Jolie: Unbroken (2014)

Angelina Jolie’s second film is an adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of US war hero Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), a former Olympic gold medallist who survived an air crash off the coast of Nauru and spent forty-seven days drifting on an inflatable raft, only to be picked up by the Japanese navy and sent to a series of a brutal prisoner-of-war camps, where he was overseen by the notorious Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Miyavi). In many ways, it’s a period drama in attitude as much as content, as Jolie sets out to craft the kind of film that the characters themselves might have expected to watch about their experiences once they returned from the front, a decision that’s particularly interesting when it comes to the relationship between Zamperini and Watanabe, which would be  intensely homoerotic – Miyavi is a gay icon in Japan – were it not for the fact that the film is tactically and tactfully oblivious to subtext in the manner of so much 50s cinema, although it’s precisely that studied oblivion that allows Watanabe’s fascination with Zamperini to be far more lurid and lascivious than it might have otherwise been. In that sense, the Coen Brothers make their mark in quite an odd  and uncharacteristic way, standing back from their more knowing brand of historical pastiche to help craft a screenplay in which it’s clear that there are more layers to this somewhat beatific, airbrushed story, but equally clear that the film itself is never allowed to know about them. As might be expected, that creates quite a flat, almost empty tone, not least because the actual historical proximity of the war – the most important thing for a 50s audience - is somewhat muted by this point in time. Yet that’s perfectly attuned to the vast expanses of Zamperini’s Pacific ordeal, which casts the prisoner-of-war sequences adrift in turn, as cinematographer Roger Deakins crafts a light palette utterly dazed by sun, sea and sky, as if to visualise lethargy turning lethal, those last few moments when utter exhaustion produces its own odd, hallucinatory high. Squinting your way from one fleeting plane shadow across water to another, it’s a war film that self-dissociates as it proceeds, or even self-dissociates to survive, much like Zamperini himself, removing you to ever quieter, flatter digital distances even as it escalates in intensity and atrocity. Watching it, then, partakes of the slightly dissociative quality that tends to characterise war films made in the immediate aftermath of the wars they depict – as opposed to the smooth, streamlined sympathetic engagement of recent WWII nostalgia cinema – and that’s perhaps starting to be a bit of a signature for Jolie as well, who may just emerge as one of the most unexpected war auteurs of her generation.