Get your own Free HomepageThe heroes in this reported $16 million World War II ensemble drama are a group of female prisoners defying their Japanese captors by forming a vocal orchestra? You couldn't make this stuff up: Beresford based his script on true accounts of female POWs. But will men come to see this? "It's not devoid of men--there are the Japanese soldiers--and there are some pretty brutal scenes, which the men might enjoy," jokes Close. "Will she or will she not survive the beating? Will he or will he not cut off her head?" (April 11)
[ WHAT'S AT STAKE ] After a promising turn on 1989's Driving Miss Daisy, Beresford has been churning out clunkers (Last Dance, Silent Fall, and A Good Man in Africa). He needs Paradise Road to get him back on track.
Paradise Road left many high-profile women stirred and inspired by female survival power at a preview Monday in Manhattan. Glenn Close co-stars in this true World War II prison-camp drama as a glorious saber of a woman who stands up to her Japanese captors in Sumatra. "An amazing group of women," said ABC's Elizabeth Vargas, who co-hosted with Matilda Cuomo and Bianca Jagger. "Very moving," said writer Patti Davis, who was shaken by the scene of a woman burned to death. That and the torture of a girl are tough to stomach. But as Diandra Douglas, a filmmaker, noted, it was good to see "the camaraderie, the strong female bonds. You rarely see women in such hardship. It reminded me of The Bridge on the River Kwai," with women.
Frances McDormand said she takes "a risk" doing a German accent as a Jewish refugee/outsider (you must hear her "darlink"). Pauline Collins, Julianna Margulies and Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Prejudice) also appear. Paradise Road opens in April.
With the possible exceptions of Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl Streep, no actress is better at projecting an empathetic, high-minded nobility than Glenn Close. And in "Paradise Road," Bruce Beresford's grandly messy World War II epic, she has the saintliest role yet in a gallery of screen characters notable for their angelic ("The Natural") and demonic ("Fatal Attraction," "Dangerous Liaisons") extremes.
Playing Adrienne Pargiter, the founder and conductor of an all-female vocal orchestra formed in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, Ms. Close is starved, humiliated, beaten and nearly killed. Through it all, she maintains her impeccable boarding-school manners along with the indomitable self-confidence of a Great Lady serenely pulling herself up out of the mud.
As Ms. Close lifts her hands to lead a humming chorus of the Largo from Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, her eyes glisten, her chin tilts upward at an angle that transforms her into a glowing patrician goddess, and a triumphant little smile plays across her lips. It isn't so much the music but Ms. Close's aura of holiness that momentarily softens the hearts of her vicious captors who, virtually hypnotized, sit down on the grass and drink in the ethereal choral rhapsody.
Later when a Japanese officer forces her into the woods, either, she imagines, to rape or kill her, it turns out that all he wants to do is sing for her approval. For this bizarre audition, which suggests a parody of "The King and I," Ms. Close is posed against a magnificently gnarled old tree, and a heavenly light streams across her face.
The scene is a typically overdramatized moment in a big, splashy film that feels unconvincing despite the fact that it is based on true incidents. Adhering to the conventions of a vintage World War II drama, it is really the female version of a 1940s combat movie preaching an upbeat message of solidarity in adversity. In the stereotypical cross-section of prisoners, Ms. Close is the group's de facto leader, the upscale, matronly equivalent of a Dana Andrews character.
"Paradise Road" opens with a terrific bang as the revelry in a swanky hotel ballroom in Singapore is shattered by Japanese bombs. It is 1942, and the supposedly impregnable city is being stormed by Japanese troops. All Europeans are instructed to evacuate immediately. Adrienne is one of hundreds of women assigned to a ship that in the movie's most spectacular scene is bombed by Japanese planes. One of the few stranded without a lifeboat, she swims to shore and finds herself in a Sumatran marsh. By the time she has made her way to a rundown village, most of the other women from the boat have been herded into the town square by barking Japanese soldiers.
At this point, the movie turns into a sprawling prison-camp soap opera that tries to track far too many characters than it can comfortably handle. Among the more prominent are Margaret Drummond (Pauline Collins), a humble, sweet-natured Christian missionary who helps Adrienne organize the vocal orchestra, and Dr. Verstak (Frances McDormand), a cynical German-Jewish emigre who appoints herself the camp's resident physician and in-house smuggler of black-market goodies.
Jennifer Ehle is Rosemary Leighton-Jones, a picture-perfect English ingenue pining for her soldier boyfriend, and Elizabeth Spriggs a snobbish upper-class woman clinging to her beloved dog, which of course is shot by the Japanese. There is much to-do about the tension between the English and the Dutch prisoners who get into a brawl over a piece of soap.
In trying to keep track of everybody while providing enough melodrama to sustain an atmosphere of controlled terror, "Paradise Road" stumbles all over itself and never really finds its center.
But it has some hair-raising moments. In the most horrifying scene, a prisoner who has flouted the rules is called in front of the camp, doused with gasoline and burned to a cinder. And as the film speeds along, the death toll among the prisoners steadily mounts.
If "Paradise Road" had an extra half-hour to develop its characters, it might have amounted to something more substantial than a series of disconnected little dramas. But despite the strong ensemble acting (Ms. McDormand's caricatured doctor is a surprising exception), the characters never become full enough for us to care a great deal about who survives and who doesn't.
It's not Ms. Close's fault that even Adrienne remains a mystery. We glimpse her with her husband for a moment in the opening scene, but thenceforth there is barely a mention of him or of their life together. It's almost as though this radiant creature were an Olympian statue who materialized like Glinda the Good Witch just in the nick of time to waft sweet music into an Oz that has turned into an inferno.
Production notes:
PARADISE ROAD
WITH: Glenn Close (Adrienne Pargiter), Pauline Collins (Margaret Drummond), Frances McDormand (Dr. Verstak), Jennifer Ehle (Rosemary Leighton-Jones) and Elizabeth Spriggs (Mrs. Roberts).
Written and directed by Bruce Beresford; director of photography, Peter James; edited by Timothy Wellburn; production designer, Herbert Pinter; produced by Sue Milliken and Greg Coote; released by Fox Searchlight.
Running time: 110 minutes.
Rating: "Paradise Road" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity and scenes of violence, including one of torture.
PARADISE ROAD. Glenn Close, Frances McDormand. Directed by Bruce Beresford. At area theaters. Running time: 110 mins. Rated R.
Catfights in the shower, beatings in the yard, brutal guards everywhere lusting to take their pleasure with the comely inmates: It might as well be a Roger Corman women's prison picture - a "Big Bird Cage" for the '90 - in which case it might be fun.
