An Intimate Epic

Rating: 10/10 (29 June 2005)

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is neither an anti-war, nor a pro-war (if there is such a thing) film. I'm not really sure just what such designations actually mean. "Bridge ..." is richer and more personal than a simple depiction of epic events. In "Bridge ...", the epic supports the intimate. If you miss this, you miss a lot. "Bridge ..." is about the human heart first, and war second.
After 47 years, it remains a powerful illustration of our failed hopes as human beings. (something sorely lacking in the more technically pre-occupied action films of today.) Oddly, it's an able companion to the less cinematic "A Streetcar Named Desire", or "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" -- full of irony -- brilliant, subtle, and ultimately believable because we've all, in one way or another, experienced the feelings and the fears of the principals.
You can't miss, entirely, this interpretation if you watch the film carefully, and open your senses to the quieter moments: Saito weeping alone having lost the battle of wills, or sending a letter home (Even a brutal camp warden can do that -- nation, race, codes of honor notwithstanding); Saito's confession to Nicholson that he had wanted to be an artist but that his father thought he "belonged in the army"; the scene on the completed bridge, which Saito begins, looking at the sunset and quietly declaring - "beautiful!", with a detached Nicholson attributing the observation to the bridge (his obsession); Nicholson, in turn, speaking of his thoughtful realization that he is "nearer the end than the beginning", and wondering, aloud, what the sum total of his life has meant "to anyone or anything". . . Rescued by the bridge, Nicholson, at last, has something of value to leave behind.
. . . Neither, are the supporting characters free of the ironies of our existence. Shears yearns for a world in which there's no place for war, but who's final act is the ultimate act of war -- killing the enemy close-up, with a knife, and ending his own life in the same cause as did the prisoner he buried, and who's name he could not recall. Joyce, the recruit, who's pre-war occupation consisted of checking and re-checking columns of figures, wants the challenge of "thinking". The denouement of his aspiration nearly costs Warden his life and, ultimately, costs him his own.
The climactic irony (Shakespearian to be sure) comes with Nicholson's realization that he has been living in "his own" and not "the world's" reality. A "friendly fire" mortar round, exploded behind him, shakes him back to "the way things are". . . "What have I done?", he asks before he falls on the plunger that will explode his own -- his only -- "beautiful creation" (ironically, again, his enemy's confirmation).
We all strive to create, or just contribute to, a world in which our dreams can flourish. This includes the powerful, who approve the wars, and the powerless, who fight them. But, often, we find the realities of that world make the dreams of our part in it impossible to realize: The "madness" which, above the carnage, Clipton desperately verbalizes.
"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is a true classic because it can be so many things to so many people -- and it is timeless: The kids and many adults will enjoy the action, the historians will enjoy critiquing its accuracy, veterans will re-visit the comradeship of the "trenches", and film buffs will revel in the picture's rhythm, drama, and well-executed technical elements.
In the final analysis, the settings, costumes, historicity, etc. are only "helpers" (however beautifully provided by Lean and company). Its bigger theme -- the aspirations of the human heart, and the painful surrendering of those aspirations -- are what we are most urgently invited to experience in this extraordinary film. 10 out of 10.