JimBell Blog

Empire of the Sun

Under discussion:
Empire of the Sun (1987)

Under discussion:

Empire of the Sun (1987)

With that much talent, that much money, that many resources, what have Spielberg and his team said with Empire of the Sun? War is tough on families? Coming of age in a prisoner of war camp is miserable? I don’t know.

Maybe the movie is more focused and tries to say something about the main character, Jim. At eleven years of age, he is torn from his parents and winds up in a prison camp near Shanghai. But what is Spielberg saying about the kid? Although I’m not sure, there are tantalizing glimpses. First comes the contrast between Jim’s very privileged life in the British sector of Shanghai and his life on the street with Basie and then in prison camp. The problem here is that in the first part of the movie, we don’t really get to know Jim. Although we see a lot of him, we never look into his eyes to see him as a real person. It’s as if he is playing the role of precocious rich kid instead of being a person who happens to be a kid who happens to be precocious and rich. In this regard, The White Countess, set in Shanghai at the same time, is far superior because the two main characters, played by Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson, seem to come to life organically, be realistically complex, and be people we can empathize with if not like.

In the middle section of the movie, we see Jim growing up in the camp, becoming the king street urchin, dashing from one deal to another in high spirits. The problem here is that we mistakenly think Jim is thriving on camp life. In the movie’s pivotal scene, however, we realize that he has been desperate for affection, that dashing around “doing things for people” is in large part a) keeping himself so busy that he can ignore his loneliness, and b) trying to cultivate replacements for his lost parents. He is also using his fierce intellect to distance himself from his emotional loss. So, when the Americans are bombing and Jim is jumping around on the roof enthralled but endangered, his friend, the camp doctor, dashes to rescue him, as buildings are falling all around. Jim spouts some abstract stuff about how the runway they built for the Japanese was sort of the prisoners’ runway, and the doctor says sternly that, no, it’s the Japanese military’s runway, and “don’t think so much!” At this stern and heart-felt admonition, young Jim cracks. He sobs that he can’t remember what his mother and father looked like. And then he babbles some Latin conjugations as the doctor carries him down stairs.

In the final portion of this two-and-a-half-hour movie, Jim is a bit deranged. The problem is that we’re not quite sure how or how much he is deranged. Or is he just sort of “shell shocked”? Or has he grown up so fast that he really hasn’t integrated everything he’s learned? No, he is definitely losing touch with reality because when his father and mother show up with hordes of other parents to look for their lost children, he does not recognize his parents even though they look exactly like they did when he was separated from them 3 or 4 years before. He ignores his father, but he has a glimmer about his mother. He examines her nails (we don’t know why), he reaches up and smudges her lip stick (we don’t know why), he takes off her hat and feels her hair (we don’t know why), hugs her, and the movie ends. And Spielberg is saying that . . . ?

posted on Monday, July 30, 2007 1:28 AM by JimBell

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womanwithinandwithout
Posted Friday, August 17, 2007 12:17 PM

I agree that much may not be understood about Jim, except that he's a wealthy child in a pretty horendous situation and he has to become fairly industrious to survive, but I feel that the most intersting part of the film is in the camp where the character (forgot name) played by John Malkovich is the King Rat of the camp and his realtionship with Jim...and overall, I think spielberg is intersted in the 'survival spirit' and also the 'opportunist tendency/selfish tendency' of humans...very animalistic in that way. It is easy to follow the film because a kid is easy to sympathsize with and a kid that finally sees his mother again, well...that just feels good. I'm intersted in the other film you mentioned--I might have to check that out sometime.

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