Film scholars tend to describe 1985’s “The Color Purple” and 1987’s “Empire of the Sun” as the films that ultimately made Steven Spielberg great. It was these pictures that saw him move away from the fantastical creatures and thrills of his earlier work to tell fully grounded human stories for the first time. It’s a reductive way of looking at his art as a director, but it’s not entirely invalid either.
Of the two, however, it’s “Empire of the Sun” that feels more personal. ‘The Color Purple’ is sensitive in the way it adapts Alice Walker’s regularly banned bookand it’s obvious that Spielberg sympathizes with the queer black woman at its center, but he also struggles to understand how best to deal with her experiences. However, that’s not at all the case with “Empire of the Sun,” a film in which a preteen Christian Bale, in his first major film role, plays a boy who is forced to grow up far too quickly. Himself a child of divorce, Spielberg was naturally drawn to this motif throughout his career before becoming a director. the cinematic therapy session that is “The Fabelmans”.
Talk to The New York Times in 1988, he didn’t deny that it was also what drew him to “Empire of the Sun.” Yet while he appreciated that it was a story about a child, what really appealed to him was “the idea that it was a death of innocence, not an attenuation of childhood, which, by my own admission and everyone’s impression of me, is what my life has been.” Perhaps herein lies Spielberg’s paradox: although he was criticized for needing to grow as an artist when he was younger, his personal life was a different story.
Empire of the Sun remains one of Spielberg’s most personal works
Based on JG Ballard’s 1984 partly autobiographical novel, “Empire of the Sun” follows Jamie Graham (Christian Bale). The son of two wealthy white British expatriates living in the Shanghai International Colony during World War II, Jamie is separated from his parents when Japan takes control of the region and, in time, becomes a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. As was also the case when Steven Spielberg directed the a true story inspired by “Catch Me If You Can” 15 years after “Empire”, it’s not really difficult to understand why this story of the separation of a family and the traumatic effect it has on their son appealed to the filmmaker.
This, coupled with his general interest in World War II, was why Spielberg wanted to make “Empire of the Sun”, even back when his cinematic hero, David Lean, was circling the subject. “My parents divorced when I was 14 or 15. […] The breakup between mother and father is extremely traumatic from the age of 4. We’re all still suffering from the repercussions of a divorce that had to happen,” he told TNYT. He also admitted that it’s part of the reason he “isn’t good with change,” and it took him a minute to stop focusing on making films that “appeal to audiences ages 6 to 15.”
At times, Spielberg’s crowd-pleasing sensibilities rear their heads in “Empire of the Sun” and clash with the story’s dark subject matter and otherwise serious tone, but that’s much less of an issue here than in “The Color Purple.” When it comes to the story as he made it, you get the feeling that the filmmaker was simply more comfortable letting this film’s haunting images and sadder moments speak for themselves.
