The Impossible

On December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake created a tidal wave, or tsunami, that devastated the coasts along the Indian Ocean. This included Thailand, which has a number of popular resort communities. Almost a quarter of a million people died, but many of the stories that have filtered from us to the west have been of vacationing Europeans, including the Belon family of Spain. Their story is told in the film The Impossible.

There has been some criticism of the film for focusing not on the general devastation of the tsunami, but rather how it affected Western tourists. As I watched the film I struggled with how I feel about that. On one hand, this is a story about one family, and they happen to be white. There can be many more films made about the event that can focus on others (perhaps there have been Thai or Indonesian films about that, but they haven't been released here). If The Impossible had included references to the other countries involved, it would have seemed like tokenism and improbable, as those in the story don't really have the time or luxury to think "I wonder how the Indonesians are faring?"

On the other hand, there are only a few non-white faces in the film. They are depicted kindly, but tangentially. When the family in question is flown out of the country on a private jet, one kind of wonders, "What about the people who have nothing to fly home to?" Then, at the end of the film, when the real family is shown, I realized that they were Spanish, and not Anglos as they are depicted in the movie (the name Belon is changed to Bennett). The Impossible is a Spanish film, though in English, and directed by a Spaniard, J.A. Bayona, but to make it more palatable, I guess, the protagonists have been changed to fair-haired British.

This topic notwithstanding, The Impossible is just not that great a film. It has a few things going for it--one is Naomi Watts, perhaps my favorite actress, who gives a great performance that is physical as well as emotional. Tom Holland, who plays her oldest son, also gives a great performance. I also thought that the film does a sensational job of imagining what it was like to go through the tsunami, both with special effects and a mise-en-scene of flattened landscape and dazed response of the survivors in shelters and hospitals.

But essentially the film rests on one plot point--will the members of the Bennett family (Ewan McGregor is the dad), separated by the tsunami, find each other? Well, it doesn't take a major in film studies to figure that out, and the way the film teases us--McGregor and Holland are in the same hospital, just missing each other, seems underhanded. Watts is badly injured in the film and I don't want to reveal what happens to her, but suffice it to say that the real woman sustained worse injuries, so the film again cheats to give us a rosier outcome.

Watts is nominated for an Academy Award and deserves it, but the film is garnering more positive reviews than it should. I hesitate to assign motive in cases like this, but movies about people overcoming natural disasters with that vague thing known as "the human spirit" tend to hit people in a way that makes them take leave of their critical faculties.

My grade for The Impossible: C.