The Impossible
Cinema’s great trick is that it lets us live more lives than a sack full of Hindu cats. From the safety of a darkened auditorium we can go to war, battle demons (literal and figurative) and look Death in the eye. No more is this the case than in the disaster movie. The latest addition to this sub-genre is The Impossible, which reenacts the devastating tsunami that battered South Asia on Boxing Day, 2004.
But before we can soak up the vicarious thrills of impending doom there’s a moral hurdle to overcome, and unfortunately it proves higher than the waves that lacerate the protagonists at the heart of the film. More disturbing than any of the life or death carnage on the screen is the fact that director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) chooses to tell Asia’s most devastating natural disaster through the eyes of a Brit party of five (Naomi Watts as mum, Ewan McGregor as dad, and their three adorable whippersnappers) holidaying at a Thai resort. It’s a glib move that cripples the movie.
It’s testament to Bayona’s filmmaking skills, then, that we do forget about this obnoxious premise for a significant stretch of his film. From the moment the tsunami hits – without warning – until the waves recedes back into the Indian Ocean The Impossible is electric. You can almost taste the muddy brine as Watts and her eldest on-screen son (newcomer Tom Holland, the movie’s standout) are propelled inland and put on spin cycle. Performed in a massive water tank, the effects are realistic and the characters’ fear and desperation palpable.
Once the water subsides, however, this disaster movie becomes a disaster. Instead of opening out to take in the horror and scale of the human detritus left in nature’s wake, The Impossible recessed to clichéd melodrama as the separated family members try to reunite. The primal terror of act one is replaced by soap opera histrionics – one fears another tsunami whenever McGregor turns on the water works.
Towards the end of this ordeal there does seem to be some satire at work. The family is saved not by heroism, guile or luck, but by the girth of its wallet: purgatory ends when their insurance company whisk them back to comforts of home by private jet, leaving the poor natives to bury their 250,000 dead. It’s a cutting act of subversion, but it comes too late to forgive the film for turning this tragedy into a bloated episode of Holidays from Hell. [Jamie Dunn]