The value in the build-up

I’ve seen two movies this week that run in excess of 130 minutes, both of which expend the majority

of their running time on the lead-up to a major event in which people burned to death.

That sounds pretty grim for two movies that celebrate the human spirit, but there it is.

There are very different types of fires at the climaxes of Only the Brave and In This Corner of the World. In the former, it’s an Arizona wildfire that claims 19 brave firefighters; the latter, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed as many as 80,000 more than that.

Rightly or wrongly – and I’ve determined it’s rightly – neither event is the focus of the film in which it appears. That focus is squarely on the people, a decision which may at first seem frustrating, but gradually proves its worth as the movie goes on.

 

I probably need to explain that a bit. As I agree with Roger Ebert’s idea that film is the ultimate empathy machine, I certainly can’t quibble with any time a film spends on developing its characters. But both of the films in question meandered more than I expected on their way to a very powerful denouement. As the anime film, Corner both meandered more and contained the more powerful denouement. The Hollywood film did a little less of both, but enough of each for me to note the discrepancy.

Although I’m generally in favor of a tight script when all else is equal, a flabbier script with better character development is certainly a welcome, er, development. It may be the only way for film to take back some of the ground it’s lost to TV. When a character dies in a TV show, you may have been following that character for a couple seasons rather than a couple hours. A great film will accumulate two seasons’ worth of emotional impact in two hours, but in general you’d think that developing such an investment in the characters would be more a matter of time. It’s invariable, to some extent.

Both of these films gave that the time – at least within the limitations of their status as feature films. Enough time is spent living with these characters before the event that defines them befalls them. They are really flesh-and-blood souls when we lose them (or don’t lose them, as the case may be).

I don’t know that I’m saying anything particularly profound here, only that seeing two movies like that on consecutive nights really made me notice it. The anime movie might have always been made that way, but Only the Brave didn’t need to be, and probably wouldn’t have been just a few years ago. As I wrote in my review, the comparative quickness of the fire that did kill them gave the filmmakers no choice but to shift focus elsewhere. Still, they could have easily made a 110-minute film rather than a 134-minute one.

And though I stopped short of actual demonstrable emotion – no tears – I felt myself on the verge of being choked up by the ends of both movies. You might say that’s just good old-fashioned cinema. I say, I don’t mind pausing to celebrate it nonetheless.