But it is, in fact, "Paradise Road", a big, bland, self-serious effort from Australian director Bruce Beresford, whose Oscar-winning "Driving Miss Daisy" established him as the absolute master of middle-brow sobriety.
With its cast of professionally over-the-top female performers - including Glenn Close, Frances McDormand and Britain's Pauline Collins ("Shirley Valentine") - the movie continually threatens to collapse into camp.
But Beresford is too much of a plodder even to give Close her head. She turns in a tedious performance, too clearly based on Greer Garson's stiff-upper-lip Englishwomen of World War II, that never acquires any life of its own.
Close is Adrienne Pargiter, the spiritual leader of a group of English, American, Irish and Dutch women who, after the fall of Singapore in 1942, have been captured and interned by the Japanese. Placed in a bare-bones camp in the jungle of Sumatra, the women are starved, beaten and put to forced labor in rice paddies and pigsties.
Their only consolation is a "vocal orchestra" led by Close and based on arrangements created by Collins, a missionary with a musical background. As McDormand,playing the camp's sole Jewish inmate, a cynical doctor, scoffs affectionately from the sidelines, the women perform choral versions of symphonies with such beauty that even their savage captors are seduced.
That's a lofty, reverent notion of art, but Beresford is careful to dose his own artistry with more exploitable elements. One inmate (Pauline Chan) is burned alive for black marketeering. Another (Cate Blanchett) is staked out in the sun for insolence. The level of sadism throughout is distinctly higher than the story requires.
Just an excerpt...the part about Jennifer:
"Paradise Road" is a full-throated ensemble piece, and Beresford has built himself a formidable case: Glenn Close, Julianna Margulies, Joanna Ter Steege, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, the fine and purposeful young Australian actress Cate Blanchett, and Jennifer Ehle, who was last seen as Lizzie Bennet in the BBC "Pride and Prejudice." Why the entire Japanese Army doesn't fall to its knees and commit mass ritual suicide in her honor is, quite frankly, beyond comprehension. The depth of the acting here works in two directions: all the actresses - with the odd exception of Frances McDormand, whose stiff Teutonic doctor suffers from a worrying case of Fargoitis - pull their weight, but the result is that the picture has no true center.
MOVIE REVIEW: 'Paradise Road' * 1/2 (R). Fact-based and all-too-noble tale of female prisoners of war, who cope with confinement and brutality by forming a vocal orchestra. With Glenn Close, Pauline Collins, Cate Blanchett, Frances McDormand, Sab Shimono, Stan Egi, David Chung. Written and directed by Bruce Beresford. 2 hours (violence, adult situations, graphic abuse). At select Manhattan theaters.
By John Anderson, Staff Writer
CAN A MOVIE be based on fact and still make "Hogan's Heroes" seem like a documentary? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, would it require someone with a heart of stone not to laugh at Glenn Close directing POWs singing "Bolero"?
The answers to these questions are strictly subjective, but they might occur to you while watching "Paradise Road," a film so noble it collapses under the weight of its own sincerity. Based on the experiences of female prisoners of the Japanese during World War II (Claudette Colbert served a similar sentence in 1950's "Three Came Home"), it concerns a multinational group on Sumatra that, in the face of relentless abuse, humiliation and its own internecine warfare, forms a "vocal orchestra."
For all its glorious Ravel and Dvorak, however -- sung in a jungle that sounds like Alice Tully Hall -- the film exalts its women beyond the bounds of believability, demonizes the Japanese beyond the limits of good taste and chronicles cruelty without establishing a point.
Director Bruce Beresford, who once made such films as "Breaker Morant" and "Black Robe" -- and has more recently cranked out such softheaded, pseudo-sociology as "Last Dance" -- is so constrained by formula that he loses track of what he's about. The initial setting is Singapore, 1942, where the self-satisfied colonials dance as if it's the end of the world, while maintaining a willful ignorance of the approaching Japanese. This lack of preparedeness is presumably the fault of the men, since the women are mere accessories. But when the society wives voice the most virulently racist opinions about the enemy, dramatic tradition demands that their subsequent suffering be viewed as something they've brought on themselves. So which is it? Retribution or sexism?
It doesn't really matter, because the real purpose of the film is to subject its female characters to incessant peril. Even here, however, Beresford misfires. He attaches the same sense of indignation to the women being rudely awakened -- the guards bang on their beds with batons -- as he does to their physical beating. The abuse is constant, painful to watch and borders on the inane. At one point, a Chinese woman, Wing (Pauline Chan), is set on fire for dealing in contraband quinine (malaria is rampant and untreated). The actions of the Japanese may be historically accurate, but why did anyone feel compelled to re-create them? A movie like "Paradise Road" needs to teach a lesson, and it's hard to find one here, except as ethnic propaganda.
The movie's ostensible inspiration -- the group organized by Adrienne (Close) and the missionary Margaret (Pauline Collins, of "Shirley Valentine") to sing wordless orchestral music -- is also based on fact, but rings as falsely as anything else, including recent Oscar winner Frances McDormand's performance as a German-Jewish doctor who seems like a refugee from a Kurt Weill road show. The constant wisecracking is merely off-putting, but the ripest moment occurs when the Japanese guards, sent to break up the singers' premiere performance, are stopped in their tracks by the beauty of the music. Literally. The vicious, sadistic tormenters, rendered helpless by the "New World Symphony." If Adm. Halsey had only known . . .
The importance of music to despairing captives was done, and to infinitely better effect, in "Playing for Time." And for all the courageousness of "Paradise Road," there are a few peculiar historical omissions. There are no rapes, for one thing -- which, given the Japanese military's record concerning "comfort women," would have seemed an inevitability. The women are, however, herded to a nearby officers club and given the option of trading sex for three hots and an occupied cot. "Are Japanese officers any worse than most of the creeps we've known?" asks Topsy (Julianna Margulies). She's talked out of it, but not all the women are. "I just lost four sopranos," Adrienne mourns.
Close is unmercifully earnest, but Cate Bartlett is convincing as the insecure prisoner Susan, and Joanna Ter Steege, as the Dutch nun Wilhelminia, supplies some welcome comic relief. It's odd, but in the film's press notes, no mention is made -- either in the plot synopsis or among the cast biographies -- of any of the film's Asian male actors. This just reinforces the sense that "Paradise Road" is a kind of vanity production, a nest of raging egos co-opting the stories of brave, real-life women for their own shallow posturing.
Trivia collectors take note: "Shine" is no longer the only Australian film to use classical music as the key to a sentimental drama about the unbreakable resilience of the human spirit. "Paradise Road" takes the same path, but another "Shine" it's not.
