Oscar Nominations
Best Cinematography - Roger Deakins
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing
If people who know me know one thing about my film
preferences, it’s that I absolutely adore the Coen Brothers. As writers and directors, I think they are
some of the most clever and most entertaining content producers working
today. So I was hyped to hear that they
were writing another film called Unbroken,
even though I was completely oblivious as to what the film was about. And then I saw that it was co-written with
two other guys. And it was directed by
the mostly untested Angelina Jolie. And
then the reviews came out with lukewarm reception at best. So I filed the film away in my brain to watch
at a later date, and lo and behold, the film still manages to nab some
technical nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. And though the cinematography is admittedly
beautiful, my initial suspicions about the lack of true Coen influence proved
to be mostly accurate.
Based on a true story, the film follows Louie Zamperini, a
former Olympic athlete who joined the war effort in World War II. His unit’s plane goes down in the Atlantic
Ocean, and only he and two other crew members survive. The first half of the film focuses on
alternately establishing Zamperini’s Olympic career through flashback and
showing the hardship of surviving on a raft for over a month. In light of the Olympic events having next to
no significance in the story aside from establishing his claim to fame amongst
the other nameless troops, the flashbacks turn out to be pointless exercises in
overly establishing Zamperini as a character, who’s only defining
characteristic seems to be his willingness to endure great suffering.
This is only accentuated in the film’s latter half, when he
is “rescued” from the raft by a Japanese ship, only to become a member of a POW
camp. The camp’s commanding officer uses
Zamperini as an example, beating him senseless for purposely imagined offenses
to demonstrate that no one in the camp is special. The film attempts showing Zamperini as a passive
resistor, but ultimately he just comes off as one who can take immense amounts
of physical pain. It’s reminiscent of The Passion of the Christ, where the
focus is on the violence rather than the purpose for the violence or the
protagonist’s journey to overcome it.
And yet, paradoxically, the film remains safely within the
bounds of a PG-13 rating, not even allowing the audience the minimal catharsis
of seeing the true extent of Zamperini’s injury and struggle. Instead, director Angelina Jolie portrays her
actors in the most pristine light possible, smudging dirt on them to give them
the appearance of pain and suffering but never going so far as to show them
emoting beyond simple solemnity. The
film feels like a child posing its toys for scenes that resemble other survivor
stories, but lacks the depth of understanding to add meaning or character so as
to make a unique and compelling tale.
So how do the Coen’s factor into this? Well, other than the occasional bit of snappy
dialogue, I have a genuinely hard time parsing what their contributions to this
project were. It’s so lacking in their
usual creative spark and innovative drive that I’m surprised that they would
attribute their real names to this instead of a pseudonym. Though perhaps an interesting directorial
experiment for Angelina Jolie, the film itself is ultimately a failure, a
shallow demonstration of form over substance that tarnishes the reputation of
two great film writers. Give this one a
pass.
Have a favorite Coen Brothers project? How about an obscure one where they didn’t
sit in the directors’ chairs? Leave your
thoughts in the comments below.
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