Spielberg’s 1987 film version of Empire of the Sun combined Lean’s epic grandeur with Spielberg’s own thematic concentration on the painful process of growing up. “The kid in E.T. that Henry Thomas played was as much who Steven Spielberg was when he made that movie as the kid in Empire of the Sun was when he made Empire of the Sun,” Bob Gale observes. “By the time he made Empire of the Sun, Steven was cut off from normal, everyday stuff by virtue of his success and how he lived. He was the kid in the ivory tower, so to speak, the kid in the sequestered existence. He was identifying with that kid [splendidly played by thirteen-year-old Christian Bale], because that was more who he was than the kid he was when he made E.T.”
“From the moment I read the [Ballard] novel, I secretly wanted to do it myself,” Spielberg admitted. “I had never read anything with an adult setting—even Oliver Twist—where a child saw things through a man’s eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him. This was just the reverse of what I felt—leading up to Empire—was my credo. And then I discovered very quickly that this movie and turning forty [in December 1986] happening at almost the same time was no coincidence—that I had decided to do a movie with grown-up themes and values, although spoken through a voice that hadn’t changed through puberty as yet.”
By adventuring into Lean territory and, indeed, Oedipally taking over a project from Lean himself, Spielberg was making a further declaration of artistic manhood.‡‡ When he was a schoolboy, his favorite movie was Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, which similarly takes place in a Japanese prison camp. His obsession with World War II also was stimulated by his father’s stories about his experiences as a B-25 radio operator in the China-Burma-India Theater. Like J. G. [James Graham] Ballard’s surrogate in the novel, Jim Graham, the young Spielberg developed an obsession with airplanes. “It’s a fetish, I guess,” he said in 1991. “I think it’s interesting to be psychoanalyzed via my films, and I agree with this idea because I consciously like flying and have flying in all of my films. But I’m afraid to fly in real life, so there’s an interesting conflict here.”
To Spielberg, as to Jim, flying symbolizes both the possibility and the danger of escape. Jim’s growing alienation from his prewar self and society is reflected in his hero-worship of the Japanese aviators based at the airfield adjoining the camp. “I think it’s true that the Japanese were pretty brutal with the Chinese, so I didn’t have any particularly sentimental view of them,” Ballard recalled. “But small boys tend to find their heroes where they can. One thing there was no doubt about, and that was that the Japanese were extremely brave. One had very complicated views about patriotism [and] loyalty to one’s own nation. Jim is constantly identifying himself, first with the Japanese, then when the Americans start flying over in their Mustangs and B-29s, he’s very drawn to the Americans.”
The apocalyptic wartime setting and the climactic moment when Jim sees the distant white flash of the atomic bomb being dropped over Nagasaki gave Spielberg powerful visual metaphors “to draw a parallel story between the death of this boy’s innocence and the death of the innocence of the entire world,” he said at the time of the film’s release. “… I don’t think I’ve made a dark movie. But it’s as dark as I’ve allowed myself to get, and that was perversely very compelling to me.” Perhaps with this story about “the death of innocence,” Spielberg was still working out his feelings about the Twilight Zone helicopter crash, as well as grappling with more of the unsettling “adult truths” that faced him as a husband and father. Empire of the Sun may have tapped into some of the same emotional anxieties in Spielberg as another story he was considering filming, one that also dealt with families being torn apart in World War II.
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THE film rights to Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally’s Holocaust novel about the rescuing of Jews by the righteous gentile Oskar Schindler, were purchased by Universal shortly after its publication in 1982. Sid Sheinberg, who understood Spielberg’s heart as well as anyone in Hollywood, sensed that the book would be challenging material for him both as a man and as an artist. Spielberg agreed, but for the next decade he agonized over whether he should direct such a “burdensome subject,” as he described it in a 1989 interview: “[A] feature film about the Holocaust is going to be studied through a microscope, and it’s going to be scrutinized from the Talmud to Ted Koppel. And it has to be accurate and it has to be fair and it cannot in the least come across as entertainment. And it’s very hard, when you’re making a movie, not to violate one or all of those self-imposed rules. So that’s why it’s been stalled for so many years.”
