Intersections

Rating: 10/10 (6 October 2006)

One earmark of a great work is how strongly it defies easy classification. The Bridge on the River Kwai could reasonably be called a war picture, a P.O.W. escape picture, a dark farce, an examination of leadership, or a debunking of the Great Man theory of historythese would all be correct and also fall short of describing its essence. The film is about a proud, valorous colonel and his rival, the ruthless leader of the Burmese P.O.W. camp at which he and his troops are captive. As the story progresses, the division between hero and villain gives way to a more significant consideration: under such austere conditions, who will be able to navigate the messy intersection of personal and institutional codes of honor and conscience? At first, the deck is stacked for the colonel (played with conviction and inscrutable dignity by Alec Guinness), as in an early scene when he pulls out a copy of the Geneva Convention to prevent his officers from participating in construction of the eponymous bridge to India or when he's willing to sit in a tiny enclosure ominously named "the oven" without food or water to uphold his principles. Eventually, his unwavering integrity breaks Gen. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), whose great pride is exposed as he weeps solitarily at his failure. Providing further counterpoint is an American soldier (William Holden), whose code of pragmatic survival has kept him alive for many years in the camp, and who cautions Nicholson that they are miles away from a civilization that respects government dictates.
During these early scenes of attrition, note the question marks Lean drops about the price of Col. Nicholson's fealty to exact military letter in such an environment, as when an officer drops dead from heat exhaustion, or the scores of others locked up in ovens in the blazing heat as punishment for his obdurateness. There is something of a heedless pedant lurking inside of him, of a stubborn child who will stop at nothing to win his point. These flickerings of personal investment foreshadow consuming obsessions yet to comeLean's masterstroke is to leave this story just as his hero is beginning to show cracks and intercut with Holden's escape from the camp, his recovery at a military hospital and his tepid agreement to aid an allied bombing of the bridge, his disreputable colors exposed in the process. However, for all of his insouciance, his identity is anything but fixed. Like Nicholson, he is by turns fatuous, noble, obtuse, principled or highly sympathetic, our understanding of him constantly in flux. The difference may just be Holden's lack of adherence to any rigid code in contrast to Nicholson, who permits the construction of the bridge to become an act of personal value, crucially supplanting his impersonal militarism.
This changing of the internal guard is beautifully evinced in a late scene involving Nicholson as he stands quietly triumphant on the overpass contemplating his achievement. He has overtaken the project, commemorated it as evidence of Western superiority. Saito is eclipsed in these shots, pushed to the background or out of the frame altogether, curiously sullen considering the monument will likely be instrumental to the Japanese war machine. As the camera slowly zooms in past Saito's dejected mien, Nicholson's words tell a more personal story: "you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life representsI don't know whether that kind of thinking is very healthy; but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!" As his jubilance emerges from some buried place, his prized officer's baton falls from his fingers into the river belowpride over duty. Momentarily, personal fulfillment has trumped national glory, and he has lost sight of the bridge's real significance. As will be proved, things of meaning and value have no dominion in such a place of madness. This is a great work.