A challenge for everyone involved that was beautifully and maturely handled

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2013)

The one thing consistent with all disaster films is you can never sit comfortably within the opening scenes because you often know what is coming and you just can bear the thought of it. J.A. Bayona's The Impossible is a picture that captures a disaster all too realistically, as it depicts the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, killing an upwards of 300,000, destroying homes, soiling towns, and leaving families and memories in drenched and irreplaceable shambles. The thought of the last thing one sees is a wall of filthy, rushing water coming towards you at a breakneck speed is unthinkable.
We center on Henry and Maria Bennett (Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) and their three children Lucas (Tom Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin), and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) who are on holiday in Thailand at a gorgeous resort when a tsunami from the Indian Ocean rushes into the mainland, destroying every thing in its path. Trees are taken right out of the ground, cars are trampled, houses are destroyed, people are taken for a ride underwater that they may not come out of, etc.
During the scenes of the tsunami, we are provided with harrowing images of bodies being flung and tossed underwater. Maria, herself, is thrown into numerous items of debris, including impaling her leg on a tree branch and almost having her breast taken off. When the water finally ceases, Maria and Lucas wind up reconnecting and venture to find some sort of relief and hopefully find the rest of their family. In the process, they take a young boy named Daniel along, who was almost crushed by failing rubble. He is a sweet little tyke, whose innocence is captured beautifully, including a scene where he comforts Maria (who keep in mind is still a stranger) by softly rubbing her hair in the face of tragedy. The scene itself is absolutely adorable, evoking the beauty of human sympathy.
Meanwhile, Henry, Thomas, and Simon are still at the resort, with Henry being scratched and bloodied, but still able-bodied unlike his wife. He tells his children to stick with a larger group while he searches for mom and Lucas, and the story of a family hoping to reunite with each other ventures on.
I've often discussed emotional manipulation and how much I dislike it. I feel it's a road filmmakers go down to achieve an undeserved sentimental reaction. Instead of using tactics of the screenwriter, films often use unnecessary events that evoke sadness and usually buoys them with an obvious soundtrack. The Impossible uses some of that, mainly along the lines of musical manipulation, yet there's so much detail, humanity, and life that comes along with this tragedy that one could easily forget about all that. Films like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the more recent Les Misérables are more to an advantage in the idea of emotional manipulation because they can simply say something like, "look at these very depressing people." They emptily showcase depression, where The Impossible almost forces you to put yourself in the shoes of this family and think what you would do.
I think my biggest problem with The Impossible, even though it does so much right, is the fact that the film takes place in Thailand, the story we're given is based off the true events of a Spanish family, and the cast is almost unanimously white. It's a subtle feature, that isn't a complete turn off unless you make it one, but it's a little disconcerting and questionable that the characters the film primarily focuses on are white in a country that is certainly complete in its Asian and Spanish demographic.
Yet I'll stop there before I start some race war I do not plan to fight. It's a petty feature that shouldn't distract from the film at hand. I stated in my review of Life of Pi that it was the most emotional movie event of the year, and that I found Les Misérables underwhelming emotionally. This film reassured that I could still be greatly effected by a film in strong, moving ways. There are several scenes in The Impossible that evoke tears, so many actually that I left the theater physically and mentally exhausted. One scene in particular is when Henry is with many other people in the dead of night, with a man passing around a cell phone urging them to call their loved ones. Henry calls his close friend, and through tears explains vaguely what happened before assuring he'll reconnect with his wife and son before hanging up. The man tells Henry that he can not end a conversation like that and gives the phone back to Henry, who elaborates more clearly the second time around. It's a simple scene, likely to go unnoticed by many viewers of the film, but it shows the magnitude of the situation to such a degree that you can't even coherently explain it without sobbing or simply questioning it to certain extremes.
Naomi Watts has just been nominated for Best Actress in the 85th Academy Awards, and her role deserves it. While she spends much of the film barely conscious and clinging on to life on a hospital bed, she is given a very physically demanding role that challenges a performer to provide the audience members with believability and sentiment and she achieves it through a heart-wrenching, motherly performance. McGregor does fine work as a conflicted father, and the children, mainly Tom Holland, are quite capable here, expressing their innocence in several sequences, including the fear of seeing your mother in great pain when you're used to seeing it the other way around. The Impossible is one of the most affecting disaster films in quite sometime, and one of the saddest dramas of the 2012 year.