Impossible, The

Synopsis: The story of an English family who survived the 2004 tsunami that devastated large portions of coastal Southern Asia and cost more than 200,000 people their lives.

The Impossible is a strange film. It announces in its opening title that is a true story yet as the family who actually survived were Spanish how true is “true”? The typically English middle-class family of five, father Henry (Ewan McGregor), mother Maria (Naomi Watts), and children Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast), and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) that Bayona laboriously establishes in the opening scenes were, understandably all flung in different directions when the tsunami hit, yet Maria and Lucas are soon reunited and, more puzzling, when Henry finds the younger boys (or they him), they don’t have a mark on them.

I assume that the title refers to the likelihood of a family surviving intact such a catastrophe. Presumably it did actually happen but director Juan Antonio Bayona walks an unsteady line between harrowing realism and cinematic fiction in demonstrating this.

Partly this disjunction seems to be a function of the terms of production, the change of language, whilst clearly being for commercial purposes, throwing the film off course and thus seemingly defeating the purpose. The result is that whilst technically, in depicting the tsunami and the human aftermath, it is very strong (it appears however to owe much to this YouTube video), dramatically it feels hackneyed and overwrought, which is exactly not how one wants to feels about such an evident tragedy.  When Henry is reunited with his two youngest sons it is so unconvincingly done (later in the film he even gives a different account to what we see) that I thought that they must have been grief-induced hallucinations. That the boys didn’t appear even slightly shaken didn’t help (and in another cut-price scene, after Maria is dragged out of the morass of debris she is taken to hospital on roads that are perfectly clean). I couldn’t by that stage help but recall the currently screening Life Of Pi  which is also about the survival of a natural disaster, but no there is no metaphysical or allegorical aspect to this story like that film or Eastwood’s Hereafter which also featured a 2004 tsunami survival story – just a diligent account of the family’s reunion, all to the tune of an over-bearing score that seems heavily influenced by Ennio Morricone.

Although the recreation of the tsunami is very effectively done, The Impossible is otherwise too low-key to appeal to the disaster movie crowd whilst it is at the same time too lugubriously graphic for family audiences.  Naomi Watts is nominated for an Oscar and, as always, she is very good but she spends most of the running time laying bruised and battered on a hospital bed. McGregor is in his usual nice guy persona and the children not a little hindered by the dialogue that they are given, are generally unconvincing. So, as much as its subject deserves our attention, I can’t imagine where the audience for this film is going to come from.

 

 

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