boys’ movie of the week
You gotta laugh. In the press release for Pearl Harbor, the new mega-budget flick about the surprise Japanese attack that destroyed the United States Pacific Fleet in 1941 and brought the US into World War II, there is a profile of producer Jerry Bruckheimer. He is described as “a film-maker who loves telling a story with fully developed characters who go through a process to learn something. His films take us, the audience, through those same processes, and we leave the theatre enriched by the unforgettable characters, excited by the great stories and intrigued by the new experiences.”
If you took that seriously, you’d wonder what to make of Bruckheimer’s previous films. Flashdance unforgettable? Beverley Hills Cop a learning process? Top Gun enriching? Gone in Sixty Seconds fully developed characters?
The only enriching aspect of these movies is revealed in the paragraph after the one quoted above, which informs us that Bruckheimer’s films “have grossed billions”. That’s the real point. The only Bruckheimer film I can think of that was more than blockbuster pap was Enemy of the State, and even that was no deep masterpiece. Good stories, yes, maybe Bruckheimer can sometimes make that happen. But he’s better known as the king of explosions.
Which is what we get a lot of in Pearl Harbor. That part of the film is, indeed, very impressive. It’s hard to resist the impulse to cheer as the great fleet goes up in flames, with giant battleships tilting precipitously as they sink, explosions bursting exhilaratingly all around them, warplanes screaming across the skies. It’s like a computer wargame with awesomely realistic effects.
Except that we’re supposed to be on the side of the Americans. Sorry, I forgot. I must have been repressing the endlessly repeated propagandistic message of the film, embodied by the one-dimensional Gary Cooper hero in the form of Ben Affleck (“Not anxious to die, sir, just anxious to matter”) and his aw-shucks buddy Josh Hartnett, by the plucky little nurses (including love interest Kate Beckinsale), by the John Wayne portrait of gung-ho flying ace Colonel Doolittle (a jowly Alec Baldwin), by the sentimental patriotism of the bombs painted or hung with messages for those nefarious Japs, by the indomitable President Roosevelt (an equally jowly Jon Voight) … You’d have thought there was a war on.
Not that the Japanese are demonised, oh no. After all, they are now major US trading partners. They’re just inscrutably hieratic aliens, whose war room is some kind of pond enclosure hung with those vertical flags they are so fond of. Can this possibly be historically accurate? Or shouldn’t one expect historical accuracy? I suppose a clue is provided by the fact that Pearl Harbor is directed by Michael Bay, who made a huge hit of the Bruckheimer-produced Armageddon, which was about a catastrophic alien attack on Earth, with lots of lovely explosions, followed by a heroic counter-attack by a small band of almost suicidally brave humans.
That’s pretty much what happens in Pearl Harbor, after the destruction of the American fleet (and after we’ve surveyed the scene of carnage, accompanied by a choir of angels). A small band of almost suicidally brave Americans engage in raid on the Japanese, just to give them a bloody nose and boost morale. It is made clear that the US will finally win the war.
“Victory belongs to those that [sic] believe in it the longest,” we are portentously told. Someone is trying to fudge the issue that, in reality, victory belongs to those who possess atomic bombs and are prepared to drop them on civilians.
This final section is meant to get us cheering for the right side, to boost our morale. The only problem is that this is now two hours later, with another 40 minutes to go, and we’re pretty exhausted by it all, so our cheers are rather feeble.
At least it finally resolves the issues raised on the personal level by the earlier interactions of Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale, whose romantic entanglements threaten to overwhelm the bigger picture (unless they are the bigger picture). This is a relief, because as soon as the Affleck-Beckinsale-Hartnett triangle forms in the movie one immediately calculates the odds according to the standard Hollywood geometry and the results are exactly as predicted, down to the name of the child born at the end. One feels so enriched.
Pearl Harbor is not entirely unenjoyable. Hartnett is pleasing to the eye (is all this best-buddy homoeroticism intentional?), and there are some unexpectedly funny lines in the otherwise clich-ridden script. And, of course, there’s the primal thrill of those huge, fully developed explosions. Just try to remember which side you’re on.