Done "The Impossible"

There is a difference between the movies that are commonly viewed as "Oscar bait," and the movies that tend to actually win awards. "Oscar bait" tends to be reserved for those movies that are clearly playing on the trends to get ahead, but don't offer much else substantively. If you look at this year's crop of nominees, and what they share in common is that they're all auteur driven films. Steven Spielberg made "Lincoln" because he wanted to make a film about Abraham Lincoln, not because he was appealing to the Academy's noted penchant for historical dramas, and its recognition is largely due to the talent involved on the project. "Oscar bait," by contrast, is only notable for its subject matter: "Hitchcock," "Hyde Park on Hudson," and "Promised Land," for instance.

And so we come to "The Impossible," directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. The director's most well known film prior to this was the horror tale, "The Orphanage." At first glance "The Impossible" looks like classic Oscar bait. It's about the aftermath of the 2004 South Asian tsunami, and follows the travails of a family that is separated by the disaster and trying to reunite against the odds. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor play Maria and Henry Bennett, who are vacationing with their three young sons, Lucas (Tom Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin), and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) who are vacationing at a resort in Thailand when the wave hits. The premise alone is an obvious tearjerker, and I was turned off by the heavy-handed trailers. The movie seemed calculated to deliver mainstream-friendly schmaltz, so I came into "The Impossible" with low expectations.

I underestimated Bayona. In other hands, I don't think the material would have worked at all, but here we have a more than capable director who recreates the experience of being swept away by a tidal wave, agonizing second by second. A major chunk of the film follows only Maria and her oldest son Lucas, who are washed away to a rural inland area. Maria is badly injured, and they have to navigate the ruined landscape to get to safety and find help. The filmmaking is very immediate and in the moment, heightening the emotional and physical states of the characters. Everything except their survival becomes a background concern. It's harrowing to watch and so beautifully executed, particularly the production design. I have no idea how Bayona and his crew managed to create some of the brutal visuals we see on the screen, which couldn't possibly have been all CGI. In fact, the tidal wave here makes the highly lauded tidal wave sequence in Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter" look like amateur hour.

The performances are very good, though there's really very little to the characters as they're meant to be universal figures. Naomi Watts has been getting the bulk of the attention, but Ewan MacGregor is just as strong here, and he gets a breakdown scene that is one of the highlights of the movie. Tom Holland as Lucas also shoulders a good portion of the narrative by himself, and I'd be surprised if we don't see him in more after this. Outside of this family unit, the movie boasts countless uncredited extras that fill in the corners of chaotic hospital scenes and crowd scenes that are some of the film's most striking. There's never a moment when Bayona forgets that he's dealing with a mass catastrophe that affected thousands and thousands of lives, and the story of the Bennetts is only one out of a vast multitude.

"The Impossible" becomes more and more conventional as it goes on, following the pattern of other disaster epics. There are some depicted events that are blatant emotional manipulation, and the movie ends exactly the way you think it will. However, by the time we got to those predictable turns, I was feeling pretty charitable toward the film. No, "The Impossible" didn't have a particularly strong script or characters with any dimensions, but it succeeded in faithfully capturing a human experience. I have plenty of minor reservations about the tweaking of the characters' ethnicities (the real life family was Spanish), the use of the kids to tug at our heartstrings, and the choice to focus almost solely on the experiences of foreigners. However, credit has to go where credit is due.

"The Impossible" is an exceptionally well made film that is entirely successful at doing what it set out to do. Though "The Impossible" may look like Oscar bait, it's better than that. And Hollywood should take note that the film that so many people thought was commercial Hollywood product, featuring a couple of major Western film stars, was actually a product of multiple Spanish studios. Bayona and much of the other key creative talent were also Spanish. Looks like those promising foreign talents don't actually need to go to Hollywood in order to make big Hollywood films anymore. And that should keep Hollywood on its toes.
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