Set during World War II and dealing with the state of war that existed between Japanese captors and their charges in an all-women prisoner of war camp, "Paradise Road" is also at war with itself. A warmhearted horror show that puts cliched movie people into a realistic situation, the signals it sends out are nothing but mixed.
Written and directed by Bruce Beresford, whose better-known works include "Driving Miss Daisy," "Tender Mercies" and "Breaker Morant," this film is intended as a tribute to a group of women who found a unique source of strength that enabled them to survive years of nightmarish imprisonment.
But try as it might, "Paradise Road" can't help being too purposefully uplifting for its own good, filled with non-surprising surprises and emotional epiphanies that are unenviable on the nose. Watching it serves to underscore how skillful "Shine" was in sidestepping some of those same obstacles and cannily simulating emotional reality.
Based on a true story, "Paradise Road" begins in Singapore on a February night in 1942. The colony's British residents are taking their ease at a fancy dress ball at the legendary Raffles Hotel, feeling smug and making derogatory comments about the capabilities of the Japanese armed forces.
An exploding bomb just outside the door changes everyone's tone. Almost immediately comes the announcement that the city will fall in a few days and a hurried plan to evacuate women and children by sea is put into effect. "It's a nice night," one woman says dryly, "for the collapse of an empire."
These opening sections, energized by a sense of urgency, are strong and promising. But once a series of mishaps leads these women, the most visible of whom is tea planter's wife Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close), to a Japanese prison camp on the island of Sumatra, the emotional texture gets dicier.
In the 40-odd years since the classic "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was set in a P.O.W. camp for men, standards for allowable on-screen brutality have considerably loosened, and "Paradise Road" takes full advantage of the change.
Under the direction of the vengeful Capt. Tanaka (Stan Egi), eager to act on his belief that "the time for rules has ended," the camp's guards unleash a barrage of savage beatings and graphic brutality on their prisoners, a scenario not likely to do much for Japan's current image abroad.
But if "Paradise Road" is realistic on a physical level, showing these women shoveling out latrines and coping with malaria as well as torture and foul food, its delineation of them as characters is considerably more pro forma. With nothing for these people to do that isn't familiar or expected, the characters tend to lose individual identity and blend together more than they ought to.
Some performers do stand out, though not always for the best reasons. Pauline Collins, the erstwhile star of "Shirley Valentine," smoothly handles the role of Miss Drummond, a saintly, unflappable missionary. Less successful is Frances McDormand, unusually at sea as the German Jewish Dr. Verstak, who calls everyone "darling" in a castoff Marlene Dietrich accent.
Equally visible is Close as Mrs. Pargiter, she of the short-cropped hair and stiff upper lip. Together with Miss Drummond, Pargiter, a music student before she married, comes up with the scheme of forming their fellow inmates into a vocal orchestra, in effect having the women delicately hum their way through some of the great pieces of the classical music repertoire. It's an endeavor that ends up touching even the stony hearts of their captors.
That story can't help but be a bit heartening in its way, but it's also a little too obvious at every turn. The same goes for the film's digs at a prewar society where women were forced to be wives or even nuns when what they really wanted to do was make music or repair trucks. It's not that that point isn't well worth making, it's rather too bad that the film doesn't trust us to discover its truths more on our own.
* MPAA rating: R, for prisoner of war brutality and violence.
Times guidelines: frequent and intense beatings of female prisoners.
'Paradise Road'
Glenn Close: Adrienne Pargiter
Pauline Collins: Margaret Drummond
Cate Blanchett: Susan Macarthy
Frances McDormand: Dr. Verstak
Julianna Margulies: Topsy Merritt
Jennifer Ehle: Rosemary Leighton-Jones
Elizabeth Spriggs: Mrs. Roberts
A Village Roadshow Pictures production, released by Fox Searchlight
Pictures. Director Bruce Beresford. Producers Sue Milliken, Greg Coote.
Executive producers Andrew Yap, Graham Burke. Screenplay Bruce Beresford.
Cinematographer Peter James. Editor Tim Wellburn. Production design Herbert
Pinter. Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes.
* At selected theaters.
Paradise Road Writer-director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) examines a fascinating but little-known true tale from the second World War in this gut-wrenching ensemble drama about a group of Aussie-European-American women who endure hellish internment in a Japanese prison camp. Caught in Sumatra after Japanese bombers sink their ship, the women spend the next three years in a tiny jungle camp where they are brutalized and starved. Though "paradise road" -- death -- is the ticket out for many of the women, their iron-willed leader, Adrienne (Glenn Close), forms a vocal orchestra to buck up their wilted spirits. True to the tenor of Hollywood prison-camp movies, Beresford unfortunately portrays the captors as evil Japanese monsters. He does, however, go lightly on the requisite false bonding scenes, instead focusing on the petty snobbery and prejudices that keep these women, who come from various levels of society, apart in a normal world. And when the vocal orchestra hums its first ethereal number a heavenly hush descends that soothes the hearts of even those nasty Japanese beasts.
** (R) Adrienne Pargiter: Glenn Close
Margaret Drummond: Pauline Collins
Susan Macarthy: Cate Blanchett
Dr. Verstak: Frances McDormand
Topsy Merritt: Julianna Marguilies
Written and directed by Bruce Beresford.
Runnning time: 130 minutes. Rated R (for prisoner of war, brutality and violence).
Bruce Beresford's ``Paradise Road'' tells the story of a group of women who were held prisoner in a Japanese internment camp for most of World War II. If you were told this story by one of the survivors, you would shake your head in amazement and marvel at her courage. You would probably think it would make a good movie: After all, it's even true.
The film begins at Raffles Hotel in Singapore in 1942, at an elegant dinner dance. An alert arrives that Japanese forces are about to take the city. Women and some children are hurried aboard a transport ship, which is attacked a few days later by Japanese aircraft. Life rafts float ashore at Sumatra, where the survivors are taken to a POW camp, there to spend the rest of the war.
The movie now has a delicate balance to find. It is no longer acceptable to portray the Japanese as the embodiment of evil; the monsters of ``Bridge on the River Kwai'' have now to be seen in a slightly better light, as harsh and cruel, perhaps, but not inhuman--and capable of sentiment when the prisoners form a choir and begin to perform classical choral works. (Earlier, the screenplay provides racist anti-Japanese slurs at the Singapore party, to show that the British, too, had their flaws; the film is set in 1942 but its attitudes are circa 1997.)
