Interesting review from the New Yorker magazine:
Hell on Earth
HBO’s “The Pacific.â€
by Nancy Franklin
March 15, 2010
“The Pacific,†a ten-part miniseries that begins Sunday on HBO, is a companion piece to the channel’s “Band of Brothers,†which chronicled a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division from training to D Day, and on to Germany, through Holland and Belgium. As soon as that series began airing, nine years ago, veterans of the war in the Pacific and relatives of fallen fighters started beating the drum for the producersâ€â€Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who had made “Saving Private Ryan,†three years earlierâ€â€to tell the story of the other war, their war, the one that took place on the opposite side of the globe and seemed to have less of a hold on the imagination of most Americans.
It’s not that the war in the Pacific hadn’t been written about or depicted on film; “Guadalcanal Diary,†for example, a war correspondent’s account of the battle that began in August of 1942, was published in 1943, before the Japanese had even finished evacuating the island, and the movie version came out later that year. Still, Americans in the forties were more likely to look toward Europe when thinking about the war; it was what they knew and understood, because it was where most of them were from. They didn’t have to look at a map to know where France was. Guadalcanal was a different story. Virtually no one had heard of it before 1942, and even some of the military higher-ups had trouble pronouncing it at first. Americans got to know these placesâ€â€Guam, Saipan, Wake Island, Bougainville, Okinawaâ€â€and what the fight was all about, but they didn’t hand that knowledge down. By the time the next generation came of age, the war in the Pacific had essentially been reduced to two events and one iconic image: the attack on Pearl Harbor, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the photograph of marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, on Iwo Jima.
Our shaky knowledge of the Pacific region remains a problem for those trying to tell the story of the war. It’s far away, and it involves island groups that we can’t even locate, and whose relation to one another we don’t understand. (My father served in the Pacific, with the 3rd Marine Division, so I’ve looked up the Solomon Islands, where Guadalcanal is, on a map; still, it didn’t register until recently how very close they are to Australia.) The Pacific Ocean covers roughly a third of the globe. In a way, you could say that it doesn’t want to be known, except to those who are truly dedicated to knowing it. Spielberg and Hanks (and Hanks’s producing partner, Gary Goetzman) are such people. Their adaptation of “Band of Brothers†was faithful and struck most viewers, and most veterans, as authentic. “The Pacific,†I suspect, will strike many people that way, too. It’s drawn largely from narratives written by marines who fought in the 1st Divisionâ€â€E. B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed†and Robert Leckie’s “Helmet for My Pillowâ€â€â€and from accounts of the actions of another member of the 1st Division, John Basilone, who was a hero of Guadalcanal and the first enlisted marine to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Leckie and Sledge both died in 2001; Basilone, who was turned into a capital-“H†hero by the military brass, plucked from the battlefield, and sent around the country to help sell war bonds, returned to combat and was killed on the first day of fighting on Iwo Jima.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisThe ten hour-long episodes of “The Pacific†were written and directed by some of the same people who worked on “Band of Brothersâ€; most of the others involved, such as Tim Van Patten, David Nutter, and George Pelecanos, are also in the HBO hall of fame, having worked on “The Sopranos,†“The Wire,†or other grade-A shows. Robert Schenkkan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “The Kentucky Cycle,†co-wrote four episodes. Hugh Ambrose, a historian and the son of Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the book “Band of Brothers,†was a consultant for “The Pacific†and wrote the companion book. As was the case with “Band of Brothers,†and with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 2007 almost-fifteen-hour PBS documentary, “The War,†there is a sense of lavishness, of quality goods about “The Pacific.†“Band of Brothers†cost a hundred and twenty million dollars to make; “The War†’s marketing campaign alone cost ten million dollars; and now “The Pacific†comes rolling into town, having spent two hundred million dollars to reënact major battle scenes in Australia and, according to a press release, to “create 3,000 manufactured uniforms . . . the equivalent of 100 tennis courts . . . of herringbone twill, specially woven in India on old-fashioned looms to replicate the 1940s weave.â€
What’s not part of the weave of “The Pacific†is the big picture. The real story of war is now defined as real storiesâ€â€in this case, those of Sledge (Joe Mazzello), Leckie (James Badge Dale), and Basilone (Jon Seda). But a series with such an overarching title ought to have more to it than the movements of boots on the ground. There’s no substitute for knowing those movements, but they aren’t the whole story, or the only way of telling it. Of course, there is no definitive narrative of a war, but the solution the producers settled on here is confusing: episodes skip around without explanation and leave the main characters off the screen for long stretches of time, and not enough distinction is drawn between different placesâ€â€we don’t learn, for instance, the specific difficulties of the terrain, which was either unyielding and rocky, with no way to cover dead bodies or excrement, or too yielding, like the slippery black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima. We’re occasionally shown mapsâ€â€with the angry red rays of the Japanese imperial flag delineating the ever-decreasing reach of the empireâ€â€but these don’t give us a clue to the import of any given victory or loss. More helpful are the micro-documentaries, just a couple of minutes long, at the beginning of each episode, which have period footage and snippets of white-haired veterans (unidentified) giving us some perspective on the war. “It still scares me today, and that’s been sixty-seven years ago,†one says.
