Swept Away

Rum swizzles are cancelled in The Impossible.

««« The Impossible. Written by Sergio G. Sánchez & María Belón. Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. 

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is the biggest human disaster you’ve likely forgotten about. We’ve never stopped talking about 9-11, but the scale of devastation left by the tsunami dwarfs it: the energy released by the magnitude 9.0 temblor that caused the wave was equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. The entire planet shook on its axis with the force of the quake. In sheer loss of life, the tsunami was equivalent to one hundred 9-11s. Fully one third of the 280,000 total casualties were children.

            Interestingly, though Hollywood has repeatedly and gleefully imagined the end of the world recently, the real-life apocalypse in East Asia has gotten scant attention. If we want to be cynical, we might blame this on the fact that it happened in faraway places that most Americans don’t care about, among poor, brown-skinned people they usually see only in the background of travel posters. Instead, it has taken a relatively low-budget ($45 million) European co-production and Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) to remind American audiences of this mega-disaster.

            Full disclosure: though Bayona’s The Impossible is well-crafted, heartfelt, and a true revelation about what it took to survive such an event, it isn’t an easy film to watch. This is the kind of story we appreciate—both aesthetically and in substance—more than we enjoy. The lead performance by Naomi Watts is emblematic: as the mother in a Western family caught in the wave, Watts is hurled through a window, tumbled, raked, dragged, pierced, marooned, and half-drowned—all in the first fifteen minutes. Not since Robert De Niro made a punching-bag of himself in Raging Bull has a star taken this kind of sustained pummeling. As she spends the rest of the story searching for her missing husband (Ewan MacGregor) and children, Watts’ body takes on the appearance of ripe plum that’s been run through a spin cycle a few dozen times. It’s an extraordinarily performance, committed without a hint of vanity or self-consciousness (and, incidentally, nominated for an Oscar). But it isn’t like enjoying Meryl Streep master yet another foreign accent.

            Instead of trying to encompass the enormity of it all, Bayona and writers Sergio G. Sánchez and María Belón keep the focus squarely on one family. This is clever, as the viewer is invited to extrapolate from the narrow frame and, with a little imagination, suspect the full magnitude of what occurred. Along the way, Bayona is almost Spielbergian in his skill at letting small details foreshadow big threats. The blender mixing up drinks at their resort suddenly goes silent; palm trees in the distance seem to kneel down before some hidden force—and then the wave is on them all.
            The narrow focus has one unfortunate side-effect, though. The vast majority of victims were Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians and Thais, not Westerners. Though Bayona does show the natives, both as casualties and committing selfless acts of kindness, they are overwhelmingly kept in the background. However well-intentioned, The Impossible perpetuates the notion that history only really happens when it happens to be people who look like us.

            Not that I’ll ever be seeing this film again. Coming out of the theater, I felt like Naomi Watts looked—wrung out and psychically bruised. No pain, no gain.

@ 2013 Nicholas Nicastro