We meet the prisoners. They include a remarkable group of women: the British musician Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close); the Australian missionary Margaret Drummond, nicknamed Daisy (Pauline Collins); the nurse Susan Macarthy (Cate Blanchett); the German-accented Dr. Verstak (Frances McDormand), and an American painted in broad strokes, Topsy Merritt (Julianna Marguilies).
Conditions are brutal in the tropical climate, food is scarce, living quarters are filthy, and the camp commandant (Sab Shimono) supervises cruel punishments, including one where a woman must kneel for hours in the hot sun, or fall over onto sharp spikes. Yet their music somehow redeems the conditions and elevates their spirits; the choir even soothes the Japanese to such an extent that guards sent to silence them cannot bring themselves to halt such a glorious sound (they, too, hate the war and are moved by beauty).
Told this story, and that it was true, you would think it would be enough for a screenplay. But would you be correct? I didn't want ``Paradise Road'' to be a melodrama--a ``Great Escape,'' say, or ``Stalag 17'' in which the sound of the music distracts from the digging of tunnels. There is not even the possibility of escape, because they are on an island in the middle of a sea controlled by Japan. We realize early on that prison life, within boundaries, will remain much the same until the film's end. But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.
The performances are moving, especially Glenn Close's work as the strongest of the women, who conducts the choir. It was difficult for me to accept Frances McDormand with a German accent (``Fargo'' was too fresh in my mind), but I admired Pauline Collins (of ``Shirley Valentine''), whose character's remarkable memory allows her to write down classical music so that they can rehearse it.
There is a possibility in this material for a story that contains more drama. The women are offered an alternative to the prison camp: If they volunteer to be prostitutes and please Japanese officers, they can live in a hotel with clean sheets, hot meals and nightly dances. (A lapse in the dialogue: When one woman seems tempted, another asks, ``But what about the choir?'') Some women in such a position did choose to become prostitutes (some women in Raffles in 1942 no doubt had made that career choice even earlier). If the film had intercut the camp scenes with the experiences of a woman who accepted the Japanese offer, it would have brought contrast into the story--and provided an ironic ending for her, no doubt.
Am I being a vulgarian? Given these brave, muddy women singing Dvorak, why am I not content? Why do I want to see one of them sell her body and soul to the Japanese? I think the film cries out for contrast, for tension, for choice. It is too linear. The women are captured, they go to the camp, they suffer and endure, they perform their music, and then the war is over. The movie is an anecdote, not a story.
'Paradise Road' is striking attempt to convey terror and triumph of WWII incident
By Michael Wilmington
TRIBUNE MOVIE CRITIC
Web-posted: Friday, April 18, 1997
When a movie makes an obvious bid for greatness and falls short, there's an unfortunate tendency to undervalue it. Bruce Beresford's ''Paradise Road,'' a splendidly mounted World War II drama, based on fact and set in a Sumatran prison camp, with Glenn Close as prisoner/camp orchestra leader Adrienne Pargiter, begs comparison to both ''The Bridge on the River Kwai'' and the Arthur Miller teleplay ''Playing for Time'' (about the inmate orchestra at Auschwitz). Just as obviously, it suffers by either comparison.
But though the reach of ''Paradise Road'' exceeds its grasp, it's still an often striking attempt to convey the pity, terror and triumph of a fascinating real-life incident.
In 1941, as Singapore fell to Japan, thousands of refugees, many of them women and children of its ruling elite, fled the city, a number of them winding up in Japanese prison camps. At the Sumatran camp we see here, Close's Mrs. Pargiter, dismayed at the squalid living conditions and brutal guards, conducts a musical revolt. She and the beatifically good missionary teacher Margaret ''Daisy'' Drummond (Pauline Collins of ''Shirley Valentine'') form an orchestral chorus, to sing the instrumental passages of works like Bach's ''Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring,'' Dvorak's ''New World Symphony'' and Ravel's ''Bolero.''
They plan to bind together a disparate group from various countries (Germany, Holland and England) who are descending into rancor or despair. But the chorus becomes something more vital, until it's finally decimated by illness and migration to other camps.
In Australian writer-director Beresford's hands, ''Paradise Road'' has its share of kitsch, as well as an unsettlingly hammy and unconvincing performance by recent Best Actress Oscar winner Frances McDormand as the camp's cynical German-Jewish physician, Dr. Verstak. But it's a rare WWII historical drama focusing on women, a film with an unabashedly reverent attitude toward art and its transforming powers. Beresford -- who already has made one great war film, ''Breaker Morant'' -- begins by brilliantly evoking the war's chaos and the camp's brutality. It's in the inspirational sections that his ''Road'' founders.
The movie starts at a ball in Singapore, where we meet some of the eventual prisoners: Adrienne, Daisy, Susan Macarthy (played by Cate Blanchett) and the lone American, Topsy Merritt (Julianna Margulies of TV's ''E.R.''). This scene, with its lilting swing orchestra and fancy gowns, self-destructs spectacularly as the impending fall of the city to the Japanese is announced. Soon, there's a mad scramble for the exits. Quickly, bloodily -- with a realistic forced exodus and the bombing of a ship carrying many refugees -- Beresford strips all certainty, veneer and order from these privileged women's lives. The sense of fragility is symbolized by the little lapdog of rotund, imperious Mrs. Roberts (Elizabeth Spriggs), a tiny pet to which she clings tenaciously as her life crumbles. This rapid turnabout and the early camp scenes are the movie's best moments.
They're also somewhat melodramatic, setting up expectations from which ''Road'' can't completely recover. When Adrienne and Daisy form the orchestra, they have to buck both the Japanese command and their own prisonmates. Guards sent to silence them refuse and stay to listen. The commander, Col. Hiroyo (Sab Shimono), eventually attends the recitals. The most seemingly vicious of the jailers, Snake (Clyde Kusatsu), reveals a fondness for Japanese folk song. Naysayers succumb.
But as the music seems to triumph, the war progresses. The suffering increases. And the story softens and slackens. In the beginning, the Japanese seem very close to caricatured villains; the worst of them, smooth sadist Capt. Tanaka (Stan Egi), is likened by the prisoners to Peter Lorre's '30s movie character ''Mr. Moto.'' And though there's an attempt to develop the Japanese captors, it seems almost half-hearted.
Though it's something of a failure, I'd still call it a noble one. But while ''Road'' has every advantage of performance and production -- extensive research, beautiful cinematogaphy (by Peter James) and a brilliant cast topped by Close and Collins -- it misses the transcendence and exalted feeling the filmmakers obviously want.
