Steven Spielberg’s war drama is moving and troubling, led by a Christian Bale performance that keeps Jim’s need to survive painfully clear. The grand presentation sometimes softens the horror, and the supporting characters deserve more attention.
Empire of the Sun is a moving, uneven war drama, worth seeing above all for Christian Bale. Steven Spielberg, directing Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, follows Jim through family separation and internment in Shanghai during the Second World War. He is interested in how a child adjusts to things an adult would know to resist. Bale makes that adjustment convincing enough to justify the film’s grand scale, though not every flourish helps.
Allen Daviau’s cinematography gives the Shanghai sequences a gloss that both helps and troubles the film. The scale of the city and the chaos of separation explain Jim’s helplessness without requiring him to announce it. Norman Reynolds’s production design makes that scale persuasive, though the richness of the surroundings can distract from the boy’s predicament. We were frightened for Jim when he was separated from his family; Spielberg makes being unable to find the people who protect him more immediate than the larger war.
Bale does not ask for sympathy by making Jim agreeable. There is something unnerving about the energy he gives the part, because it makes the boy’s adjustment to captivity seem possible. We can understand why a child might cling to any available adult, while still wanting him to stop accepting so much as normal. That is a difficult feeling for a performance to sustain, and Bale sustains it without making Jim seem implausibly wise about what is happening to him.
John Malkovich’s Basie gives that need for an adult somewhere to go. Jim’s need for a substitute parent gives their scenes an uneasiness that Malkovich handles well. Stoppard’s screenplay is less successful at allowing the surrounding people lives of their own. Miranda Richardson’s Mrs. Victor and Nigel Havers’s Dr. Rawlins belong to a supporting cast the film does not explore enough. The actors provide human company, but too often Jim seems to be the only person whose experience matters.
Michael Kahn’s editing keeps the large-scale sequences intelligible, so the activity around Jim does not overwhelm our sense of his predicament. His work helps Spielberg sustain the child’s viewpoint across a long film. John Williams’s music is more debatable: its encouragement towards heroism sometimes softens the hardship that Bale conveys. A quieter accompaniment would have served those moments better.
As a war film, this gives a narrow account of occupation, and anyone looking for a wider history will find gaps. Most critics disagree with us about how well it works, finding the polish and the heroic touches too reassuring. We think that underestimates Bale’s performance: Jim’s growing ability to cope is troubling because he is still a child. Spielberg does soften some of the material, but the performance keeps the cost of that adjustment visible.
The reservation is that 153 minutes leaves ample room to deepen the people around Jim, and the film does not always use it. Still, anyone interested in war films that stay close to one person’s experience should find enough here to justify the length. Watch it for Bale, with the caveat that Williams sometimes sounds more reassured than we feel.
