Get the Feed
|
S I G H T S | review
Hollywood’s Not-So-Surprising Attack
What is Cuba Gooding, Jr. doing in Pearl Harbor? The answer to this question — which bothered me through most of the 173 minutes I spent watching the film — is, like many Hollywood answers these days, both blandly reasonable and alarmingly cynical. Gooding is here to provide an "historical" referent and to preempt charges of racism. He plays real-life hero Dorie Miller, a cook on the USS Arizona who manned the battleship’s gun turret during the attack, took out a plane, and became the first African American to win a Navy Cross (this gunning is a big time rah-rah moment, to which I will return below). While it may be a good thing that Miller is recognized, he’s unmistakably a token here. Gooding’s role has nothing to do with anything else that goes on in the film, which is not about history at all, but about making money. This in itself this isn’t startling, nor is it particularly heinous. Pearl Harbor is what it is: an over-determined blockbuster that complaints from movie critics couldn’t squelch. (The film took in an estimated $75.2 million over the four-day weekend, making it the second biggest Memorial Day weekend opening ever, after 1997’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World, which took in $90.2 million.) An event-movie, it’s designed to get people in seats, and perhaps grant them momentary blissful ignorance and "uplift." As such, Pearl Harbor is indeed overwhelming. Proud of itself and loud about it, this expensive ($140 million) extravaganza lines up all kinds of previous summer blockbuster ideas, taken from every predictable source, including several items in both Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s high-octane oeuvres, as well as Independence Day, Top Gun (how many feisty sidekicks named "Goose" can one genre stand?), Titanic, Braveheart (whose writer, Randall Wallace, also scripted this movie), U-571, and Saving Private Ryan, and even … Star Wars. The force is with the U.S. military in Pearl Harbor. Or rather, the force is with the pretty flyboys Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Danny (Josh Hartnett), who maneuver their planes like they’re playing really cool video games, or maybe reliving — and enhancing — Tom Cruise’s magic moments from that most famous big-bucks Hollywood-military complex recruiting vehicle. And like Top Gun, Pearl Harbor achieves its Star Wars effect by making the U.S. look like the underdog. Like Luke Skywalker and company, the U.S. military is depicted as a crew of scrappy rebels and kids brimming with natural talent and an absolute passion for flying. To this end, Rafe and Danny, who first appear as rural Tennessee boys (portrayed by Jesse James and Reiley McClendon) playing in an old crop-duster cockpit, grow up to be most excellent pilots, trained by Jimmy Doolittle himself (Alec Baldwin, who really needs to move on from this kind of tough-loving mentor role). As young men who want to fly in the service of their country, Rafe and Danny are distressed by U.S. isolationist policy. In this sentiment, the boys are — unbeknownst to themselves — in league with the leader of the free world, FDR (Jon Voight under a mound of face makeup). After they chafe and fret, the scene cuts to the president, chafing and fretting in his own way, which means tearing into his advisors and demanding they find a way to "do more" to help in the war effort than send money to the Allies.
Rafe doesn’t have a Cabinet to chew out, so he goes the more usual standard-movie-hero route: He volunteers to fly with Britain’s RAF, leaving behind his best bud Danny, as well as his brand new lady love, the virginal Nurse Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale). When Rafe’s plane is shot down and he’s lost — apparently dead — well, Danny and Evelyn are left to deal with it. Now stationed at Pearl Harbor, they share their grief, a pain so exquisitely orchestrated that it lands them in an embrace amidst the wondrously billowing silky whiteness inside a parachute warehouse that apparently has no security detail at night. As usual in such movie situations, the girl is serving as mediation for the boys’ real and most important love (though, as recent WWII movies go, this one isn’t nearly so gay as Enemy at the Gates). Evelyn and Danny’s Hawaiian idyll is unfortunately interrupted by 1) Rafe’s return; and 2) the Dec. 7 attack. It’s hard to say which event is worse, within this film’s emotional economy. You certainly know that both are coming, because 1) you’ve seen the trailer which advertises that both men love the same woman; 2) you never see Rafe die; and 3) you do see several scenes in which the Japanese are planning their attack. These scenes are unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, garden-variety evil empire-ish - the Japanese sailors and pilots look dour and regimented, all business and fierce ritual. This is the kind of imagery inevitably recalls movies from the 1940s and ’50s, when bashing entire races and national populations was the norm. Since those good old days, of course, PC has made such sweeping declarations suspect — even a