The Weight of Water

The Impossible

** out of ****

Directed by: Juan Antonio Boyana

Starring: Naomi Watts, Tom Holland, Ewan McGregor, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast

Running time: 114 minutes

Too often, films about a true-life tragedy waver between authenticity and dramatization. Take the two films about 9/11 released in 2006: United 93 and World Trade Center.

The former is a gripping, intense docudrama about the hijacked flight that crashed into a field outside Shanksville, Penn. It is raw and immediate, a tribute to the heroes of that day without the need for melodramatic flourishes.

The latter also shows true courage, of the men and women who helped to save two police officers trapped underneath the rubble at Ground Zero. However, this patriotism overwhelmed the film, using the weight of the tragedy to make the onscreen action seem more stunning than what was actually happening. 

In other words, one placed you at the scene of the action while the other made you feel as if you were watching a movie. Unfortunately, J.A. Boyana’s The Impossible, about a family imperiled by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, feels too much like the latter.

Although based on the true story of a Spanish family, The Impossible focuses on the Bennets, a generic, English-born family from Japan who arrive at the film’s start on an idyllic beachside resort in Khao Lak, Thailand. The sands are as white and the waters as turquoise as the guidebooks probably suggested.

There is very little time spent with father Henry (Ewan McGregor), mother Maria (Naomi Watts) and their three boys – the eldest of whom is named Lucas and portrayed by Tom Holland, in an extraordinary screen debut – before December 26, 2004. That day, a tsunami barrels toward the coast, with the Bennets and tens of thousands of others in its relentless path.

Maria and Thomas find each other, miraculously, within the rushing waters. She’s gripping onto one of the last palm trees as her son tries to quell the tide and swim toward her. The water is up to the traffic lights. The carnage underneath the surface scratches Lucas and injures Maria.

Limping through shallower waters, son and mother try to find their way to the nearest hospital, since a bark bandage can only sustain Maria’s wound for so long. Lucas assumes the rest of the family is dead and gone but cannot waste a moment dwelling on the tragic news.

For many, especially parents, The Impossible will likely be an emotionally draining endurance test. Spanish director J.A. Boyana recreates the natural disaster itself with chilling details that recall the glimpses of flooding and devastation from the nightly news just over eight years ago.

However, while this account is viscerally pulse-pounding – the film starts on a black screen and an amplified volume of whirlwinds, which only emphasizes the dread we already know is coming – the story itself is too shallow, reducing itself to a streamlined cavalcade of clichéd moments that can only happen in the movies.

This dramatization wouldn’t be so inept if the words “true story” hadn’t stayed on the screen at the beginning for a few added seconds, emphasizing the film’s claims to reality. As spectacular as the carnage is, not enough of the film’s personal moments ring true – even though Maria Belon, the real mother, gets a story credit.

Meanwhile, McGregor and Watts, two strong actors, breathe heavily and cry and pant and wail like distraught parents, but are unfortunately playing generic characters. Holland, who looks like a young Jaime Bell (appropriately, he played Billy Eliot on the London stage), gets an enhanced arc as the stoic eldest son.

When Lucas uses his nimble legs to search a hospital for survivors, taking the names of the missing on a notepad with hopes to reconnect them with their anguished parents, Holland utilizes an impressive range, from buoyancy to dismay. It’s the film best scene and one of its only moments that focuses on any of the other disaster victims.

The Impossible broke box office records in Spain, likely due to its director, J.A. Boyana, who has been dubbed the ‘Spanish Spielberg.’ Due to the film’s financial longevity overseas, The Impossible could be his Jaws, also a massive hit and horror story that capitalizes on audiences’ fear of the underwater.

Boyana also uses, frequently, the same close-up, that of an awed human face realizing the unbelievable, that is one of Spielberg’s directorial flourishes.

The Impossible starts as an incredible story of survival and descends into one shaped by the need for big, climactic movie moments than for the credibility of the events. The more Boyana treads into unleashing spectacle, through overwrought dream sequences and larger-than-life moments of inspiration, the more he dilutes the film’s power.