The key to understanding the foundation of this movie is about 8 minutes and 50 seconds into the movie , where there is a really weird dissolve of the parents putting Jamie to sleep. This is the same picture that Jamie “Jim” Graham has on his wall in the interment camp that he takes with him wherever he stays. This is how we know that a ton of what we see on the screen his his projection of how things went. You could even argue that Basie was a projection of the man on his comic book.
Jamie/Jim: Our main character played by an astounding 13 year old Christian Bale, who has an amazing physicality to this role along with a great singing voice . He dreams of being an airline pilot , and this movie is about his loss of naivety and what kind of man he will become after the war. He really sees the humanity of the Japanese and rejects the binary good/evil of war, though at the start of the film he is entrenched in racism/classism of the area that he lives in. You can argue that entire movie is shot from his imagination, with several weird scenes (the pilot giving the thumbs up, the supply drop that’s glitter and toys, the way he bikes around everywhere he lives) is the way he sees the world , from the way even Basie is presented.
Basie: “Buying and Selling … in other words: Life!” A very good line that sums up the ethos of his character ( who looks exactly like the cover of Jamies comic book), a very interesting man who children look up to , but his embodiment of survival above all else ends up leaving Jamie cold at the end. Basie and Jamie are similar in the fact that they really have no place to fit in, Basie is always at sea and has no place to call home, Jamie is an englishman who has never been to England/isn’t chinese though he lives in China. Basie mantra is survival by any means possible. Survival is the most important thing in war, but it is no way to live a life in peace. He even refers to the middle of the war as a “country club” , telling us he thrives the most when people will do “anything for a potato”.
I love the fact that the family dresses up as pirates for Halloween, to show how they plundered the area/culture of which they live in.
I find it really interesting when I see something that transcends human language and culture like the love of aviation and flight in children.
Here the horrors of war will eventually overtake the innately human longing that can be achieved without war. But for the time being , we can see how even in an interment camp, humanities passions can be unleashed. Unfortunately, war and violence also transcends language and culture .
A great summation of Basies and Jims relationship can be the sequence where Jim has to set a trap for a pheasant, but all the Americans know it’s for Basie to see if there are mines in that part of the land for his eventual escape. Jim thinks it s a rite of passage in order to become an “American”, but Jim is as expendable to Basie as the soap he barters for.
Jamies growing up is him dealing with the fact that men have the power to kill so many, but bring back nobody. Jamie cannot bring back his aviation friend, nor his childhood ignorance.
Yet, Jamie has had enough of Basies , lasie fairre attiude to life and human condition over hustling. He realizes that to him and his materalistic mentality, ,like war,nothing is sacred, and maybe he’s the same as all humans.
The film is about escapism (via airplanes,books, materialism), how it can kill. Time and time again, there is an entire cast of characters who choose to ignore the reality of the world around them, and end up lifeless shells of their former selves or worse. The film’s message seems to be that in the face of such a serious reality, denial and escapism are deadly, and the world must be dealt with on its own terms. Jim’s throws away the suitcase that has his childhood dreams on it, and his own name. The film ends with that suitcase being in the same harbor as the Shanghai dead.
When Jim embraces his mother at the end of the movie, you can see in his eyes that it’s not quite joyous. He’s trying to turn back into the boy he once was, as seen by him biking around the camp after the death of his Japanese friend. He wants to escape to another reality like he did with his comic books and planes, to avoid the horrors of living in a world such as this. A world where the lady who took care of him has a grand gesture from God to show her passing on, not an atom bomb killing globs of people. The movie tells us that Jim has to grow up and face reality, but does he do it like any of his father figures? Did Jim throw away his empathy for the human race above all else?
Lots of people call this a coming-of-age or loss of innocence story, and I can see where they are coming from, but I’m not sure that’s a right description. Does Jim/Jamie seem more prepared to take on the world at the end of this movie? Does he have a stronger sense of identity, an Englishman who has never seen England, a man of China who isn’t Chinese? Is home with the family he can’t even remember , with a lifestyle he doesn’t fit in with anymore? Is he just someone with a gruff American nickname given to him by a grifter whose ideology he rejects? Where is Jim/Jamie place in the world after all this? I don’t think he’ll ever fly planes again, that wonder is gone at the end of the movie. He’s a man who war broke as a child, but he see’s no path as a warrior. Much like how he looks at his clean hands as his Japanese friend dies, he has no blood on his hands, but he can’t repair ,fix, or protect anything.
What will become of Jim? Remains to be seen.
