Cast: Adrien Brody, Tim Robbins, Fan Xu
Director: Xiaogang Feng
Country: China
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: Back to 1942 opens in North American theaters today, November 30th..
Back to 1942 is a film that explores the ravages of famine and the responsibilities of a government to the governed It is a large scale humanist epic that attempts to tell a story too big for a single vantage. It follows several groups during the Henan famine (1942-1944) and attempts to recount the events from every direct and peripheral vantage, resulting in a chaotic cacophony of disjointed tragedy, and large scale filmmaking at its most erratic. Emotions are painted in broad strokes and each character acts as an ambassador for their respective socioeconomic class, coming and going with such frequency and rapidity that it is difficult to engage with the emotional core of the film. The ground shifts from under your feet each time you are comfortable in the destitution of a particular set of characters until Tim Robbins inexplicably shows up with a bad Italian (?) accent.
It follows several groups during the Henan famine (1942-1944) and attempts to recount the events from every direct and peripheral vantage, resulting in a chaotic cacophony of disjointed tragedy, and large scale filmmaking at its most erratic.
As we assume the role of the all-seeing eye in this historical epic, we are afforded unflinching looks into the absolute destitution of the Henan refugees as they fled from the uncertain threat of Japanese soldiers while facing the very real threat of famine and drought. A haunting reversal of Steinbeck’s breast-feeding-of-the-dying-man is merely one among many tragic scenes in a film bursting at the seams with tragedy as a new mother starves to death, leaving nothing behind in this world as her frail frame (malnourished from a diet of kindling and millet) would offer no milk for her crying orphan. Tragedy is followed by the futility of bureaucracies as they earnestly bumble through self-serving face-saving measures that would do little more than illustrate the ignorance of a government that had to be shown the extent of the suffering (caused in large part by their pilfering of the population’s meager coffers on false pretenses) by a foreign journalist (queue Adrien Brody as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Theodore White).
Engrossing yourself in the destitution becomes difficult when Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins show up and do little more than be irritatingly noticeable.
One of the stranger qualities of Back to 1942 is the use of Hollywood actors in a film that moves so quickly that it never has much time to concentrate on a single character. In its attempt to tell its enormous story of the famine induced exodus of millions of people from as many vantages as possible, it uses the manipulative power of juxtaposition to show the startling differences in the worlds of the haves and have-nots. Engrossing yourself in the destitution becomes difficult when Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins show up and do little more than be irritatingly noticeable. It’s an understandable move, and one that could bring an audience to a film that recounts history (with indeterminable accuracy) that few Western audience members have likely studied, but it is ultimately a move that undermines the weight of the material rather than serve it.
Back to 1942 is a film that might have been exceptional if it had managed to avoid being crushed under its own weight, but what we are left with is little more than an intriguing series of vignettes that try desperately to achieve the heights of Spielberg (their aspirations, not mine) and fail through unrealistic ambition. It is a film that asks us to remember, but unfortunately tragedy has a shelf life that is largely dictated by distance from the event and the homogeneity of those observing and those affected.
[notification type=”star”]50/100 ~ MEDIOCRE. Back to 1942 is a film that might have been exceptional if it had managed to avoid being crushed under its own weight, but what we are left with is little more than an intriguing series of vignettes that try desperately to achieve the heights of Spielberg (their aspirations, not mine) and fail through unrealistic ambition.[/notification]