Spielberg could not have made his Holocaust film without first having told the story of the death of Jim Graham’s innocence. Seeing Empire of the Sun today, one is struck by the many visual correspondences between the scenes of chaos in the streets of war-torn Shanghai and in the Kraków ghetto depicted in Schindler’s List. Both films take place largely in prison camps, although Schindler is far more disturbing, since it not only includes scenes taking place in the Plaszów forced-labor camp but also in the Auschwitz extermination camp. The terrifying scene of Jim being separated from his mother when he drops his toy airplane on the crowded Shanghai street in Empire of the Sun is multiplied a hundredfold when the Jewish mothers run screaming after the trucks bearing their unsuspecting children away to Auschwitz in Schindler’s List.
Spielberg acknowledged that his unresolved childhood trauma resulting from the breakup of his family was reflected in his intense identification with Jim’s dilemma in being torn from his parents and forced to live in strange, hostile surroundings. The Shanghai setting also had a personal significance for Spielberg, which he did not discuss publicly. Some of his relatives on his father’s side, the Chechiks, lived there after fleeing persecution in their native Russia. Like many Russian Jews, they found a temporary safe haven first in northern China and, later, in Shanghai’s British Protectorate, whose thriving Jewish community managed to survive the war. Anti-Semitism enters only fleetingly into Spielberg’s canvas in Empire of the Sun, when Jim catches a glimpse through the window of his chauffeured automobile of some men in Nazi armbands chasing children along a Shanghai street. But the images of a prewar peace being violently shattered by Axis militarism carry related emotions in both films.
Survival and loss are the predominant themes of both Empire and Schindler. The protagonists of both films outwit the enemy by adapting to wartime corruption with their formidable talents as hustlers and machers. The fact that the hero of Empire is an adolescent boy helped Spielberg ease his way into such treacherous thematic terrain using a familiar emotional compass. It was not until he came to grips with his Jewish heritage that he found a way of dealing with the agony of war from a more fully adult and more historically complete perspective.
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BEST known for his dreamlike science-fiction novels, which Spielberg admired as a boy, Ballard recreated his bizarre childhood experiences in China by conjuring up a landscape that was simultaneously a realistic portrayal of a particular time and place and an almost surrealistic evocation of a world gone mad. With his own tendency to view the world through the heightened perspective of dreams and cinematic imagery, Spielberg was especially well suited to film Ballard’s hallucinatory vision.
Working with cinematographer Allen Daviau and production designer Norman Reynolds, Spielberg recreated 1941 Shanghai in images of overwhelming visual beauty, shadowed by an omnipresent sense of nightmarish danger and anxiety. Daviau’s work rivals the best work of Lean and his great cinematographer, Freddie Young.§§ The poetic, multilayered texture of Daviau’s imagery and its sensitivity to the subtle changes of light on exotic locations make Empire a visual feast. With the possible exception of Janusz Kaminski’s black-and-white photography on Schindler’s List, no other Spielberg film has been so magnificently photographed.
The Shanghai location shoot in the first three weeks of March 1987 required elaborate preplanning, including a year of negot
iations with Chinese officials by Kennedy and Marshall. “It was superbly prepared, one of the smoothest productions I have ever been on in my life,” Daviau recalls. Made when China was actively courting the American film industry, the $30 million Warner Bros./Amblin production was the first Hollywood movie shot so extensively on Chinese locations. Much of Shanghai’s landscape had remained unchanged since the 1940s; the only major changes required were the installation of signs with the old Chinese characters and the use of smokescreens to block out some modern buildings. The government took the unprecedented step of shutting down seven blocks of the city’s main thoroughfare for Spielberg, and also supplied thousands of extras.