Perhaps this movie needed to be a masterpiece to work at all. Beresford has been unusually catholic and daring in his choice of films since ''Driving Miss Daisy'' won the 1989 Best Picture Oscar. His projects are dense and novelistic, with big, talented ensembles and broad canvases (''Black Robe'' and ''Mister Johnson'' are gems; the others less so).
But unlike his best films, which tend to rely on previously written works, Beresford is the only writer here. And though ''Road'' is good on big, theatrical scenes -- the burning of Chinese servant Wing (Pauline Chan) for smuggling in quinine -- it's weaker on those little details and seemingly commonplace moments that heighten belief.
Close, Spriggs, Joanna ter Steege (as a salty Dutch nun) and Collins are all excellent. Glenn Close, in fact, seems on the verge of becoming the American cinema's youngest grande dame, and, since that limits her, that's a mixed blessing. Here, she may be trying to bring out more levels -- including some prickly and unsympathetic ones -- than the script can accommodate. Collins, in a convincing portrayal of a genuinely decent person, gives the richer, truer performance.
Done with obvious sympathy and skill, beautifully filmed and acted, ''Road'' disappoints precisely because Beresford's writing doesn't match his directing. Couldn't he have hired one of Australia's current crop of novelists and playwrights as a collaborator?
With Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in its repertoire and Holland's Malle Babbe Women's Choir to sing, ''Paradise Road'' tries to pour out its heart. Unfortunately, it's too unsupported, too much a cappella. While the music soars up, our souls remain below.
There aren't many movies about women in World War II prison camps. Stories about men include "Stalag 17," "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "King Rat" and "The Great Escape." The women's plight was recorded with TV movies like "Playing For Time" and "A Town Like Alice."
Add to this list the big screen film "Paradise Road," which is based on facts gleaned from women prisoners in the Pacific Theater of World II. The story details the lives of disparate women - missionaries, Chinese, Australian, English, Dutch and European women, and one German Jew - who are thrown together in a Japanese internment camp on Sumatra during the early days of the war. Their travails make up most of the film, which sometimes drags, but other times the movie literally sings.
Two women, Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close) and Margaret Drummond (Pauline Collins), decide to form a vocal to perform great symphonic works. They don't sing words, but hum the various parts of an orchestral piece. The group performed 30 different works before being freed in 1945.
"Paradise Road" refers to death, the one way out of the camp. This is a film for women, with a lot of humor women will understand. Strong friendships are formed by English women Pargiter and Drummond, by Australian Susan Macarthy (Cate Blanchett) and the German Dr. Verstak (Frances McDormand). Other outstanding characters are Rosemary Leighton-Jones (Jennifer Ehle), Topsy Merritt (Julianna Margulies, Mrs. Roberts (Elizabeth Spriggs) and Sister Wilhelmina (Joanna Ter Steege). Graphic portrayals of atrocities in the camp are hard to watch, but leavened with some unexpected humor. "Paradise Road" is a good drama that is well cast and acted and tells a story worth seeing.
-- Sandi Davis
By Carrie Rickey, INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC
from The Philadelpia Inquirer, 4/18/97
Though the name evokes a palmy resort, Paradise Road is the last resort. It's the inmates' euphemism for a real-life concentration camp in Sumatra, a dunghole where the Japanese interned Australian, Dutch and English women and children, prisoners of war fleeing Singapore, during World War II.
And a place where these internees -- an unlikely collection of socialites, nuns and nurses -- heroically endured the torturous conditions, nourishing starving spirits and boosting sagging morales with music. Spectral, transcendent music.
What the ``Colonel Bogey March'' was to The Bridge on the River Kwai, Dvorak's New World Symphony (hummed by a ``vocal orchestra'') is to Paradise Road, starring an international cast that includes Glenn Close, Pauline Collins and Wendy Hughes. While its resourceful characters earn our respect and admiration, Bruce Beresford's spirit-lifter feels less inspired than tired.
Which is odd because, for the most part, the actresses couldn't be more powerful, the scenery couldn't be more exotic and the situation couldn't be more fraught with conflicts, both of the class and war varieties.
Yet somehow Beresford, the gifted director of Breaker Morant and Driving Miss Daisy, wrote a screenplay so severely compressed that he does little to suggest the passage of five years and even less to develop the transformation of his many characters. Like a television Movie of the Week, everything is telegraphed rather than expressed, which does a disservice to the story.
War as the great leveler is a staple of movies from River Kwai to The Dirty Dozen, but it's rare that we see how women from dramatically different walks of life transcend their differences to resist a common enemy. (I can think only of three movies about this, the wartime So Proudly We Hail, the haunting 1950 saga Three Came Home and the '70s telefilm Playing for Time.)
In this regard, Paradise Road refreshes a testosterone-linked genre. It is genuinely moving to see Glenn Close, as Adrienne Pargiter, a tea-planter's wife, befriend missionary Margaret Drummond (Pauline Collins) and shyly apologize for having been such a snob in Singapore to have thought she was socially superior to this great-hearted soul. It is these two characters who organize the ``vocal orchestra'' to help the internees, suffering from starvation, malaria and cultural misunderstanding of their Japanese captors, endure their hardships.
Despite this plotline, there is also a sinking sense here that sisterhood is powerless. Because of Beresford's strange emphasis, Paradise Road is a lot like Stalag 17 with sexual threat. The emotional crescendos of the movie are not in the nurturing friendships nor the soul-sustaining music, but in sequences involving sexual and physical torture. When Partiger strikes a Japanese officer who attempts to molest her, she is imprisoned in a bamboo cage and sentenced to death. (Although this is no doubt a historically accurate depiction of what happened, it is treated with the exploitation-picture air of a women-behind-bars flick.)
Likewise, when nurse Susan Macarthy (played by Aussie newcomer Cate Blanchett, who is terrific) protests to the Japanese officers, she endures a torture rig of barbed arrows that makes those Puritan stocks look like the stuff of a four-star hostelry. Beresford must think that graphic depictions of torture are like medicine, that if a little does the job, a lot will do it faster.
That Close, Collins, Blanchett and Wendy Hughes maintain their characters' dignity through much of this sadism is a testament to their talent as actresses. Less successful are Frances McDormand, as a German-Jewish refugee with a bad accent and worse attitude, and Julianna Margulies as the loose-lipped American amid a sea of Anglo-Australian-Dutch stiff-uppers.
