Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The Bridge on the River Kwai is the thirtieth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here.
All the devastation of two World Wars completely remade the entire globe and that tortured legacy is etched deeply in the record of cinema. Go all the way back to the silent era and filmmakers were already grappling with the futility and suffering, the egos and carnage of global conflict. This holds true of the Academy Awards as well. At least a dozen winners have primarily centered on war, with half of those winners coming in the decades immediately before and after the Second World War. David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai arrived at the tail end of that era, depicting the intractable nature of conflict. Captured in Burma by the occupying Japanese army, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and his company are tasked with building a bridge for the demanding Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Saito is under a time crunch, his commanders are demanding he finish the bridge — one crucial to the Japanese war aims — soon or else be forced to commit ritual suicide. In light of these consequences, Saito commands all his prisoners, including Nicholson and the other officers to work full bore to the completion of the project. This sets up a conflict as the gentlemanly Nicholson refuses to allow himself or his officers to do manual labor, citing the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, an American commander, Shears (William Holden,) escapes the camp’s sick bay, only to be ordered back by the British Army on a mission to destroy the bridge under construction. Lean’s wartime epic is a gargantuan 161 minutes, the fifth longest winner of Best Picture to that point. At times the deliberate nature of the film feels like watching the titular bridge be built in real time. Some of the tediousness serves the functions of the movie and its criticisms of war. Much of the central conflict stem’s from Nicholson’s refusal to work, making nearly half the movie about standing up for the critical virtue of the Geneva Convention’s exemption of officers from manual labor. The foolishness of choosing that molehill to die on is something of a microcosm of the film. Much time is spent on something that is ultimately frivolous. When Nicholson finally agrees to take charge of the bridge project — which only happens after Saito’s complete capitulation — he becomes obsessed. His men are ordered to cease sabotaging the bridge and more or less collaborate with the enemy. This is essentially an effort to show British superiority over an incompetent Japanese army. The central performances are what really make The Bridge on the River Kwai. Guinness was not the first choice of Lean to play his part but is rather masterful in making Nicholson’s stubbornness shift from noble to folly. Hayakawa’s Saito makes for a tremendous foil, the desperation creeping over his face as he is forced to cede ground to Nicholson. Holden is also good as a brash but cowardly commander, even if his escape subplot feels more like a distraction than an additive element to the story. Ultimately there are a lot of ideas about what is truly reaped out of war buried in this plodding epic. A more streamlined telling might have highlighted those themes more strongly. As much as is revealed about the British war ethos by Guinness’s stiff upper lip becoming his downfall, that journey is more often endured than enjoyed. 6/10
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