Comforting, but brutal too

Rating: 7/10 (23 February 2013)

Two weeks ago my girlfriend and I went to the movies and decided to watch two movies instead of the usual one; we didn't think much in our double-feature, I mean in the selection which certainly needs always to be featuring two similar films but not for the obvious reasons (like for instance just because both were directed by the same dude, as Tarantino once remarked), but we just based our selection in the show times: FLIGHT at 17:00 hrs. and THE IMPOSSIBLE at 19:30 hrs.
We knew both were not feel-good experiences, but the similarities we found between them were more than we expected and luckily the double-feature was just damn right, with those magic movie moments – going out from a film that shows and is based upon an air crash to enter to one that begins with a sequence inside of a plane (not to mention that only a couple of a weeks ago I had enter a plane for the first time in years!).
FLIGHT (Robert Zemecki's comeback from "motion capture") and THE IMPOSSIBLE (Juan Antonio Bayona's first feature since 2007's EL ORFANATO) are about the consequences of, respectively, an air crash and a natural disaster. The structure in both is quite similar and none takes much time to show us the disaster (the big, important sequence we all know exists and therefore are waiting); in fact, both do it in a not very different way and at the moment of the impact (of both the plane with the surface and the tsunami) everything gets confused, the lose sound, certainly they are trying to put us in the victims' perspective.
Both films bring us hard and sad issues during almost the whole time to end in an optimistic note (the characters that suffered find some light). "Classic Hollywood style" you might be thinking, and yes, both are comforting for the average viewer (especially THE IMPOSSIBLE) but at the same time never forget that their subject is a tragic one – in FLIGHT the main character doesn't have the best ending (even if he finally finds some peace) and in THE IMPOSSIBLE the horror of the 2004 tsunami is always well exposed.
The great Terry Gilliam once criticized Steven Spielberg's SCHINDLER'S LIST, saying that "they save those few people, happy ending but that's not what the holocaust is about, it was about complete failure of civilization to allow 6 million people to die". Also, Gilliam compared the Spielbergs of this world with the Kubricks (it was Kubrick actually who first said that "SCHINDLER'S LIST is about success and the holocaust was about failure"); the first ones give you answers ("even if the answers are stupid") and comfort the audience, while the second ones leave you always intrigued, make you think and provoke ideas and discussions.
When you make a film about a human tragedy, namely the holocaust or one natural like the 2004 tsunami (which caused the death of approximately 280,000 persons), you're taking some important risks. When you decide to place a story about hope in any of those tragic scenarios, well, you're taking even more risks. THE IMPOSSIBLE begins with the words "based on a true story", and in fact this is remarked when the screen only shows "true story". Juan Antonio Bayona had to do that for obvious reasons, as the main story of his film is the one that comes for every 10 thousand tragedies of the tsunami.
Some images are simply brutal (a truck full of dead bodies, for instance). THE IMPOSSIBLE could be thought as a movie with a completely different horror to the one of EL ORFANATO – a graphic horror, which requires a daring work especially from its main actress Naomi Watts. And Watts is indeed daring, great and leaves no doubts why she got nominated for the Academy Award.
It would be easy to "destroy" THE IMPOSSIBLE as Gilliam did with SCHINDLER'S LIST, because and as I already said, Bayona's film turns to be comforting, with a climax that's totally a "movie thing" (even when it's based on facts), and since it constantly shows the good side of things (the protagonists helping other victims and vice versa). However, Bayona perfectly understands what this tragedy is all about – yes, the protagonists' ending is a happy one, yet in the same scene we can see the other people that weren't as lucky still suffering the consequences. For this I would say that in this film Bayona has aspects of both, the Spielbergs but also of the Kubricks of this world.
*Watched it on 08 February, 2013