“Did you see a lot of dead people?”
The Impossible has been praised and ridiculed in almost equal measures. Proponents point to the authentic spectacle achieved with water tanks, miniatures, a subtle touch of CGI, and a grueling shoot, along with a trio of excellent performances. Detractors take aim at the whitewashed story and the exploitation of a national tragedy. I find that both factions have their fair points, but tend to side with those who find the drama compelling (though I find it’s melodramatics tiresome). After all, an argument that it is morally objectionable to swap out the Spanish family to whom the story belongs for one composed of rich white tourists is essentially a case that the movie shouldn’t exist to begin with. Studios fork over insane amounts of money for all kinds of atrocious films, but without exception those productions are greenlit with the expectation that they will turn a profit. And to be frank, the market for $45M disaster films with subtitles is a lot smaller than the one for those without. It’s just business, as they say.
In any case, Juan Antonio Bayona’s film is not a typical disaster movie. It doesn’t take an adventurous approach that turns a tragedy into a high octane cartoon à la Roland Emmerich. Instead, in its depiction of the Boxing Day Tsunami—a massive wave that ripped across Southeast Asia and killed hundreds of thousands of people—Bayona’s film approaches the calamity by focusing on a single family. Now, it’s true that the family in question is composed of actors selected for commercial appeal, including the likes of Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, and Tom Holland, but that’s only an issue if you’ve got a political drum to beat and does not diminish the emotional impact a smidge. In the first fifteen minutes or so, as the Bennett family arrives in Thailand, checks into their luxurious lodgings, unwraps their Christmas gifts (rendered in “home movie” style), launches Chinese lanterns into the night sky, etc. the ocean quietly looms over the proceedings, as we know that it will soon unleash its awful power.
Bayona’s technical achievement in depicting the tsunami is laudable—a seamless, large-scale integration of practical and computer-generated effects. Bodies are tossed about, debris explodes from collapsing buildings, the camera dips below the surface to capture the roiling underwater pandemonium. I had gone in with a basic knowledge of the story but minimal expectations regarding the merits of the production. As the carnage unfolded before my eyes I wondered aloud several times about how it was achieved. It looks so real, but of course you can’t just dump millions of gallons of muddy water on Naomi Watts and film it. In the prolonged chaos, Maria (Watts) and her oldest son Lucas (Holland) manage to grasp one another as the water sweeps them past myriad dangerous obstacles. When the flooding subsides—not before the mass of water recedes in another wild rush—they find themselves alone. Henry (McGregor) and the two other boys (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast) have presumably been killed by the wave; a reality that Maria, who is badly wounded in two different places, cannot confront but which Lucas verbalizes with stark finality. But of course, Ewan McGregor isn’t making a cameo. Henry has survived, along with the two younger children and a few other fortunate souls who are living atop the washed out remnants of the resort.
Maria and Lucas are rescued by a few helpful locals who have compassionately wandered out to the ravaged coastline in search of survivors and taken inland to find aid. Henry sends his boys with a stranger to a safer spot while he continues to scour the wreckage for his wife. Language barriers, scant resources, and dying cell phone batteries present obstacles as the melodramatic latter half of the film plays out. As the story gradually pulls the Bennett family toward a central location—an overcrowded and justifiably disorganized hospital—the younger boys, Lucas, and Henry are brought into tantalizingly close proximity while Maria lies dying on a cot. This leaves the viewer in a tricky spot, moved by the true story but unable to step back from the manipulative dramatic touches. (I wasn’t duped, but they tricked my wife and she cried.) The reunion is almost overwhelming. The strong performances from Watts, McGregor, and Holland (impossibly good for a debut performance), each of whom is given moments to show their range, really sell the drama. They’re so good, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook the poorly scripted dialogue. In a genre where one expects faux sentimentality propped up by orchestral swells, The Impossible succeeds in conveying real human tragedy through action, which is a welcome change of pace.
Despite the narrow mode of storytelling, Bayona occasionally zooms out to emphasize the scale of the disaster, showing panoramas of the destroyed landscape and having Lucas crisscross the over-capacity hospital trying to link separated family members. In this way, he manages to capture the widespread nature of the destruction while retaining the strong emotional pull of the personal story. Of course, many have made the case that the focus on non-Thai people is objectionable. It’s a fair point. On balance, this cataclysmic event affected the Thai people more than the foreigners vacationing there. But, again, it’s really a complaint that goes all the way back to the executives who greenlit the movie. Bayona isn’t pretending to tell a story that encompasses the entirety of the tsunami. Like Paul Greengrass’ United 93, he’s thrusting us into the action rather than showing events on a mass scale. To begin weaving in tangential stories about locals would sap the emotional thrust of the main narrative. And it’s not as if the local people are excluded. In fact, they’re roundly depicted as saintly humanitarians, going above and beyond to care for the people who are hurting and helpless regardless of their ethnicity.
Sure, it would have been more politically savvy to make a film that featured a variety of victims, but the real misstep here was to pack in too many elements that bluntly pander to cheap emotion when the raw power of the direction and performances would have sufficed.