movie so upfront crass as this one has to tone it down. But only slightly. The Japanese warriors march about, wear starched uniforms, and formally prepare to commit suicide in service of their emperor. True, Admiral Yamamoto (the venerable Mako) says at one point, in response to a minion’s compliment, that if he were truly "brilliant," he would have figured a way not to go to war, but for the most part, the portrayal is relentless: The Japanese troops are anonymous, ruthless, and implacable. Like Darth Vader’s Storm Troopers, they’re the bad guys and they deserve to get blown to bits. You know, of course, that the primary function of these Japanese-planning-the-attack scenes is to make you worry for the Caucasian lovebirds at Pearl Harbor, and, oh yeah, the 2,400 or so other characters who will be killed during the attack (several of whom you see decimated by terrible torpedo explosions or strafing gunfire — the movie spends almost an hour on this money sequence). The attack itself, spectacular and turbo-charged as it is, serves a function as well — to motivate the boys’ decision to bury their own hatchets (you see Rafe drunkenly hitting Danny, starting a bar brawl, and then a potential reconciliation as they have to elude base MPs). In fact, the boys are sleeping, post-brawl, in Danny’s convertible (I won’t even examine the erotic content of this scene), when the Japanese planes zoom in like a buzzing swarm. The attack drives all base dwellers into a frenzy to get payback from what they repeatedly call the "Japanese suckers." Natch; this is a watered-down version of the language that U.S. soldiers actually used at the time. You wouldn’t want the heroes of a summer blockbuster sounding like bigots now, would you? This is the problem that permeates Pearl Harbor. It’s clear that the filmmakers had some sense of the risk involved in revisiting this moment, which triggered a series of blatantly racist responses from individuals and the U.S. government (including, for instance, internment camps for U.S. citizens of Japanese descent). The Associated Press reports that the version opening in Japan and Germany on June 7, has "tweaked dialogue" to avoid offending viewers. Though Touchstone has released no "tweaking" details, it may be safe to assume that derogatory language such as the above will be altered. But changing the dialogue doesn’t change the film’s obvious evocation of old-time racism. To be fair, and apparently at the solicited suggestion of Japanese American Citizens League director John Tateishi, Pearl Harbor includes a fraction of a scene in which a wounded man exclaims that he won’t allow an Asian doctor to touch him. But as less than a minute in all this ugliness, it hardly impedes the film’s overriding xenophobia. And here’s where Cuba Gooding, Jr. comes in. Again he serves what is beginning to seem his primary function in movies, to make viewers feel "better" about historical iniquities. While Dorie Miller surely won’t make anyone concerned with the representation of the Japanese feel any better (his grandly portrayed take-down of the plane — whose pilot you do not see — elicited cheers from the audience with whom I saw the film), he does embody the hope that the U.S. will eventually be less prejudiced, if only because an epigraph notes the fact that he was awarded the Navy Cross and specifically, that he "wasn’t the last" African American to receive such an honor. (Eventually, you know, the military was officially desegregated.) In one of Dorie’s precious few brief scenes and his only contact with one of the movie’s principals, he admits to Evelyn his frustration at being stuck in the galley and unable to "fight for his country." This will no doubt remind you of Gooding’s starring role as Men of Honor’s Carl Brashear, another real life Navy hero turned into rousingly inspirational fiction. As Dorie Miller, Gooding delivers what he’s delivered in the past: sweat, tears, an instant of triumph at high cost, and a lavishly displayed devotion to a white captain who has a nice word for him. My concern here is not Gooding’s career choices, interesting as this subject may be. Rather, it is the cynical manipulation of Dorie Miller/Gooding by Pearl Harbor. While it uses Miller to represent "history," at the same time, the movie makes no pretense of being accurate elsewhere (um, Dan Aykroyd plays the single U.S. intelligence officer who seems to have a clue that the attack is coming; I rest my case.) Indeed, director Michael Bay has said, "We tried to recapture the feel of the attack. It’s not a history lesson." Even granting that, the movie’s means to get at this "feel" are deeply disturbing. Like all those other movies it pulls from — ID4, Titanic, etc. — Pearl Harbor sought a place in entertainment history as a kill-all-the-competition winner at the box office on its opening weekend. While it’s an ignoble cause, it is a common one, the reigning Force that’s with us. Cynthia Fuchs, an associate professor of English, African American studies, and film & media studies at George Mason University, is the film/TV editor for PopMatters and weekly film reviewer for the Journal Newspapers. Related Sites |
