make a chaotic motion picture. The brilliantly staged scenes of the attack on the Vietnamese village in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux, if they served no other purpose in being revived, should serve to show up Pearl Harbor for the woeful excuse for a movie that it is.

Affleck, Hartnett, and Beckinsale are reasonably innocuous in their respective roles, but I would hardly described what they're engaged in as acting--they're more like highly paid fashion models doing an ad in 1940s military drag. Yet, surprisingly enough, Pearl Harbor includes two quite solid performances: by John Voight as President Roosevelt, and by Alec Baldwin as General James Doolittle. In fact, for me, the best moment in the entire film occurred when FDR--at a meeting with his advisors after they tell him a bombing raid on Japan is out of the question--insists on standing up unassisted to emphasize his resolve. The scene is very well staged, and Voight is the one participant in Pearl Harbor likely to get an Oscar® nomination for his work.

Visit the Web site of the Naval Historical Center

Production data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database

Home

E-mail Dave: daveclayton@worldnet.att.net