History lessens

War is sell in Pearl Harbor

by Peter Keough

PEARL HARBOR. Directed by Michael Bay. Written by Randall Wallace. With Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hartnett, William Lee Scott, Ewen Bremner, Alec Baldwin, James King, Jon Voight, Cuba Gooding Jr., Mako, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Colm Feore, Dan Aykroyd, Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Reiley McClendon, and Jesse James. A Touchstone Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment-Swansea, Flagship, Holiday, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

"That's bullshit," says Jimmy Doolittle (Alec Baldwin) in the early going of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor after hotdogging flight trainee Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck, smart-ass and insipid) excuses his latest aerial stunt by calling it a "homage." "But," he adds, "it's very good bullshit." The film, on the other hand, as homage or as entertainment, is just bullshit. It fails on every level. As a re-creation of a historical tragedy, it's the world's biggest video game. As a tribute to those who endured it, it's a hypocritical, exploitive travesty. As a love story unfolding in the midst of an epic event, it makes Titanic look, well, titanic. Maybe as a moneymaking product it can succeed, but only for the first weekend, until people figure out what a dud it is.

That should happen about 10 minutes into its three-hour length, as Bay delays getting to the Japanese sneak attack to provide a back story for the fictitious ciphers who save the day. As kids, Rafe and best friend Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett, brooding and inept) both dreamed of flying fighter planes, and they take off briefly in Rafe's father's cropduster. Danny's dad gives his boy a licking, but Rafe is there to defend his pal. Turns out Danny's dad is messed up because of World War I. So Rafe's the protective alpha male, Danny's the wounded Montgomery Clift type, and whether war is hell or just a game, they will be friends forever and their dialogue will always be bad (thanks to screenwriter Randall Wallace, Oscar winner for Braveheart).

Years pass, they're in the Army Air Corps, and the rest of the world's at war. Rafe falls in love with Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale, aiming for Katharine Hepburn or Veronica Lake but settling for Jessica Rabbit), a nurse who jabs him twice in the butt with a big hypo in a sequence that is most painful in its grueling attempt at humor. But Rafe wants to volunteer to fight the Luftwaffe. "I'm not eager to die," he says in one of the film's few decent lines. "I'm eager to matter." But you know it's Bay who's eager to get to the aerial combat. Neither passion nor psychology motivates behavior here; they serve only as an excuse to insert neat effects and justify them with platitudes.

Worse luck for Rafe, who gets shot down over the Channel and is presumed lost (such suspense: how will Ben Affleck achieve his return from the dead?). Danny and Evelyn in the meantime have been assigned to Hawaii, and what with a sunrise flight in a P-40 and a walk through a hangar full of parachutes shot by a revolving camera -- well, these things happen. Then, who should pop up at the worst moment?

As Humphrey Bogart put it, all this doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Just in case you had forgotten the title of the movie, Bay interjects the occasional newsreel footage, or scenes of Dan Aykroyd as an intelligence officer trying to figure out where the Imperial fleet is, or of Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) plotting his pre-emptive strike (the Japanese are noble stereotypes, with nice uniforms and subtitled dialogue). And, sad to say, you can't wait for the bombs to fall, if only to put an end to these irritating characters and a trite triangle so lacking in chemistry that it doesn't even sustain a gay subtext. The supporting cast, lunkheads with names like Red and Gooz, are just a charmless collection of tics and clichés. Only Jon Voight as FDR salvages anything from the wreckage; who else could pull off the scene in which the polio-stricken president rises from his wheelchair to make a point without arousing laughter? Maybe he should get a nod for best unsupported actor.

As for the attack itself, watch the trailer. Bay, forged by commercials and MTV, is a master of the 60-second format. Unlike Spielberg, who structured the opening of Saving Private Ryan into a three-act drama that propelled the horrific detailing, Bay gives us a collection of sound and visual bites that evokes the chaos not of war but of a video arcade. True, there are moments of pathos and glory: Cuba Gooding Jr. as the black messmate who grabs a gun and fires back evokes the sense of helplessness and fury; Beckinsale in triage reassuring a wounded kid even as she marks him off as a fatal case. Mostly, though, it's a barrage of explosions (the destruction of the Arizona shot from the point of view of the dropping bomb recalls the technological detachment of the Gulf War) and "homages." Ripoffs of Private Ryan, Titanic, and Star Wars are blatant, the last being most egregiously evoked when Rafe and Danny hop into their fighters and take on the entire Japanese air force.

In fact, there were a couple of pilots who did that, shooting down some half-dozen enemy planes between them. But it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that by turning their heroism into a thrill ride, by attributing it to a callow Rambo who has just come from winning the Battle of Britain and will go on to fly with Doolittle to bomb Tokyo (sorry, folks, when the smoke clears at Pearl, there's still a long way to go), the movie trivializes it. "Nothing," says Doolittle, "is stronger than the heart of a volunteer." Except maybe the cynicism of a Hollywood filmmaker.