Some stories just seem made for the movies. The passage of the 13th Amendment, let’s say, or some nerdy people sitting around in Tehran listening to Led Zeppelin. All right, those may not be the best examples, but you know what I’m getting at. There are those stories that seem as ill-suited to the cinema as salami. A case in point would be the decision in the days following World War II whether or not to charge Emperor Hirohito of Japan with war crimes. It’s a rich and significant subject for scholars, but not exactly filmic.
Director Peter Webber (“Girl With a Pearl Earring”) and screenwriters David Klass and Vera Blasi think otherwise. “Emperor” is the result. General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) tasks a deputy, General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox), to gather evidence about Hirohito. He has just 10 days before MacArthur has to tell Washington what to do. Gulp.
Comments
Good review. With Manchester's superlative biography of MacArthur "American Caesar" as a comparison, I was leary of this movie. And I had the exact same reaction to Tommy Lee Jones after seeing the trailers on tv.
MacArthur towered over everybody in every way. Sounds like Jones was a good choice. I don't think this type of subject matter should be restricted to scholars. It's a way of trapping the general public into a moment of learning something.
If the emperor was tried as a war criminal, there would have been a civil eruption of unimaginable proportions by the suicidal Japanese people. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and marines would have lost their lives and there would NOT have been as many baby boomers living today. Their "fathers" would have been slaughtered.