Jim Graham: Christian Bale
Basie: John Malkovich
Dr. Rawlins: Nigel Havers
10 April 2003
by Jasmine Park
Christian Bale has long deserved the success and fame that Leonardo DiCaprio has unduly had. After a lengthy, uncredited career, Bale inherited his breakout role as Patrick Bateman in 2000's American Psycho only after DiCaprio backed out; and he hasn't been in a decent film since. Meanwhile, DiCaprio got the opportunity to ruin Scorsese's Gangs of New York playing Amsterdam Vallon, a role that Bale would have been able to honor. Bale is the only young actor working today who might have been able to give Daniel Day-Lewis a run for his money.
At the age of thirteen, Bale starred in his feature film debut, Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, and it remains his best performance to date. I cannot think of another studio film that demands more intelligence and nuance from a child lead. Bale appears in nearly every scene, and he never once displays that awkward hesitation so characteristic of child performances, even when Spielberg ladles on the hokiness. The role is exceptionally complicated, but Bale is nothing short of perfect.
The film is an adaptation from the memoir by J.G. Ballard, who relates his experience growing up as the son of upper-crust English expats in 1941 Shanghai. We first see Jim, played by Bale, singing in the choir at his prep school; the music is a lovely Irish ballad that recurs in the film and is treated like a religious hymn. He lives in the blessed ignorance of Western wealth with his well-intentioned but distant parents in the International Settlement. In these early scenes, Spielberg easily captures the comfort of Jim's life, so protected in a colony whose foreignness borders on hostility, and where, chauffeured through the market in his family's beautiful Packard, the Chinese crowds press upon their car staring in at them.
Jim's abiding passion is for airplanes; he lovingly flies his models on lawns at tea parties, and one day, to his father's astonishment, he declares that he wants to grow up to become a Japanese fighter pilot. But after the Japanese have invaded the city, Jim is separated from his parents in the population's mad rush to leave Shanghai. The havoc in the street is one of the film's best moments; Jim stands above the crowd crying out for his mother, who is carried away by the mob, leaving Jim to fend for himself. He eventually meets an American hustler named Basie (John Malkovich) and his cronie, Frank (Joe Pantoliano), who immediately sniffs a rival in young Jim. All three are eventually herded with other Westerners into a Japanese internment camp outside of Shanghai that neighbors a Japanese airbase. The location allows Spielberg to stage the film's few embarrassingly earnest moments of racial sympathy, where Jim, in childish idolatry, befriends the Japanese pilots.
The second hour of the film is taken up by Jim's new life of squalor and survival in the camp. He displays a talent for changing his character to suit the moment, taking care of many of the more helpless prisoners while earning the respect of the ill-tempered Japanese sergeant (Masatô Ibu) who runs the place. Basie becomes the ringleader of the Americans in the camp (including a young Ben Stiller), and his refuge is a haven of contraband goodies like shaving cream and magazines. Jim plays the situation like a game and easily forgets his former life, and eventually the faces of his parents.
The film contains a number of memorable scenes: Jim running along a rooftop in the camp at eye-level with the incoming American planes like a boy in love, screaming, "P-51! Cadillac of the skies!"; a dazzling desert haven where all the priceless possessions of the wealthy in Shanghai have been gathered; the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima that lights up the sky at the moment when Jim is frantically trying to bring a neighbor back to life, and he imagines that the white light is her soul rising to heaven. With these scenes, the film becomes a sublime distillation of a child's fantasy world in a time of war and terror.
The ending of Empire of the Sun is strikingly similar to that of A.I. (2001), where, at last, parents and child are reunited in a seemingly happy resolution. But the ending of Empire is in fact troubled by our knowledge that something irreparable has already occurred, and that no pat finish can account for the horrors that Jim has experienced. The dead look in his eyes is not miraculously dispelled when at last his parents find him, and even as he touches his mother's hair in disbelief, it is impossible to think that Jim will ever be the boy he once was. There is something broken in his character by this point, and it makes the film all the more affecting that even a return to his former life will not resolve his troubles.
Empire of the Sun was one of Spielberg's few box-office failures during the 1980's. After becoming America's directorial darling and churning out popular hit after hit, movie audiences were simply not ready for complication or ambiguity from Spielberg. A.I. received a similarly lukewarm reception for the same reason; the masses adore Spielberg when he's a cheerful simpleton, but the second he shows any sign of innovation, they retreat. Yet the stubborn defiance he displays with these few, perverse films is what I have always admired most about him - these moments of doubt, when childhood doesn't seem so appealing, and dreams take on the strange hue of an oncoming nightmare.
Warner Bros. presents a film directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J. G. Ballard. Running time: 152 minutes. Rated PG.
A young Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun.
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