"Paradise Road" is a devotional and beautifully crafted concentration camp movie that genuflects to the endurance of women interned by the Japanese in Sumatra during World War II. Offering a long overdue alternative to the many similar movies focusing on men, it's based on facts gathered by writer-director Bruce Beresford during two years of interviews with the camp's Australian, European, and American survivors. Wisely, the film mutes the usual prison camp dramatics and heroics, correctly assuming that day-to-day survival with some portion of dignity intact is heroic enough. Although it lacks a measure of urgency as it struggles to find a dramatic focus, it's the richest women's ensemble piece in some time, with Glenn Close's natural leader, Pauline Collins's gentle but spiritually towering missionary, and Cate Blanchett's rapidly maturing young nurse the standouts. The film opens in Singapore's legendary Raffles Hotel on Feb. 10, 1942, as a ballroom full of colonials, jagged with style and dripping with complacency, dance to the strains of "Mad About the Boy." Before the evening ends, they're fleeing a Japanese shelling. When a ship evacuating women and children is bombed and strafed by Japanese planes, the survivors who make it to Sumatra are rounded up by the Japanese and interned. What follows is the predictable clash of wills, with the Japanese holding all the cards. They are not disposed to elevate women, especially foreign women, and the film does not flinch from depicting the frequent beatings, occasional executions, and commonplace torture cruelly inflicted upon them against a background of semi-starvation and other deprivations. To keep their spirits up and offer a kind of resistance that won't get them killed, Close's music academy graduate forms what she calls a vocal orchestra, whose members bypass the customary songs to vocalize movements of classical music, most notably the Largo from Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. Although not all the Japanese are brutal, enough are. None of the women is raped, although all are invited to get better treatment by becoming permanent residents of the officers' club, where it is understood they will service the sexual needs of their captors. The officer who runs the camp is a sadist who enjoys humiliating the women, but the nominal commandant refrains from excessive abuse, and the NCO who barks most of the daily orders has the film's only sentimental moment. Still, it's the interplay between the women, with their nationalistic and class differences, from which most of the drama stems. Multiculturalism creates problems here between the Dutch and English-speaking women, and nobody much likes Frances McDormand's tartly ironic German Jewish refugee camp doctor with a secret. Despite their problems, the women pull together upliftingly, if not without a certain amount of carping, sniping, backbiting, and the usual betrayal from an informer. The pattern of assertiveness by the women, followed by brutal repression, grows predictable. Yet Close, Collins, Blanchett, and Joanna ter Steege's Dutch nun transcend the film's flatness with their strength and conviction. Thanks mostly to them, you come away feeling that justice has been done to a cross-section of ordinary women who became extraordinary in survival.
April 18, 1997
In pirsoners of war dramas, we are faced with the unthinkable: being unarmed and defenseless at the hands of sworn enemies. It's a kind of excruciating, even exquisite suffering, as we hope against hope for the safety -- and ingenuity -- of the captives.
After all, these prisoners represent "our" people, a society-in-miniature of leaders, gripers, hustlers and despondents, pitted against a world of institutional tyranny. Civilization, as we know it, is in grave danger. So all acts of rebellion, sabotage or escape are heroic, necessary and ultimately transcendental.
But enough about "Hogan's Heroes." Let's talk about "Paradise Road," the uplifting, tearful, raise-your-fists story about female prisoners in World War II who rally against their brutal Japanese captors. But they don't do it with weaponry, guile or tunnel-digging.
Conducted by den leader Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close), they proclaim their independence and strength with song or, more accurately, air violins. Humming complex classical compositions, note for note, they transform themselves into an a cappella orchestra.
The bedraggled, triumphant prisoners (including Pauline "Shirley Valentine" Collins, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Ehle and Julianna Margulies) represent a sort of sisterly harmonic convergence of Europeans, Australians and Americans. Even the barbarians are moved by these strains of freedom.
Well, that's the idea. There's grist here for a genuinely stirring film. But writer-director Bruce Beresford -- who created the screenplay from interviews with real-life World War II prisoners (who also performed music for the Japanese) -- reduces everything to its most uninteresting banality.
Everything feels measured and superficial, whether it's the aerial attack that wrecks the women's ship, forcing them to swim to Sumatra (located in the East Indies) and into the Japanese camp; or the camp atrocities, which are filmed so tactfully, their menace is almost lost.
Beresford (whose downward directorial spiral from "Breaker Morant" to "Driving Miss Daisy" plummets even further) wants to create a war backdrop for quirky humanism and proto-feminist togetherness. But the characterizations -- surely the movie's most important element -- are hazily outlined. As Pargiter, the chirrupy leader, Close comes on with so much rah-rah vigor, you want to force her to weed the camp garden for the rest of the war. And Frances McDormand's accent -- she plays a German Jew -- is so awful, you want to bury her in that garden. (She actually says "darlink.") Collins's assured performance as a missionary with courage stands out the most. As for that musical triumph, it's a monstrously kitschy conceit that pulls us away from the movie's "Bridge on the River Kwai"-feminist intentions and into "The Sound of Music." The only thing missing is the Japanese camp commandant taking his lieutenants aside and wondering aloud (in song, of course), "How do you solve a problem like Ms. Pargiter?"
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Japanese are kept, literally, at a distance. We never get a feel for what makes them tick. They are given to bullying and goading the prisoners like cattle, but it's unclear whether they do it with malice, racism or sheer indifference.
The sexual implications are almost nonexistent. When the women are initially captured, the Japanese ask for volunteer concubines for the officers. Many go, but they're hardly heard from again, as if the movie has lost all interest. We're forced to stay with the ones who opted for internment. Dramatically speaking, this turns out to have been the wrong choice.
PARADISE ROAD (R) - Contains shower nudity, violence and profanity.
PARADISE ROAD: Drama. Starring Glenn Close, Pauline Collins, Cate Blanchett, Frances McDormand and Jennifer Ehle. Directed by Bruce Beresford. (R. 110 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
`Paradise Road,'' director Bruce Beresford's film about a group of female prisoners of the Japanese during World War II who cope by forming a vocal orchestra, has breathtaking moments. But it never ventures deeply enough into its characters to stir the soul.
A big problem in the beautifully shot movie, with top-billed Glenn Close heading a fine ensemble cast, is that there are too many characters. ``Paradise Road,'' based on actual incidents, opens today at the Presidio and other Bay Area theaters.
Some will be reminded of ``The Bridge on the River Kwai,'' especially when the women start humming the largo movement of Dvorak's ``New World'' symphony. The gorgeous singing is an attempt to harness solidarity and show resilience against a treacherous enemy.
David Lean's epic took its great themes from the quirky personal traits that connected the captives and the captors. But ``Paradise Road'' overemphasizes the inherent nobility of the captives at the expense of believability. Sometimes overly grand, even sanctimonious, the film plays like an old-fashioned war movie with women as the embattled buddies.
