Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken arrives with the weight of Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book behind it and a true story that seems engineered for the screen: Louis Zamperini, an American Olympian, survived 47 days adrift in a raft after his bomber ditched in the Pacific during World War II, then endured captivity in a series of Japanese prisoner of war camps. The film was released in the United States on December 25, 2014, after a world premiere in Sydney on November 17, 2014 and a London premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square on November 26, 2014. It grossed $163 million worldwide, a financial success. It is also, for long stretches, a film that mistakes endurance for drama.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Jack O’Connell and the Raft
The film’s best asset is Jack O’Connell as Zamperini. He plays the part with a lean, watchful stillness that holds the screen even when the script gives him little to do but suffer. The raft sequence is the clearest example. After his B-24 Liberator goes down on a search-and-rescue mission in a war-weary plane that loses engine power, Zamperini, Phil and Mac are the only survivors. They drift on two rafts. On day 27 a Japanese fighter plane strafes them. Mac dies six days later. On the 47th day, Japanese sailors capture Louie and Phil.
That stretch should be the film’s core, and Jolie shoots it with real scale. Roger Deakins’s cinematography earned praise for good reason: the water, the glare, the shrinking rafts. But the movie keeps cutting away from the men to remind us of the stakes, and the effect is to flatten them. O’Connell and Domhnall Gleeson, as Phil, do the work. The film rarely trusts them to carry a scene without a cutaway or a swell.
Torrance and the 1936 Olympics
The flashbacks to Zamperini’s youth in Torrance, California, are where Unbroken is most conventional and least convincing. Louie steals, drinks and smokes. He is bullied for his Italian ethnicity. His brother Pete, played by Alex Russell, trains him into a disciplined distance runner who earns the nickname “The Torrance Tornado.” He finishes 8th in the 1936 Summer Olympics and sets a record in the final lap for the 5,000-meter race.
These scenes are meant to establish the will that later sustains him. They play like a highlight reel. The bullying is stated, not felt. The training montage is competent. Nothing in the Torrance material has the texture of the raft or the camps, and the film’s habit of reaching for uplift here undercuts the harder material later. The tagline is “Survival Resilience Redemption,” and the film believes it. Belief is not the same as proof.
Miyavi and Camp Ōmori
The film’s most complicated figure is Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe, played by the Japanese musician Miyavi. Watanabe is an Imperial Japanese Army corporal who is especially hard on Louie at camp Ōmori, in Tokyo, beating him often. He is the film’s antagonist, and Miyavi gives him a coiled, smiling menace that is genuinely unsettling. When Louie is given the chance to broadcast a message home after learning the U.S. government classified him as killed in action, he refuses to read anti-American propaganda. He returns to camp, where Watanabe has each prisoner punch him. After two years, Watanabe receives a promotion.
Survival Resilience Redemption
That is the tagline, and it is also the film’s thesis. The problem is that Unbroken treats Watanabe as a puzzle it never solves. He is cruel, then he is absent, then he is cruel again. The film wants his obsession with Louie to mean something, and it never says what. Miyavi is doing more interesting work than the script supports.
A True Story That Resists the Frame
The screenplay carries four credited writers: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. That is a lot of hands, and it shows. The film moves through its episodes — the Nauru bombing mission in April 1943, the crash, the rafts, Kwajalein Atoll, the interrogation for technical information on aircraft models and the Norden bombsight, the transfer to Japan, the camps — with a procedural evenness. Louie successfully navigates the interrogation without revealing important information. The pair are split up. The film keeps going.
What it never does is decide what it is about. Is it about faith? The film barely touches it. Is it about the specific cruelty of Watanabe? Then it needed to stay with him. Is it about the ordinary fact of endurance, the way a man simply refuses to die? That is the strongest reading, and it is the one the film keeps wandering away from. Runtime is 137 minutes, and the length is not the issue. The issue is that the film has no idea which 100 minutes matter.
The supporting cast is full of good actors given little to do. Garrett Hedlund as John Fitzgerald, Finn Wittrock as Francis “Mac” McNamara, Jai Courtney as Hugh “Cup” Cuppernell. Maddalena Ischiale and Vincenzo Amato play Louie’s parents, Louise and Anthony. Morgan Griffin is Cynthia Applewhite. They register, then they are gone.
What the Film Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
Unbroken is not a bad film. It is a well-made film that never becomes a great one. Jolie directs with a steady hand and no visible vanity. She does not put herself in the frame. She stages the crash and the strafing runs with clarity. Deakins gives her images that belong in a better movie. O’Connell gives her a performance that belongs in a better movie.
The failures are structural. The film is based on a non-fiction book, and it adapts like one: it hits the events in order and trusts that the events will add up. They don’t. The 47 days adrift, the camps, the interrogations — these are facts, and facts are not a story. A story needs a question the film is willing to ask. Unbroken has a subject and a title and a tagline, and it has no question.
The comparison to the source is unavoidable. Hillenbrand’s book is titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. The film takes the survival and the resilience. It takes the redemption as a given. It does not earn it. When the film was followed by Unbroken: Path to Redemption in 2018, the sequel was less successful, and that is not surprising. The first film had already spent the redemption without doing the work.
The mixed reviews were right, and the praise for O’Connell and Deakins was right too. What the film needed was a director willing to sit in the raft and the camp and refuse to cut away. Jolie cuts away. She is too eager to reassure. The material does not need reassurance. It needs patience.
5.9 of 10.
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