Reeling Backward: Empire of the Sun (1987)

Steven Spielberg's most underappreciated film is still an emotional wallop, as a boy navigates POW life during World War II, desperately trying to find purchase for his passion.

“Empire of the Sun” is my favorite Steven Spielberg movie. It’s also the one that probably most people have never heard of.

I would not call it Spielberg’s best movie — “Schindler’s List,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jaws” and “Saving Private Ryan” are typically put at the top of that very competitive list.

But best vs. favorite to me is like the difference between beautiful and attractive. There are plenty of women society says are beautiful that I don’t find attractive, and vice-versa. You may recognize a film’s greatness but it doesn’t personally touch you.

(“Citizen Kane” being a perfect example for me.)

In a similar way, I can understand why “Empire” was not a fan favorite, underperforming at the box office and with critics. It’s a rather depressing story, a prisoner of war tale in which a young British boy navigates a complex constructed society in which nobody seems to have much use for him. He repeatedly turns to various figures hoping to find his familial longings returned but is constantly rebuffed and rejected.

It’s also 2½ hours of a not particularly fast-moving or action-filled narrative, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, adapted from the novel by J.G. Ballard. Ballard based it on his own World War II experiences, but in a highly fictionalized, esoteric way that makes (at least for me) for a halting reading experience.

I think I always just identified with the story of a smart, confused kid who comes of age feeling disconnected and alienated from everyone around him. I was older than Jamie “Jim” Graham, who’s supposed to be about 12 or so when the film begins, but I strongly recalled those impulses and the impossibly strong emotional tug one experiences at that time.

It’s a coming-of-age story, but also one of stark realism that isn’t afraid to look at the squalor of human behavior, sifting through the piles of ugliness to find a few nuggets of genuine compassion and altruism.

Derided as a cynic at a young age, I now describe myself as a hopeful realist. So this film, with its unlikely mix of depressing degradation and soaring passions, fits neatly into my psychological/emotional wheelhouse.

Today the film is probably most remembered for being the first starring role of Christian Bale, who would of course go on to become one of our most celebrated actors in cinema. It wound up still receiving six Oscar nominations, though in what are unfairly dismissed as the “technical” categories.

Composer John Williams also got a nod, and I’d argue it’s one of his most exhilarating musical scores. The sequence where Allied fighter planes attack the Japanese air base as Jamie watches from atop a crumbling pagoda is one of my core cinematic touchstones. Just hearing a snippet of Williams’ “Cadillac of the Skies” cue will instantly transport me to a moment of wanton revelry.

Another great piece of music is the gorgeous choral piece that begins and ends the film, with Jamie as the featured soloist at his exclusive private school for Westerners living in Shanghai. (James Rainbird actually does the singing.) I’d always thought it was in Chinese, and am ashamed to say I finally learned it is a Welsh lullaby, “Suo Gân.” (My 50% heritage apparently not giving me enough of an ear to recognize the mother tongue.)

The story opens in 1941, with Jamie the son of a pair of wealthy tai-pans (foreign businessmen) played by Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer. Japanese forces are marshaling to invade, just waiting for triggering attack on Pearl Harbor. Jim’s father waits too long to flee, no doubt trying to maximize his profits as the owner of a textile mill, and they wind up getting caught in the crush of frenzied humanity and separated.

The truth is Jamie is quite the little spoiled brat. He orders around the Chinese servants and nonchalantly sets a toy on fire. His unfailing good Brit manners barely hide a profound sense of privilege. He is chauffeured about the city teaming with refugees in a gleaming black 1938 Packard Super Eight with the “Cormorant” hood ornament, an imperial steel swan.

During the first act Jamie’s attitude is very unsympathetic, more of a “I can’t believe this is happening to me” tone than tragedy.

Finally wandering into the city when his food runs out, Jamie tries unsuccessfully to surrender — but nobody wants him, even as a prisoner. After running into Basie and Frankie (John Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano, respectively), a pair of American scavengers trying to make it in a post-invasion landscape, he immediately becomes attached to the mercenary Basie — even when he tries to sell him into slavery.

Basie is the first, and most compelling, substitute father figure that Jamie takes on during the movie. An utterly self-interested cad, Basie cares for the kid only as far he can use him to advantage. He only reason he agrees not to abandon Jim, as he calls him, right in the street is the boy’s promise to point them to rich houses in his neighborhood full of treasures.

Upon their first meeting, Basie confiscates the pound sterling coin and aviator glasses Jamie had upon him, which they then trade back and forth over the course of the movie — totems representing how Basie always keeps their relationship on a transactional level.

Flash forward a few years later, and Basie uses Jamie as his servile errand boy, scampering about the POW camp helping run the man’s various scams. Their standing agreement is that Jim must bring Basie something of value every time he visits him. He understands that Jamie idolizes him, using it as bait to get what he wants.

For example, Jamie desperately wants to move out of the British family quarters and in with Basie at the Soochow Creek internment camp where they wind up. He’s getting older now and the proximity to Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson), a beautiful blonde wife, is causing increasing tension as he’s taken to spying on the couple during their trysts.