Featured are Pauline Collins as a sunny Christian missionary, Frances McDormand as a cynical Jewish German emigre who is camp physician (and whose accent is distracting), Jennifer Ehle as a young wife pining for her husband and Elizabeth Spriggs as an upper-crust matron with a yappy lap dog. Julianna Margulies (``ER'') plays a tough American named Topsy. The film has 19 featured actresses, one of the largest female ensemble casts ever assembled.
The movie's small dramatic moments are frequently on target. ``Paradise Road'' is saved from itself on more than one occasion, thanks to purposeful performances in key scenes and to Beresford's (``Driving Miss Daisy'') bold, eerily captivating cinematic elegance.
Two of the film's most harrowing moments -- the attack on a ship carrying the women fleeing from Singapore, and a scene in which a prisoner is doused with kerosene and torched -- are visual masterpieces with emotional punch.
Close plays Adrienne Pargiter, one of a group of women married to European, Australian or American military men living in Singapore when the Japanese attack in 1942. The women are shipped out, but most perish at sea. Pargiter and a few others miraculously reach the shore of Sumatra, where they are taken prisoner. The women are beaten and humiliated, and some are killed by their captors (played by Sab Shimono, Clyde Kusatsu and Stan Egi).
Close plays her part with an aura of saintliness that mostly rings false -- but Close is good at playing noble, and never turns her characterization into an irritant.
The story is based, in part, on recollections by Helen Colijn of Menlo Park, a Dutch woman who wrote her story in ``Song of Survival: Women Interned.'' It's odd, really, how Beresford managed to keep such a wonderful story at an emotional distance. ``Paradise Road'' is ultimately a disappointment, but it has enough going for it to be worth a look.
SYNERGY is the buzzword in entertainment, so the link-up between Buzz magazine and Fox Searchlight Pictures won't surprise anyone in the business.
A new alliance between Buzz Boos (in tandem with St. Martin's Press) and Searchlight will next week publish the screenplay of "Paradise Road," the new Glenn Close movie. The partnership plans to do four books a year, some of them screenplays and others novelizations of Searchlight movies.
MPA rating: R
MPA info: for prisoner of war brutality and violence.
Information: Handsomely produced and imaginatively cast, Bruce Beresford's latest movie is a well-made POW drama that nevertheless leaves you wondering: why go to all this trouble if you have nothing to add to the genre? Pauline Collins and Glenn Close are too saintly by half, while Joanna Ter Steege plays a comic-relief nun who could have wandered over from the set of "The Sound of Music." 114 minutes.
Starring: Glenn Close, Pauline Collins, Julianna Margulies, Frances McDormand
Written by: Bruce Beresford
Directed by: Bruce Beresford
Here is what The Seattle Times says: The rating: **1/2
by John Hartl
Handsomely produced and imaginatively cast, Bruce Beresford's latest movie is a well-made POW drama that nevertheless leaves you wondering: Why go to all this trouble if you have nothing to add to the genre?
With the help of Alfred Uhry, who wrote the Australian-born Beresford's biggest hit, "Driving Miss Daisy," Beresford spent some time researching and compiling stories of European and Australian women who had survived capture by the Japanese during World War II.
The most vivid touches: period detail and attitudes. During the opening scenes in Singapore, "Mad About the Boy" plays at a military dance, as giddy women gossip about each other's dates. Bombing interrupts the dance; as the women flee the city, they worry about rumors of what the Japanese did to Hong Kong nurses. Soon their ship is sunk and they're marooned in Sumatra with their captors.
Alas, scene after scene seems borrowed from other, more vital movies. A Geneva-convention showdown between the Japanese commandant and his spunkiest prisoner is straight out of "The Bridge on the River Kwai." The use of music ("a vocal orchestra, not a choir") to survive the camps is reminiscent of Arthur Miller's TV movie, "Playing for Time."
Other scenes recall "King Rat" and "Empire of the Sun," both of which made more compelling use of the material. Aside from a couple of convincingly staged atrocities that doubtless earned the film its R rating, there's little here that we haven't seen before.
The characters remain types, no matter how much the actors try to break out of formula. Pauline Collins and Glenn Close are too saintly by half. Joanna Ter Steege plays a comic-relief nun who could have wandered over from the set of "The Sound of Music." She loves whiskey ("I'm a nun, not a saint") and has cute feminist impulses ("I love God, even though I wonder sometimes what she's doing").
Even this year's Oscar-winning best actress, Frances McDormand, just barely manages to inject some irony and ambiguity into her role as a tough-minded German Jew who acts as the prisoners' doctor, removing gold fillings from corpses to trade for medicine, cigarettes and liquor.
The attack on the women's ship is effectively staged, to the tune of Holst's "The Planets," and Beresford lends an eerie quality to the scenes in which the survivors wander Sumatra, wondering where they've landed. Other interesting touches: a Japanese lecture about European exploitation of Asians, a shower fight over soap "stolen" by Dutch inmates, a bathing scene that prompts a bawdy discussion, and a visit to a Japanese officers club in which the younger, more attractive women are recruited to join the "satin sheet brigade" in exchange for better food and accommodations.
All these incidents seem real enough, but Beresford, who usually doesn't write the films he directs, rarely finds a way of allowing his characters to connect with them. While he's assembled some fascinating anecdotes, they're not quite a screenplay.
In this World War II dirge, courtesy of director/writer Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), she's a world-weary German-Jewish doctor in a Japanese interment camp in Sumatra.
Label her the ironic outsider among the plucky throng of pampered British ladies, Australian nurses and Dutch nuns who are captured after their Red Cross ship is bombed. Casting a jaundiced eye, McDormand blows streams of cigarette smoke and sounds like a cross between Dietrich and Lugosi, saying stuff like, "If you vant to live, you must adapt."
Hmmm, sounds as if someone confused camp with campy.
She's not the only acting casualty in this draining trudge through overly familiar terrain previously covered by the far grander Bridge on the River Kwai, TV's Playing for Time and - my favorite - Three Came Home, with Claudette Colbert.
Even with its grueling pageant of torture and abuse at the hands of monstrously inhuman Japanese officers (a prisoner who briefly escapes to get medicine is burned alive, and beatings and whippings are as common as mud), Road never reaches the heart. It settles for the recycled emotions of the past despite the fact Schindler's List has forever made such treatment shamefully passe.
Its characters are strictly stock - dotty dowager and spinster daughter, mouthy American, surly snitch, droll booze hound, self-sacrificing Chinese, naive English beauty. As a result, this potentially inspiring true account simply trivializes the hardships endured by the real survivors.
