Based on the 2010 New York Times best-selling biography, written by Laura Hillenbrand, the film opens with a soundtrack sounding like Lord of the Rings – all at once powerful and something to be taken seriously, much like its director, the ever-fabulous, and competent Angelina Jolie. The story focuses on WWII fighter planes, and on our hero, Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell).
Then we cut to his childhood, where “Dark and light” are the sermon at church…and that we must ‘live through the light…not to wage war on the sins of man….but to forgive them…smile on the sinner. Love thy enemy.” So we know there’s a lot of church going on, and Zamperini’s parents, both immigrants, scream at him in Italian when he smokes cigarettes. That’s about all we know of his youth…delinquency….
“If you can take it you can make it” are the words of his older brother, Peter, who tells Zamperini that with practice, he can make the track team. He goes on to be an Olympic track star in a split second. Soon after the film transitions to Louis as a young man leaving for Germany….”A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory” is what Peter now preaches. It seems recipes for success are drilled into his head wherever Zamperini goes.
But even if the biopic feels old-fashioned, forced and whimsical – with the power of prayer at its core – the movie is still brilliantly executed, with a solid screenplay by the Coen brothers (of all people) and Richard LaGravanese lending his Oscar-worthy weight. Jolie uses a steady and earnest hand directing her second film (following In the Land of Blood and Honey) and the actor, Jack O’Connell, btw, is virtually an unknown British actor, who does a fine job reminiscent of a young Charlton Heston.
As the story moves along, Zamperini survives a plane crash in the Pacific where he spends forty-seven days on a raft (is that possible?) and the story turns all Life of Pi. As an audience we’re still trying to come to terms with Zamperini’s parched lips, blistered face and dehydrated form, when he’s taken into a Japanese prison camp and now the movie becomes ‘two years a slave.’ Suddenly his childhood recipes/mantra for survival have to kick in…and it’s serious.
But unlike (for example) Fury (Jolie’s husband, Brad Pitt’s film) that had us digging fingers into our armrest or perhaps The Deer Hunter, of the late 70s, with its POW angle, we’re never riveted to this journey that misses elements of family, love and patriotism…a longing for ‘home.’ This instead felt one dimensional. If the movie rests on endurance, then we needed to know more of Zamperini’s childhood aside from the ‘take it to make it” mantra. In this two-plus hours of doom and gloom you find yourself saying “What a sad story,” but then what? Where is the narrative train that makes a book a great film? Sadly Zamperini didn’t live to see this come to the big screen, but sadly it won’t make a top ten list either. Sadly Unbroken is broken. ♚ ♛