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Friday, August 12, 2005
As Good As It Gets
By Tony Medley
Several years ago I read The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William B. Breuer. I thought how wonderful it would be if someone made a movie out of it because it shows heroic Americans and Filipinos and bestial Japanese, but I didn’t hold my breath.
Well, Miramax has made it! While it barely mentions the Bataan Death March, it does tell, in detail, the courageous, heroic efforts of the U.S. Army and Filipino commandos to liberate the notorious POW camp in the Philippines called Cabanatuan and the subsequent three years of horrific imprisonment by the Japanese savages (when you see them in this movie, you’ll know what I mean).
The Great Raid is narrated by Captain Robert Prince (James Franco), who led the raid; this is the story of Colonel Henry A. Mucci (Benjamin Bratt) and his band of Alamo Scouts, a part of the U.S. Army Rangers, and their mission to rescue 510 POWs at Cabanatuan.
The film is shot backlit almost in its entirety by cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr to enhance the feeling of going back in time. The story flashes back and forth among Mucci’s Scouts, the POWs imprisoned and brutalized by the Japanese at Cabanatuan, and a courageous American civilian, Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen), who was a leader of the underground in Manila and was pivotal in smuggling medicine and food into Cabanatuan.
All these stories are compelling. However, director John Dahl has created a fictional and ludicrous love story between Utinsky and the commander of the POWs in Cabanatuan, Major Gibson (Joseph Fiennes). This Hollywood tampering is a disgrace because it diminishes Utinsky’s heroism. To imply that she was helping the POWs and working in the underground because she was in love with a prisoner demeans what she did and what she went through.
There is no Major Gibson mentioned in Breuer’s book. There were so many real people who suffered at Cabanatuan, there is no reason why a fictional one needed to be created. And there is absolutely no justification for the creation of the fictional love story.
The attack on the camp is among the best recreations of a wartime battle I’ve ever seen on film. The audio is so good that when bazookas blow up tanks, the theater shakes with the explosion.
Stay for the closing credits because they are over grainy black and white films of the actual Scouts and camp survivors taken in 1945 after the liberation of the camp. After seeing what they had gone through, it’s a thrill to see what these people really looked like.
Except for the silly love story, everything about this movie is as good as it gets.
(August 12, 2005 issue)
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