In “The Pacific,†an extraordinary amount of attention is paid to an often neglected battleâ€â€the bloody fight for Peleliu, which was supposed to be over in a matter of days and ended up lasting months. It became clear to the military then and to scholars afterward that the battle was unnecessaryâ€â€securing the island made no difference to the outcome of the war. It was a battle between two American admirals: one who wanted to cancel the operation and one who wanted to proceed as planned. The fighting took place under hellish conditions, with temperatures often above a hundred degrees. About nine thousand Americans were killed or wounded, and at least eleven thousand Japanese were wiped out. Although the series also shows us the battles of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, we spend part of three episodes on Peleliu, as if it were standing in for the horror of the entire war. At the same time, the story is told choppily, with Leckie leaving Peleliu at the end of the sixth episode, and Sledge still on the island in the seventh episode. (I recommend the History Channel’s documentary on the battle of Peleliu; and YouTube has some remarkable videos on the subject.)
There are nighttime battle scenes that last as long as ten minutes in “The Pacificâ€â€â€an attempt to give viewers some sense of the unrelenting, terrifying reality of it all. This artistic decision echoes the one that Spielberg made in showing us almost half an hour of the Normandy invasion at the beginning of “Saving Private Ryan.†But authenticity in a war movie doesn’t depend exclusively on the accumulation of gory detail; it also requires emotional and psychological realism. Here, when Basilone dies, the camera pulls up from the splayed body in an aerial shot, as if the angels were lifting him up to Heaven, while generically elegiac orchestral music plays, and then cuts to a shot of his widow with a sunset in the background, as the music comes to a sweetly sad resolution. The scene is a lie about death.
If the fleshly horror of the war can only be pictured and not fully conveyed, the same is true of the spiritual agony. We do see the light fading from the actors’ eyes as the war goes on and the characters become resigned to their diminishment. But the filmmakers seem not to have completely trusted the marines’ actual experiences. In a scene on Okinawa, Sledge encounters an old woman in a hut, dying of an infected wound that was probably caused by bomb fragments. At first, he is suspicious of her, and then he realizes that she wants him to shoot her in order to end her pain. Instead, he sits down and holds her, cradling her head, until she dies. In the book, Sledge leaves in search of medical help, while another marine goes into the hut. Sledge hears a shot and asks about it: the marine says that she was “just an old gook who wanted me to put her out of her misery, so I obliged her!†This makes you suspect that the filmmakers have taken other liberties in “The Pacific,†though in a way I wish they’d taken moreâ€â€gone a little crazy and delved deeper into the men’s innelives, as Terrence Malick did in his 1998 adaptation of James Jones’s Guadalcanal novel, “The Thin Red Line.†There’s no question that the creators of “The Pacific†set out to honor the marines’ experience; they haven’t exactly failed to do that, but neither have they succeeded in leading viewers to a deeper appreciation of thisâ€â€then and nowâ€â€faraway war. ♦
