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I'd been jonesing for a good movie cry for awhile now so The Impossible came to me right at the right moment - my boyfriend was out of town, I didn't have to expose my blubbering to the public since I could watch it at home - perfect! The film does a lot of great things and has some very fine acting going on in it but even through my sobs I could see its issues - I think it needed more time at the start to let us get to know these folks, and it really meanders for the last half an hour or so, and it panders for those teardrops on probably too many occasions. Still, I didn't give a shit. God how I cried! Big fat sprays like a Sea World tank. And its dedication to the grueling dehumanizing embarrassing nature of tragedy was much appreciated - I think even more than that heralded leg-gash it was the moment when Naomi's breast unknowingly hangs out in front of her humiliated son that probably hit me even harder. That this comes from the director of The Orphanage makes much more sense now - this is a horror film, and not just because of the blood and screaming and all that, but the spiritual and emotional violence that this sort of chaos brings upon us. The film's putrescence is gorgeous too (perhaps inappropriately, at times) - those shots of bodies spinning and being bashed about beneath the surface were violence as poetry.
I do want to take a second, since I mentioned it on Twitter, to give a shout out to Ewan - Naomi's great (the moment when she first surfaces and just begins screaming and screaming was primal and harrowing), so no knock on her, but Ewan is great too and it seems like time and time again he's wonderful and nobody gives him notice. I know - poor little handsome charming and rich Ewan McGregor, we weep for him so. But that scene where he finally gets to use a phone to call home is devastating - the way his emotions, previously numbed and kept under wraps, just explode into body-shaking helplessness. And somehow Alan Arkin gets a nomination over this. It's no good! Shut the whole town down - Hollywood is broken!
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5 comments:
Glad you liked. Yup, Ewan is just fantastic here (as is Naomi). I actually loved that they showed so little of the family before the disaster because it fits in with that I think is the film's disinterest in showing the Bennetts as "special" people. Even as they're the family at the centre, the film's entire ideology seems to be one where their "success" is pure happenstance, and spending too much time on them removed from the disaster might have worked against that.
I feel exctly the same way, and I also have to say that if there was one child performance that needed to be honored in 2012 it was Tom Holland's performance. He just floored me, always acting his age unlike some other people *cough*Chloe Grace Moretz*cough* and yet he still delivers a great performance. And unlike Quavenzhane, he's old enough for us to know that the performance did come from him.
Great post and responses. Tom Holland and Ewan and Naomi were all top-notch. The film did indeed have issues, but that scene with the cell phone and an earlier scene where Holland impulsively hugs a young boy in the hospital were deeply moving.
My thoughts exactly, too. Thanks for reading the movie the same way I did. I feel less of a crazy man for defending a movie, and particularly these performances from the haters. Flaws (evident in the way you mention, at first sight) and all, you can't help but being hit by it, just like a giant wave. In the same way, every time we saw the girl in the red coat or heard the violins in Schindler's List we knew we were being manipulated, and we didn't care, we got into it.
I'll only add that the final shot, the shot of the sea after the recovered happiness in the plane, points in the direction you mention, that of a horror movie. It plays like the stereotypical ending of a good horror movie, the shot of the threat that is far from being over. Here not in the shape of a resurrected serial killer, but on that of the natural catastrophe.
Also, Tom Holland was nominated for breakthrough performance by an actor for the Goyas, and though he didn't win (I think he gave the real breakthrough performance of the nominees) his spontaneity hugging Bayona when he won Best Director in the upset of the night (the big winner was Blancanieves) won me over again. Bright future, if he gets in the right hands.
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