442nd/100th two-for-one movie review - Part II

(Continued from Part I)

Only the Brave is a labor of love by lead actor/director Lane Nishikawa. Born in Hawaii, his uncles fought in the 442nd.

It stars Lane Nishikawa as the sergeant. Other cast members of note are Tamlyn Tomita, Mark Dacascos (you may know him as Chairman Kaga's nephew), Pat Morita (one of his last roles before dying) and Jason Scott Lee.

My favorite is Jason Scott Lee. He's an actor with an amazing physical presence, and I wish he could get decent roles instead of the usual drek reserved for Asian-American men. I highly recommend Map of the Human Heart. He carries that movie, and I always cry for the last ten minutes straight while watching it.

Only the Brave centers on the most famous action of the 442nd, the rescue of the Texas Lost Battalion. It's a pretty grim movie. The main theme isn't racism, or bravery, it's the sheer psychological torment of undergoing massive casualties. There's some moments of happiness and camaraderie, but the movie is dominated by scenes of soldiers dying at a steadily increasing pace.

The cast is great, and the acting is solid throughout. More than anything, you get a sense that these soldiers were three-dimensional human beings from diverse backgrounds. They weren't dominated by ideology, they just did what they felt was right. The movie doesn't stuff their tragic circumstances down the audience's throat. The camps are portrayed in a matter-of-fact way, as simple, bare rooms from which families say goodbye. There are only two brief confrontations with white men shown. The rest of the movie just concentrates on the positive and supportive relationships between 442nd members.

The visuals of the movie are very well-done and the action scenes are also impressive, especially the bloody attack at the end of the movie.

Is Only the Brave a great movie? Well, I have to be honest. It has great intentions, and some strengths, but also some flaws. Since I feel bad about criticizing it directly, I'll just say it suffers from The Thin Red Line-ism, which in my opinion is one of the worst war movies ever made.

(I just have to add, my mother once told me that movie should be called "The Thin Green Stalk" because most of the scenes have soldiers running through endless grass fields... with constipated looks on their face and strings throbbing in the background.)

Thin Red Line-ism symptoms:
- massive ensemble cast which is too big to get to know any character well
- abuse of symbols symbolizing the brutality of war in a symbolic way
- abuse of flashbacks
- substituting flashbacks for character development, plot structure and pacing
- too many flashbacks
- sappy music

I'll say that "Only the Brave" has some symptoms, and leave it at that. Otherwise I strongly recommend it. I also hope more movies eventually get made about the 442nd. There are many amazing stories waiting to be told.

There was one much earlier movie made about the 442nd called "Go For Broke". It was written and directed by Robert Pirosh in 1951 and stars Van Johnson. Yes, it's one of those movies starring a totally extraneous white guy. Van Johnson plays an officer assigned to train and lead Nisei soldiers. He starts off distrusting the wily Japanese but comes to respect them. Yes, it's horribly cliched. However, I found myself thoroughly enjoying this movie and very much recommend it. The miracle is that the movie's two biggest flaws -- insertion of Extraneous White Guy and lack of a real plot -- actually cancel each other out. About a third of the way into the story, the movie forgets that Van Johnson is supposed to be the star. He gets reassigned and drifts out of the plot. The rest of the movie is mostly taken up with casual vignettes of the soldiers making their way through Italy. Since many of the actors were actually real surviving members of the 442nd, this is as close to a documentary as it gets, and the scenes are fantastic.

The movie takes a much lighter note. There's a ukulele performance and a sentimental subplot involving a piglet mascot. It gets dark towards the end as the 442nd starts taking massive casualties, then ends with a triumphant flourish as the Nisei rescue the Texas Lost Battalion and even take down a few Nazis using aikido moves.

For 1951, and for its limited budget, this is pretty good.

442nd/100th two-for-one movie review - Part I

This weekend I received my copy of "Only the Brave". I ordered it directly from the linked website, since it's not in wide release.

The 100th and the 442nd were made up of Japanese-Americans who fought in the European Theater. Their story is incredible and inspiring. They fought in some of the fiercest battles in WWII and were the most decorated unit of their type. And they would have received even more medals were it not for the racism of the time.

For example, Senator Daniel Inouye did not receive his much-deserved Medal of Honor until 2000. He should have received it 55 years ago. I was absolutely mindboggled when I read exactly what he did, because if I'd seen it in a war movie I'd have thought it was ludicrous and physically impossible.

Back in Italy, the 442nd was assaulting a heavily defended hill in the closing months of the war when Lieutenant Inouye was hit in his abdomen by a bullet which came out his back, barely missing his spine. He continued to lead the platoon and advanced alone against a machine gun nest which had his men pinned down. He tossed two hand grenades with devastating effect before his right arm was shattered by a German rifle grenade at close range. Inouye threw his last grenade with his left hand, attacked with a submachine gun (emphasis mine) and was finally knocked down the hill by a bullet in the leg.

The Japanese-American history of internment and WWII is not really my family inheritance, because I'm the first Japanese-American in my family. Nevertheless, I feel a strong connection to the events.

If your family had all their land and goods and businesses and home stolen by neighbors, had your children pulled out of school, and then you were rounded up and forced to live in a shack in a desert surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards... how hard would that make you want to fight for your country?

After learning more about this history, one interesting thing I came to understand was that the root cause of internment was not racism. It was simply greed, aided of course by racism. To explain this, there were three basic groups of Japanese-Americans at the time: Hawaiian, West Coast and East Coast. The ones in Hawaii were very numerous and had been there for several generations already. Many started off at the very bottom as sugarcane cutters, but they had become integrated into the island economy. On the East Coast, Japanese-Americans were few, scattered and diverse. On the West Coast, there were more, and many had achieved economic success in fields like strawberry farming and running small grocery stores.

It was this success that got them into trouble. There weren't enough East Coast Japanese to bother stealing from, so they were mostly left alone. In Hawaii, interning all Japanese-Americans would have caused an economic crisis. But on the West Coast, people starting looking at their neighbors and seeing dollar signs. They grabbed the stores and farms and land and sent their neighbors off to the camps.

The soldiers of the 442nd were divided among Hawaiians and mainlanders, and their culture and backgrounds were very different. Originally the 100th was Hawaiian and the 442nd was from the camps, but because of massive casualties they were eventually combined into the 442nd.

After giving all this background I'm a bit tired, so I'll have to postpone the actual movie reviews to Part II, which I'll post either tomorrow or the day after. I'll review Only the Brave and Go for Broke, the only other movie about the 442nd that I'm aware of.