“I was dreaming about God.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”

One of the predominant subjects of Steven Spielberg’s storytelling has been the separation of the nuclear family and the trauma this distressingly common reality inflicts upon children. In Empire of the Sun he is able to explore this idea directly by casting thirteen year old Christian Bale as Jim Graham, a young British boy living with his wealthy parents in Shanghai, who becomes a prisoner of war during WWII.

Spielberg has a tendency in these scenarios to overplay his hand with too much sentiment or an exaggerated sense of terror, but here we find a child protagonist who is frightened and angsty, sure, but also clever and determined and unaware of bleakest horrors occurring outside of the Japanese internment camp’s insular bubble. Jim does find a substitute father (John Malkovich), but again Spielberg is restrained with his sentiment as Basie selfishly abandons his protégé not once but twice. And his shell-shocked reunion with his biological parents is anything but mawkish. Indeed, the most horrifying part of the film might be when Jim beholds his unperturbed mom and dad as if they are aliens in the midst of an Olympic stadium surreally full of confiscated possessions.

It’s funny, then, that despite all that contortion Spielberg seems to do to keep his natural sensibilities in check, his film still seems more than a touch saccharine when set against its source material. The film is based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard, a writer primarily known for his experimental science fiction noted for its unblinking approach to atrocity. While we can characterize Spielberg’s film as not being entirely given over to sentiment, Ballard’s novel is downright cynical. As Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests in his 1987 essay “The China Syndrome,” the real-life experiences that formed Empire of the Sun (1984) explain the clear-eyed morbidity that characterized the author’s distressing body of work.

Rosenbaum’s lengthy criticism of the film—which, by my reading, can be summarized by saying that, contrary to the director’s preferred perception, it is not a deeply serious anti-war movie but a shape-shifting blockbuster that uses the war to explore Spielberg’s pet theme—is certainly on the mark, but it only applies if one is expecting Spielberg to be as skilled at defining a dreadful moral vision as he is with sweeping spectacle and the vague sense of mysticism that runs through most of his oeuvre. I don’t expect moral clarity of any persuasion from Spielberg, although my opinion has been formed by seeing most of his subsequent output. His ultimate master is the silver screen, not an ideology (coherent or not). And so I was mostly satisfied with his work on Empire of the Sun, which finds a nice middle ground between the spectacle, sentiment, and solemnity that tend to fall out of balance in the director’s “grown-up” efforts.

That being said, am I more likely to follow my viewing by watching more Spielberg or reading more Ballard? Probably the latter, but I do have more Spielberg DVDs than Ballard paperbacks.