The Weekend Review: The Wind Rises

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

There is a risk with certain movies - with certain director's last movies - to expect too much from them.  It's not enough that they're good, they have to be great: a swan song that encapsulates their entire, decades-long filmography in only 90 minutes and ultimately justifies their lack of future films.  Anything less than perfect is a disgrace, and even perfection is a bitter-sweet reminder for what has left us.

To say that I was excited to see The Wind Rises, legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki's last film before his retirement, would be a profound understatement.  His films helped open my eyes to the possibilities of non-Western films: to animated epics involving primordial animal gods, exiled princes, goldfish princesses, fire demons, cursed fighter pilots, mechanized castles, otherworldly day spas and friendly neighborhood spirits.  It was through him that I first understood that epic scope did not mean abandoning intimate narratives, that riveting scenes of action did not have to come at the expense of quiet, meditative shots of characters simply being.  Films didn't just have to be one thing.  They could be flashy at times, subdued at others, seething with intense emotion when such things were called for and yet become fully at peace with their own existence when all the fighting was done.

And this - his decidedly last film - was unique in his filmography: not a fantastical tale of gods, monsters and ethereal spirits, but a historical biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed many of Japan's World War II fighter planes.  Unique, and yet not so far removed: blurring the lines of reality and imagination to create an impossibly, fantastically rendered reality that both does and does not belong to our otherwise mundane existence.

So when I finally saw The Wind Rises on Saturday - this final outing from one of the world's most visionary directors - it would have been easy enough to despairingly label it a failure unworthy of Miyazaki's last film.  But that would have been disingenuous to the truly amazing film that he did produce.  Even if it is not quite what it could have been, it is never-the-less as filled with Miyazaki's trademark love of life and the ugly yet beautiful world that we find ourselves in.

Jiro Horikoshi is a brilliant Japanese engineer whose boyhood fantasies of flight and Inception-esque shared dreams with renowned Italian aircraft designer Count Giovanni Caproni have driven him to to a simple end: to build beautiful planes.  But with the coming second World War and Japan's wealth disparity demanding the country's attention, he is forced to compromise his pure dream by designing fighter planes and bombers: machines that exist only to kill and be shot down.

Despite its decidedly realistic narrative, Miyazaki succeeds at incorporating his trademark style into what could have otherwise just been yet another historical biopic.  His understated fantastical flair touches the film with just enough unreality to make it feel like a wholly unique experience.  While it makes sense that, in his own mind, the two would easily blur (such as the image above, where his papers fly around the office from some unseen gale of the imagination), they do so beyond the bounds of his mere dreams and daydreams.

As Jiro describes his dream of a sleek, near-frictionless airplane capable of shattering current airspeed records to his engineering team, we see his vision swoop down from above in the office.  While lesser directors would have left us with that glimpse of Jiro's vision, Miyazaki presses even further - having Jiro's coworkers follow its progress with their eyes, hurriedly duck down when it dives and exclaim in enthusiastic awe about the shared vision for the project that they just had.  Even their hair and clothes intensely rustle, as if they actually did just have a near miss with a plane zooming over 200 miles an hour past them.

While Miyazaki does go further than what probably any other director in his position would have, I can't help but feel that even he was playing it too safe.  These were, for me, the absolute highlight of the film: his mad scramble to perfect aviation technology and how his mind brought his fantastical creations to life in an equally fantastical way.  I would imagine that, being out of his traditional depth of high fantasy, Miyazaki opted to keep his biographical narrative more grounded in realism than he would have otherwise.

While that is a respectable position to take - even responsible - it was not the correct one.  A film can be stylistically unreal while still being no less realistic.  Igmar Bergman proved this with his entire filmography, especially films like Persona and Wild Strawberries.  Even the Japanese film Perfect Blue managed this in the late nineties.  Last film of no, Miyazaki should have gone for broke with The Wind Rises and merge the fantastical and the mundane so completely that the two would be virtually inseparable from one another.

Miyazaki's films have always dealt with the horrors of war and the ideal of peace.  Princess Mononoke depicted a pointless and horrific war against nature itself, resolving that one should live alongside the planet, not attempt to dominate it.  This brought out more obviously in Howl's Moving Castle, which graphically depicted the military bombing civilian targets and the film's title character alternates the entire film between conscientious objector and defender of the defenseless.

The Wind Rises addresses this theme in the most nuanced way imaginable: not from the perspectives of either the bomber or the bombee, but from the man designing the weapons being used.  Jiro is an idealistic, pacifistic man who only wants to create beautiful planes that can improve peoples' lives - a goal shared by his idol Count Giovanni Caproni, who really just wants to build commercial planes to transport people across the Atlantic.  When working out how to make his planes faster, his first suggestion is to remove the guns (something that his military-backed employer obviously won't allow).  The film ends on a haunting meditation of his and Caproni's life's work: "airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams waiting to be swallowed by the sky."

If I can really fault the film for anything, other than simply not blurring the lines between reality and fantasy enough, it's that its more interesting story of aeronautical engineering is interspliced with a far less interesting - and completely fictitious - account of Jiro's personal life: of the woman he loves, her (fictitious) death by tuberculosis and the precious little time that they had together.  While none of it was bad per se, it was considerably more dull than the rest of the film, sometimes bordering on feeling as contrived as it, in fact, was.  I would have much preferred an increased focus on Jiro's professional story.

Despite not being Miyazaki's best film, it is easily his most nuanced and mature: a perfectly poignant note for him to end his career on.  The animation is as breathtaking, his characters as endearing and his narrative as engaging as they ever have been.  This is a must see for fans of the director, its medium, dramas and film in general.  It is a film instilled with an infectious love of life, positing that "le vent se lève! / Il faut tenter de vivre!" (The wind is rising!  /  We must try to live!").  I give the film a high 7.5 out of 10.

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