Spielberg's Unsung Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2000)

Naive, slow, maudlin, superficial. These are the criticisms typically leveled at this film. Coming after "The Color Purple", it was regarded as another overly sentimental attempt by the director to take on "serious" subject matter. Critics may be easily enough dismissed, but I read somewhere that no less a figure than the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa sent Spielberg a letter taking him to task for "Empire of the Sun". Perhaps he took offense at the way the Japanese were portrayed in the film. I'd be very curious to know exactly what his criticism were, but I imagine the thrust of it was that Spielberg's Disney-ish world-view was inappropriate in the context of a serious and important subject such as WWII.
Spielberg seemed to have taken these criticisms to heart, because when he came back to WWII again, he approached it in a radically different way. "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" give us a window into the era that is painfully transparent. Our collective knowledge of this time comes from newsreel footage and the recollections of those that lived through it. Spielberg drew on these elements and created two films of striking verisimilitude.
Now that Spielberg has his Oscar and no one accuses of him of being incapable with "serious stuff", I think is now possible to fully appreciate "Empire of the Sun".
This is not just a stepping-stone to his later, "truly mature" films, but a great work in its own right - one that in my mind forms an integral and compelling WWII trilogy with "Schindler" and "Ryan".
Whereas the later films take a profound and unblinking look at the horrors of the death camps and the battlefields, I think in many ways "Empire" actually goes a little deeper. WWII was not just an epic, global human experience, but a transforming moment in history. 1945 wasn't just the year WWII ended - it was the end of an era. It clearly marked all that followed as a new and modern age (both exciting and dangerous).
There is nostalgia about WWII. I think this nostalgia runs deep for a very simple reason. With WWII, the events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the world became a place whose end was no longer just hypothetical, but very possible. "Empire of the Sun" is a film that expresses this wider sociological impact of the war quite tellingly.
For Americans, however, nostalgia for WWII isn't just a yearning for a simpler, less dangerous time. Maybe this is why Spielberg's intent with "Empire" was largely lost on his American audiences. WWII brought the nation together in powerful ways and catapulted it onto the center of the world stage. America was victorious, after all. If Americans have a perception of those times as Big-Band fun and GI Joe heroics, Hollywood has certainly played a big part in forming it. If any filmmaker is especially attuned to this fact, it is Spielberg. His earlier "1941" was a reasonably (though not entirely) successful attempt to pay tribute and parody the Hollywood wartime propaganda that we've all grown up with.
"Empire", through its unique story, allows WWII to be viewed from different and vital perspectives. The protagonist, Jim (brilliantly played by Christian Bale) is not the typical Spielberg "gee-whiz" kid, in spite of any superficial similarities; but a precocious, sheltered, rebelliously minded son of an English ex-patriot living in the Far East. He likes to read GI Joe comics, but he also is an atheist, and writes books on contract bridge.
The Americans in "Empire of the Sun" (splendidly personified by John Malkovich through his character Basie) aren't stereotypes either. Behind the "Joe Cool" sunglasses and "Hi'ya, pal" facades are calculating opportunists. Even the antagonists, the Japanese, are not depicted simply as "Bonzai" fanatics; we are allowed to see them as committed and courageous warriors too.
"Empire of the Sun" is a great story about the loss of innocence, not just that of a spoilt English choir boy, but of the collective innocence of the world. It may lack the subtlety of "Summer of '42" or the wistful charm of "Hope and Glory", but "Empire of Sun" shows us a WWII that isn't just grim horror and tragedy, isn't John Wayne guts and glory either - but an ironic mixture of both, which characterizes the subject pretty accurately I think.
If any moment in the film best shows the strength of Spielberg's effort here, it must be the moment where the terrified Jim is lost, racing through the war-torn streets of Shanghai. He's separated from his parents, pursued by a dangerous ruffian - and comes upon a gigantic mural of "Gone with the Wind". It is one of those blatant but compelling cinematic images, like Orson Welles pontificating before an enormous backdrop of Charles Foster Kane.
This is one of many great moments in a stirring and thought-provoking film, moments I won't soon forget:
Jim chasing his glider up a hill only to come upon a company of Japanese troops preparing to invade his world...
Jim signaling a Japanese destroyer with his flashlight and getting an explosive response...
Jim snatching a food dish from the grip of a dead prisoner...
A lost boy in a lost world finding his heroes where he can (saluting Japanese airmen)...
His surrogate mother dies in his arms as the world enters the nuclear age... (Subtle symbolism may be more aesthetically pleasing, but it is not always so effective)
The euphoria of liberation, the hysteria of civilians caught in the deadly crossfire of war... (The Mustang air attack sequence - a splendid example of Spielberg's filmmaking craft as any!)
Jim, a listless refugee, casting away his suitcase, letting go of all that used to define him and give him certainty...
Jim frantically trying to resuscitate his Japanese alter-ego...
Spielberg has always been very conscious of the cinematic legacy he has inherited. Kurosawa may have hated it, but I can't imagine that David Lean wouldn't have admired this film as much as I do.