Jolie can and will get there, here is what needs work in the meantime

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2015)

To start with the good: Angelina has a beautiful photographic eye paired with a strong sense of pacing in the way she edited her shots as well as timing in the way she had the actors deliver their lines. The combination of these factors gave us both touches of visual nostalgia and of understated realism that removed us from the typical Hollywood schlock and elevated the experience to something that at certain points felt divine. The opening sequences are gorgeous and well paced and there are many shots through out the film that are beautiful. She chose a tremendous actor (Takamasa Ishihara) to play "the Bird" and he made the character's intensity and motivations palpable. Domhall Gleeson as "Phil" was also a great choice. While a lot of people had trouble with the slow and endless torture scenes, I personally did not. I found these sequences and their drudgery necessary in order to explain how much this man was tested. The film felt more European or Japanese in tone in these parts, and if it were black and white, parts of it could have easily felt like French or Japanese New Wave cinema. And, in part, this is some of the problem, Jolie's film was really three films in one- a Hollywood war film, an art film and a sentimental biopic and for this reason the directorial motivations are disjointed which left room for error. I walked away wondering if this was a humble biopic about her friend, Louie, or a film meant for an Oscar? If this was a film meant to be a humble biopic, then it is perfect. It is a sweet retelling of what her friend went through and it is filled with love and integrity, but if it was meant for an Oscar several things would have to change to get it there. First, the choice of Jack O'Connell is wrong, or at least what he gave to us was wrong. What we needed was a feisty Italian. We needed to see how the very thing he was persecuted for as a child (being Italian) gave him the sense of charisma, grit and passion to survive his circumstances. We needed passion and fire, we needed to fall in love with him. What we got was someone too contained, cool, and detached from his feelings for us to get close- we liked him, but we couldn't emotionally invest in him at the level we needed to. His containment backfired in the film, because the character needs to first overcome himself before he can overcome everything else and we did not feel that he developed in this way. Imagine for a moment if Joaquin Phoenix was in that role. That very charismatic, passionate man can make his audience feel heaven and hell because he feels it first- he is entirely committed to torturing himself on our behalf - this intensity is what we needed here in my opinion. I think O'Connell has the talent to get there, but I don't feel he did get there for some reason. I also believe there needed to be more character development in the "young" Louie. If the point of the piece is that he learns to be a great Olympian (and subsequently a great soldier) from his brother who sets him straight after he experiences discrimination and hardship, I wanted to see him do more than smoking and drinking in reaction to it. I want to feel his sense of longing to fit in and his frustration at not fitting in which motivated him to be bad. I wanted to feel what personal obstacles he had to overcome that made him strong enough to endure what he went through in the war. If clear motivations and character development had been more strongly established in the beginning, then we would have been rooting more for him when he was in the camps and out at sea. Instead he was sort of ready-made and well adjusted without a lot of struggle. Sure, his brother gave him a few words of advice and taught him to run that wasn't enough for us to root for him. We needed to feel that INTERNAL struggle. This would be much deeper than a bunch of bullies hitting him- this would have started before they ever did. This lack of struggle made his character and his motivations a little flat when we see him later in the camps. What we need to see is that he survived the first round of bullying as a child, and we know how he did that- by becoming a great Olympian and now he's going to survive these new bullies in the camps because he's a great Olympian. We needed to connect all the dots to figure out how he survived. There were also little things that took this down from Oscar level. The serif font selections weren't my favorite and I had wished we didn't see the dates when they were out at sea. What we needed was to FEEL the time out at sea, not be given the dates. There is also too much exposition at the end which took it away from Oscar potential and put it into pure biopic or scrapbook and too much in Jolie's head. As much as it warmed my heart to see Louie run the Olympics at 80, I had to question the pairing of a Cohen Brother's script with these final inserts- a simple title telling us he did this all of this may have been better than the footage and pictures- or better yet, make the story about him returning to Japan to forgive his captors- that part of the story is what intrigues me most and dovetails the most with Jolie's message. Jolie is a beautiful and awesome person, if she keeps working on her directorial abilities she will get there.