The Impossible

A family with three young children is caught in a natural disaster while on vacation in a foreign country.  With no further details, I’m hooked.  My heart immediately goes out for them and I want to know this family’s story.  The Impossible is based on the true story of the Belón family from Spain who were on the coast of Thailand during the catastrophic tsunami of 2004.

Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) are about to spend Christmas on vacation with their three young boys.  In the first few scenes we get a sense how their family functions.  Their oldest son, Lucas (Tom Holland) is on the cusp of puberty and growing more defiant.  Their middle son, Thomas (Samuel Joslin) is only seven and a half, hardly self aware yet.  And Simon is just an innocent little five year old.  From their time on the plane and spending Christmas together, we see a lot of love and the parents treat their boys with kindness and understanding.  They’re nearly ideal.

The tsunami hits while the family is at the resort’s pool.   It splits them far apart, but thankfully none of the boys are alone.  We are shown an intense scene where Maria and Lucas are being swept away in the strong current filled with all manner of debris.  Finding each other alive in the chaos is a miracle, much less being able to physically swim to each other, especially while Maria is so injured.  We get hints that Henry, Simon and Thomas were in a similar situation, closer to the resort, but we are not shown.  Seeing a five year old in that turmoil would have been far too much.

 While the tsunami scene is realistic, frightening and very intense, the film’s heart is found in the aftermath.  Before Maria and Lucas have found higher ground, they find a little boy and bring him with them, even as they’re afraid of another wave approaching.  With Maria’s injuries (that looked bad enough to even make my husband gasp) she cannot walk well and will not survive without medical treatment.  Through the kindness of strangers she and Lucas can’t even understand, they help get Maria to a hospital.

The hospital is chaos and so over capacity that people lay in hallways, out on sidewalks and in numerous makeshift tents outside on the grounds.  As his mother is treated, but grows weaker, she urges Lucas to go try to help around the hospital.  While he tries to find one man’s missing children, he’s called on by many others to try to find theirs.  It’s only a drop in the bucket of displaced families searching in vain.  Even worse, with so much chaos in the hospital, Lucas can’t find his mother and doesn’t know whether she is alive or not.

As Maria and Lucas fight to survive, Henry is faced with searching for them.  In a hard decision, he decides to let his younger boys go with a group up to the mountains where they’ll be safe from any possible waves, while he continues to search for his wife and Lucas.  As Henry searches, we see how futile the effort is.  Rubble is everywhere, and it’s impossible to look into it all, much less know if they are one of the bodies lined up and wrapped in a tarp.  Even as we see their distance shrink, Henry is searching for needles in one of many haystack hospitals.

I’m not the kind of viewer that falls for sentimental bull, but I spent a good portion of The Impossible with tears in my eyes.  I was genuinely scared during the tsunami scene, wincing in pain for Maria and heartbroken as Henry broke down on the phone with his father.  The biggest emotional pull for me was knowing how terrified the whole family must have been not knowing where their missing loved ones were, much less if they even survived.

While The Impossible can be considered a disaster film, it doesn’t feel like Earthquake, The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure.  It isn’t about action or heroic stunts, it’s far too real for that.  It has a lot of heart, the kind that most rarely see.  The kind that only comes out when people are at their most helpless and lost moments.

The only Oscar nomination The Impossible earned was for Naomi Watts’ performance.  She is the rock of this film and drives it, guiding young Holland with her.  Had there been ten Best Picture nominations, I’d like to believe this would have taken that last spot.

The Impossible may not be an easy film for some people.  The tsunami scene and people struggling in the aftermath are intense and have some disturbing images.  However, I believe it’s a great film about hope, the real life chaos after a large tragedy and the impossible story of one very lucky family.

“When I came up, I was on my own.  That was the scariest part.  And when I saw the two of you climbing to the tree, I didn’t feel so scared anymore.  I knew I wasn’t on my own.”

Mulholland Dr.

David Lynch is known for making some weird films, but Mulholland Dr. may be his most weird that I have encountered so far.  Let me first say that weird is never synonymous for bad, at least not with me.  Weird happens in Mulholland Dr. when there isn’t much of a plot to follow, characters are acting strangely and everything seems flipped into a new dimension without warning, to name a few instances.  Yet, through all these strange moments, I was intrigued, curious and let myself open up to the film’s vibe.

The opening of the film draws us in perfectly.  Well, after a minute or so of purple-green screen sock-hop dancing that is.  Anyway, we see a dark car going up the windy Mulholland Drive, and two cars full of yelling teenagers racing down the road.  The first car has a dark haired woman (Laura Harring) sitting alone in the back.  They make an unexpected stop.  The driver points a gun at her and tells her to get out.  Just as it looks like she’s done for, their car is hit head on by one of the drag racing cars full of teenagers.  Only the woman in the back of the car survives, and she wanders away from the accident down to the lights of Los Angeles.  She has amnesia and calls herself Rita, pulled off a movie poster for Gilda.

As Rita finds somewhere to go and clean up, Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives at the airport.  She smiles and looks around with wide innocent eyes like she hasn’t arrived in LA, but Oz.  She’s an aspiring actress.  The rest of her is just as naive, saying goodbyes to an older woman she met on the plane with dialogue that feels plucked from a 1950s after school special.  Betty finds Rita when she arrives at her new apartment, befriends her, learns of her amnesia and together they set out to find who she is and what happened to her.  Suddenly, the film looks like it could be a mystery.

Along the way are some odd turns and side characters.  The two women seek out a woman named Dianne’s apartment, thinking it may be where the Rita lives, but find a horrible sight.  This scene made me think of Betty as one of Hitchcock’s classic blondes.  They go to a show, are moved to tears by a song and engage in some girl-on-girl action.  There’s a film director (Justin Theroux) who is threatened to cast an actress in his next movie and pours neon pink paint on his wife’s jewelry when he finds her in bed with another man.  He has other temper tantrums.  He meets the cowboy who has an ominous presence and no eyebrows.  And there’s Billy Ray Cyrus pulling off a pretty clumsy murder or three.

This is all in a semi-normal world, after the blue box is opened (you’ll know it when you see it), it’s like falling down the rabbit hole.  Suddenly, it’s like the characters are in an alternate dimension.  Betty becomes Dianne, living in the apartment and all.  Rita is both Dianne’s lover and with the director and it fuels insecurity in Dianne.  Images are recognizable, but feel out of place.  The uncanniness of it all is intriguing and can make the viewer feel very uncomfortable.  It got more weird and shocking to the very end, and left me completely dumbfounded.  I loved it.

I feel as though I’ve described this film too much, and yet not at all.  Really, you won’t know what the hell I’m talking about unless you see it.  I do feel that this was a little too out there for a best picture nomination (perhaps it could have been 2001’s Tree of Life with 10 nominations), but David Lynch’s nomination for best director was well deserved. There’s such a sense of the uncanny, a film that feel very noir yet modern, unsettling, yet intriguing that only a master director could pull off.  Mulholland Dr. is not an easy film, or one most may enjoy, but it’s one hell of a hypnotic ride.

“It’ll be just like in the movies.  Pretending to be somebody else.”