As his ticket to the American quarters filled with fast-talking, easygoing Yanks, Basie makes Jim sneak through the mucky grounds just outside the prison wire — ostensibly to lay traps for pheasants, but really to test his hunch the Japanese have laid no landmines there. Basie is perfectly willing to see the boy die, his only real stake being several large bets he’s made with his henchmen and hangers-on.

It’s a mesmerizing performance by Malkovich, his Basie somehow void of virtues and yet inexorably charismatic. He teaches Jim the only times of war you truly need to be afraid are the beginning and the end, when everyone is in panic mode and no one truly knows what’s going to happen next. You just have to learn the newest rules… while working to subvert them to your advantage.

The contrasting parental figure in Jamie’s POW life is Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers), the camp physician who teaches him Latin and other schoolwork when not tending to the prisoners who are constantly dying of dysentery and other ailments brought on by starvation rations and unsanitary conditions.

Rawlins bears a passing resemblance to Jamie’s father, and even has the same habit of drawing a forefinger across his upper lip while deep in thought. The good doctor actually encourages Jamie to stay close to Basie because he recognizes that the American, while absolutely amoral, is a cockroach-level survivor.

Strangely, the third man Jamie is always trying to impress is Sgt. Nagata (Masatō Ibu), the often-brutal head of the prison guards. He cuts Jamie some slack because he bothers to actually learn Japanese snippets of language and customs, such as always bowing to the ground when he approaches. One of Jamie’s many camp responsibilities is shining Nagata’s boots — which he does not do himself but outsources to another kid in an endless web of favors and transactions involving seemingly everyone in the camp.

Dr. Rawlins correctly diagnoses that Nagata and the other Japanese, rather than truly hating their English and American prisoners, are embarrassed by them. As the war winds down, they barely have enough food to feed themselves, let alone the POWs, which damages their militaristic sense of domineering pride. Nagata considers watching over old men, women and children beneath him.

Jamie intervenes to save Rawlins when Nagata is giving him a terrible beating, because the doctor tried to prevent the smashing of the infirmary windows in retaliation for the Americans bombing the Japanese air base next to the prison. The boy personally destroys two windows himself, then prostrates himself with a humble beseeching in Nagata’s tongue, which translates as:

“There has been some sort of mistake, we are all friends here, aren't we? It's the war’s fault.”

Nagata relents, mortified that a mere boy has humbled him so. However, when Nagata later busts in on Basie’s rampant hoarding — including Nagata’s own embossed shaving soap cake, which Jamie had filched for him — the pleadings are ignored and Basie gets beaten close to death, his “friends” making off with all his food and trinkets.

Jamie, an aviation nut, is completely ensorcelled by the Japanese pilots and planes he sees constantly taking off (though rarely landing) from the base. He literally salutes them, not out of a toadying desire to ingratiate himself but because he genuinely respects them, their skill and their sacrifices — especially toward the end, when fighter pilot graduations are replaced with kamikaze send-offs.

One of them is a boy about Jamie’s own age (Takatarō Kataoka) with whom he forms a kind of unspoken friendship, sharing smiles and waves from across the fence line. When this boy is killed at the end of the film, it somehow represents the worst tragedy Jamie has suffered, despite having watched innumerable Westerners die terribly.

I think this last portion of “Empire” is the one where many people in the audience get lost. Ironic, because this is the section that most closely resembles Ballard’s book — dreamlike, observant and detached.

While being force-marched by the Japanese after the camp is bombed, the POWs begin to die off quickly, the survivors encountering increasingly hallucinatory domains. They wander into Nantoa Stadium, a sports arena built in hopes of landing the 1940 Olympics, and the formerly wealthy Westerners encounter all the beautiful furniture, vehicles and other symbols of their privilege laid about carelessly.

It’s one of those things that might seem like Hollywood BS but is closer to the truth than you’d think.

Upon rewatching for the first time in a number of years, the thing that struck me most about “Empire of the Sun” is the exuberant loneliness of Jamie. He transitions from a boy seemingly without any needs or attachments into a pitiable figure who cannot find any purchase for his passion. He needs everyone more than they need him, which is why he is constantly dashing about camp, trying to please this adult or that.

Think about how tough your preteen and early teen years were — that painful combination of longing and the desire for adult independence. You pushed others away so forcefully to obscure your desperate need for affection and attention. You badly want the freedom that comes with growing up but still crave the security of family and home.

Jamie Graham grows up with all the challenges of adolescence without the supports. No parents, no place to live other than whatever bunk he’s currently occupying, no friends his own age. Not even a country, really, as he divides his patriotic fervor among the British, Japanese and Americans, depending on who seems to currently hold the upper hand.

In this sense, Jamie’s Nipponophilism is not really disloyalty to England — a place he has never even visited — so much a reflection of his inherent confusion in occupying a circumstance that makes no sense. He is quite literally homeless.

In the end, Jamie reunites with his parents, though he can barely remember them. My sense has always been that his existence would return to something externally resembling normalcy, but the crushing sense of abandonment that has ruled his young life will never leave him.

Scars fade, but the wounds we sustain while a child never truly leave us. I think that’s why this film has never ceased haunting me.