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PEARL HARBOR: LOVE STORY OR HISTORICAL DRAMA?

By Sean Herriott

June 2001

My wife and I went to see “Pearl Harbor” opening weekend.  When a friend at work asked about it, I said, “Well, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but Leo dies.”

 I resisted the lure of “Titantic” as soon as I heard that the sinking of the great ship was used as a backdrop to a love story that consumed most of the film.  Forgive me for being insensitive to Kate Winslett’s angst, but it seems that the needless and tragic deaths of over 1000 people might rate more screen time than a pale retelling of Romeo and Juliet.  In point of fact, I’ve never actually seen the entire film.  I watched most of the sequence where the ship goes down the last time it was on television, which was about the only part I actually wanted to see.  When early feedback from critics and moviegoers indicated that Pearl Harbor was another film minimizing a major historic event, I was slow to warm up to the idea of going.  Not wanting to deprive my wife of the experience, however, we went on the Sunday before Memorial Day.

There’s no question that the movie is flawed.  Like Titanic before it, there are almost two films happening here; the love story, which could have happened almost anywhere, and the historical epic, which was a whole lot more interesting.  Films like Saving Private Ryan and U-571 use fictional characters to give us insights into major historical events, and help humanize stories that are almost too big to tell; Titanic and Pearl Harbor plunder history, using it as a backdrop for their characters’ fake lives.

Am I being a bit harsh?  You betcha.  Pearl Harbor suggests that Ben Affleck’s character drove the Japanese away almost single-handedly after the attack on December 7, 1941.  It struck me as unseemly, and disrespectful to the men and women who gave their lives that awful day, and during the war that followed.  If you’re going to reinvent history, why not have Superman swoop down and stop the attack in the first place?

Pearl Harbor’s most powerful moments, and its redeeming grace, are in the depiction of the events leading up to December 7, as well as the attack itself.  These scenes are done respectfully, with a minimum of melodrama, and without the level of gore that has become popular in war movies since Saving Private Ryan.  That’s the movie I wanted to see.  A little less Affleck, and a lot more Cuba Gooding Jr. (in a role based on a real Navy cook who becomes a hero) and John Voight (as FDR) would have been fine with me.

In the end, I suppose that Pearl Harbor does what it set out to do.  We have a better understanding of the day that changed everything for our nation and the world, and a more human face is put on the suffering of the soldiers and innocent bystanders who were so brutally attacked.  The Japanese are not played as caricatures, but as real men who were not all sure of the rightness of their cause, or their methods, but committed to serve their country and their emperor.  I came away reflecting on the many who stood in the gap to protect our freedoms, and reflecting on how life would be if the war had ended differently, and grateful to God for the freedoms I take for granted. But, it didn’t have to take three hours to get me there.

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