While preparing for the first day of shooting in Shanghai, assistant director David Tomblin “plotted out all the crowd movement and everything, and I planned to keep the road clear so there could be traffic movement. I drew it all out and told everyone what to do. Then five thousand people suddenly flooded the road. I went crazy. I said to Steven, ‘Oh, Jesus, it’s all gone wrong!’ He said, ‘Looks great.’ So I said, ‘Roll the cameras. Action!’ He was happy with how it looked, and I wasn’t going to argue with five thousand people. He’s very good like that. He’s not pedantic. Whatever is there, he makes it work.”
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“I THINK the first hour of Empire of the Sun is somewhere in the masterpiece class, as good as anything he ever did,” says playwright Tom Stoppard, who adapted Ballard’s novel.¶¶ “It’s up to Schindler’s List, the work of his I like best of all. The scenes in the streets of Shanghai were absolutely remarkable. The way the shots are put together, the balance between the work that Steven is doing against the work which I and J. G. Ballard were doing, the balance there just seemed to me to be perfect.”
The major issue Stoppard and Spielberg worked out together was how to focus the second half of the story, dealing with what Ballard describes as Jim’s “unsentimental education” in the Lunghua prison camp. “The book is a big canvas, with a lot of figures in the foreground,” Stoppard observes. “To film all of it, you’d end up with a film which is maybe four or five hours long. And so, as normal, you make choices, and the auteur—the author as opposed to the screenwriter—is the person who ultimately makes these choices. When it gets to the camp, the book is about several relationships between Jim and other people, not all equally important, but you can’t deal fully with all of them. Steven was most interested in Jim’s relationship with Basie.”
Played by John Malkovich, Basie is Jim’s surrogate father figure. While showing him occasional moments of kindness, Basie also teaches the brutal lessons of survival. As Ballard puts it, “Jim’s entire upbringing could have been designed to prevent him from meeting people like Basie, but the war had changed everything.” Jim’s own father (Rupert Frazer) is a pampered fool of a businessman who ignores warnings to evacuate his family from Shanghai and vanishes from his son’s life until the war has come to an end. By then Jim has turned into a feral, hollow-eyed little man who cannot remember what his parents look like. While admiring Basie’ s cynical pragmatism as a necessary tool for survival, Jim finally rejects his mentor in disgust, recognizing in Basie the Darwinian ugliness he must transcend to keep his spirit from perishing along with his childhood illusions.
Basie remains a somewhat nebulous character for the generous amount of time he is given on screen. The book’s suggestions of sexual ambiguity in his character and that of his sidekick, Frank (Joe Pantoliano), and of a sexual component to their interest in Jim, remain largely unexplored on screen. Perhaps in part for that reason, the second half of the film, which takes place mostly in the prison camp,|||| proves a relatively pallid and conventional piece of storytelling. Some of the fault lies with the novel, which is most compelling when evoking Jim’s state of mind as a solitary figure trying to come to grips with dizzying social dislocation, but less so when he interacts dramatically with other characters. The film’s growing emphasis on Basie tends to take the focus away from Jim, making Empire more of a typical prison-camp movie, despite several visually lyrical and deeply emotional scenes dealing with Jim’s experiences of the war’s final stages. Among the most memorable are the scenes of Jim’s twilight song and salute to the departing Japanese kamikaze pilots and his hysterical jubilation over the devastating American bomber attack on the airfield adjoining the camp.
The first half of the film is superior, Stoppard feels, because it “had a compression, a density. There was more room in it for Steven to do what he does. The images were very eloquent—they locked together in a way which aggregated—and not many overtly dramatic events were happening. For example, there’s a moment where the boy is rude to the servant about taking something from the icebox. I didn’t care for it too much on paper. But Steven always knows what he’s doing. When the servant later slaps the boy’s face, the two things, those two moments, are so interdependent. The boy wasn’t trying to be insolent. The boy was just expressing colonialism, he was expressing the ethos of his own society.”
In his Village Voice review, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Christian Bale as Jim gives the most electrifying child performance I have ever seen on the screen, even surpassing … Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in The Four Hundred Blows.” Les Mayfield’s documentary on the making of the film, The China Odyssey, shows Spielberg crafting the young British actor’s performance in a casual but shrewdly intuitive manner, behaving more like a friend or older brother than an authority figure. Spielberg bought remote-controlled racing cars so he and Bale could play with them during lunch breaks. Bale thought of the director as “just like another kid.” At one point during the filming, while coaxing an open-mouthed reaction of shock from Bale, Spielberg boyishly suggested he assume “one of these real cool action-figure positions.” But the director always took care to ensure that his young star understood the deeper meaning of a scene. Preparing Bale for Jim’s separation from his mother, Spielberg said, “I think the reason I want you to have a plane in your hand is because you need to make a choice between your mother’s hand or your airplane, which drops, and you choose your airplane. You let go of your mother to get the airplane and your mother is swept away in this force.”
Before they shot the scene of Jim throwing his battered suitcase into the sea at the end of the war, it was almost as if the director was thinking aloud to Bale about his own painful maturation process: “I guess you could think your life is so simple that it’s everything you once were, contained in this small box. Which is not really a fair measure of who you are, but it’s interesting to think about this box as everything you used to be.” And when the scene was completed, Spielberg told his young alter ego, “This was the only room, I think, in the story for tears, for crying, because this is the last day of his childhood, and he goes into another era after this. For the rest of his life, he will never be the same.”
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THERE was little critical consensus on Empire of the Sun. While Sarris was “stirred and moved on a scale I had forgotten still existed,” his colleague J. Hoberman condemned Spielberg for being “shamelessly kiddiecentric … This is The Sorrow and the Pity remade as Oliver!” Faced with what David Ansen of Newsweek called “the first Spielberg adventure set in hell,” many reviewers seemed at a loss for words. “You come out saying, ‘What was that about?,’” wrote The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, describing the film as both “majestically” directed and “mindlessly manipulative.”
Even some who praised it seemed uncomfortable as they tried to deal with Spielberg’s cinematic maturation process while being stuck with a warehouse of outmoded critical clichés. “There are almost too many brilliant, climactic moments; Spielberg hypes the emotions he wants to create rather than just letting them emerge from the marvelous story he’s been given,” thought David Denby of New York magazine. “… But what a prodigious visual imagination! Empire of the Sun is a great, overwrought movie that leaves one wordless and worn out.” Expecting something quite different from the maker of E.T., Sheila Bens
on complained in the Los Angeles Times that “we don’t have a single character to warm up to. They are either illegal, immoral or fatally malnourished…. Surely the least sentimental young ‘hero’ ever to occupy the center of a massive movie, Jim isn’t shaped by the horrors of his surroundings into a more loving, more admirable or more humane person. He becomes a slicker and more accomplished little con man.”
Such complaints must have seemed strange to a filmmaker who previously had been pilloried by many critics for his supposed sentimentality about childhood. His latest attempt to move beyond his familiar suburban milieu was received with more of the supercilious sneering that greeted The Color Purple: “I hope Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun wins him that damn Oscar so he goes back to making movies that give real and lasting pleasure to people,” Peter Rainer wrote in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
Spielberg also was attacked for downplaying Ballard’s details of disease and starvation in the prison camp, and for minimizing the brutality of the Japanese guards. The film ‘treats the hell of the prison camp as if it were the background for a coming-of-age story,” Kael contended. “… Spielberg seems to be making everything nice, and, as with The Color Purple, there’s something in the source material that’s definitely not nice.” Such comments betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the complexity of Spielberg’s, and Ballard’s, perspectives on childhood. “I have—I won’t say happy—not unpleasant memories of the camp,” Ballard explained. “I was young, and if you put 400 or 500 children together they have a good time whatever the circumstances…. I know my parents always had very much harsher memories of the camp than I did, because of course they knew the reality of the circumstances. Parents often starved themselves to feed their children. But I think it’s true that the Japanese do like children and are very kindly toward them. The guards didn’t abuse the children at all…. I was totally involved but at the same time saved by the magic of childhood.”
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