Moments like a naked shower brawl over a sliver of soap practically cry out for the Monty Python troupe. Especially when Pauline Collins as the jolly owlish missionary and Glenn Close as the captive most likely to be a Girl Scout leader decide to organize a vocal orchestra among the prisoners. Yes, a vocal orchestra - humming to the classics like Ravel's Bolero and Dvorak's New World Symphony.
Turns out music does soothe the savage breast, if not the stereotypical "Jap" beasts. But instead of being inspired by the angelic chorus, I couldn't help but wonder what happened to the Swingle Singers, who wordlessly oo-be-doo'd their way through the '60s and '70s.
When it's dutifully announced "The war is over," you will share in the joy of knowing that you can go home, too.
(Selected cities; R: violence, nudity, torture)
By Emanuel Levy
HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Based on extensive research of true incidents, Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road is an honorable and even noble effort to pay tribute to the courage and strength of a group of disparate women held captive by the Japanese during World War II.
Though carefully rendered from a historical perspective, this powerful account of female friendship and bonding under the most cruel conditions lacks the narrative focus and dramatic shapeliness to generate emotional excitement.
Still, the illustrious cast, headed by Glenn Close, Pauline Collins and Frances McDormand, and potential interest by mostly female viewers in this still little-known chapter of history, should ensure a reasonably decent opening for the Fox Searchlight release, though ultimately, theatrical results will not meet expectations.
Written by Beresford, who reportedly spent two years studying the era and interviewing survivors, story recounts more accurately events and personalities similar to those depicted in Jean Negulesco's 1950 war melodrama Three Came Home, starring Claudette Colbert. Tale begins in Singapore's Raffles Hotel on Feb. 10, 1942, when a military ball is interrupted by Japanese bombing. The women and children are put aboard a ship, which suffers a massive attack, with the survivors thrown into a camp. Though they are from different countries -- and different social strata -- the women are forced to find common ground in order to survive the brutalities of camp life.
Initial sequences jump around too much before the film settles on its half-dozen heroines: British Adrienne Pargiter (Close), a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music; Margaret "Daisy" Drummond (Collins), a gentle Australian missionary; Dr. Verstak (McDormand), the only German in camp; Australian nurse Susan McCarthy (Cate Blanchett); and Topsy Merritt (Julianna Margulies), the sole American in the group.
Early on, Margaret observes, "The thing they despise most are European women prisoners." "That's us," says Adrienne, and a friendship evolves. Ensuing drama unfolds within two distinct frameworks: the antagonistic relationship between the women and their brutish Japanese captors, and the more interesting and complex relationships among the female prisoners themselves, who form a truly multinational unit.
Directly disobeying orders, Adrienne forms a vocal orchestra, in which she literally has to beg the members to participate -- at risk of their lives. The arduous recruitment, the clandestine, often violently interrupted rehearsals, and public performances provide the most engaging moments of an otherwise sprawling story. But despite the uniqueness of the situation and its dramatis personae, Paradise Road falls victim to its generic format. The arguments and conflicts, concerning fights over food, suspicion, betrayal and collaboration with the enemy, recall such classic prison war movies as The Bridge on the River Kwai and Stalag 17, even if earlier renditions centered on male protagonists.
Worse yet, helmer stumbles into a predictable narrative rhythm: almost every act of courage or defiance by the women is followed by an act of ruthless torture by the Japanese, and back again. This makes the film tediously repetitious, rambling from one episode to another with no strong, involving center. Beresford may have created too many characters for one drama, and he can't maintain control over them -- or give each more than a few sentences or a few identification traits. The dialogue -- and humor -- is often forced, as in the scenes between domineering Mrs. Roberts (Elizabeth Spriggs) and her sheepish daughter, Celia (Tessa Humphries), which are reminiscent of the Gladys Cooper-Deborah Kerr interaction in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables.
Still, Beresford's humanistic approach, which often rises above these problems, conveys vividly how, despite chaos, hatred and strife, the women managed to create something pure and beautiful: music. This is all the more accentuated by the fact that the chorale didn't perform popular songs, but highly intricate arrangements of classical music, such as Dvorak's New World Symphony. Beresford aims to show how ordinary women become extraordinary, but the film doesn't deal sufficiently with their musical activities, instead paying too much attention to the more familiar details of camp survival.
Yet, this well-intentioned, uplifting chronicle contains some genuinely touching moments, such as the scene in which Japanese guards are sent to break up the performance, but instead find themselves deeply moved by the music and thus refuse to silence the women. Or the contemptible castigation when a prisoner caught for dealing in the black market is set on fire in front of her terrified mates.
Of the large, international female cast, two thesps stand out. Close dominates every scene she's in with her highly modulated performance, bringing her customary edge to the tough role of the choir's conductor. Collins, as usual, radiates warmth and intelligence as the kind missionary who often mediates among the various factions.
As the cynical doctor who hides a secret about her past, McDormand, so brilliant in Fargo, here gives a stiff, one-dimensional performance (which is a function of the script), and her heavy German accent is no more than passable. A lively lineup of both young and veteran thesps fill out the large ensemble, adding color to the proceedings.
Shot mostly in Penang, Malaysia (standing in for Sumatra), the picture boasts a strong sense of period verisimilitude, with particularly impressive contributions from lenser Peter James and production designer Herbert Pinter. Some of the music has survived the horror of the camps, as original members of the choir donated copies of their scores to various museums around the world.
Adrienne Pargiter ........... Glenn Close
Margaret Drummond ........... Pauline Collins
Susan McCarthy .............. Cate Blanchett
Dr. Verstak ................. Frances McDormand
Topsy Merritt ............... Julianna Margulies
Rosemary Leighton-Jones ..... Jennifer Ehle
Mrs. Roberts ................ Elizabeth Spriggs
Celia Roberts ............... Tessa Humphries
Oggi ........................ Susie Porter
Colonel Hiroyo .............. Sab Shimono
A Fox Searchlight release of a Village Roadshow Pictures production. Produced by Sue Milliken, Greg Coote. Executive producers, Andrew Yap, Graham Burke.
Directed, written by Bruce Beresford. Camera (color, Panavision widescreen), Peter James; editor, Tim Wellburn; music, Ross Edwards; production design, Herbert Pinter; art direction, Ian Gracie; set decoration, Brian Edmonds; costume design, Terry Ryan; sound (Dolby), Gary Wilkins; visual effects coordinator, Brian Cox; assistant director, Colin Fletcher; casting, Alison Barrett, Joseph Middleton, Patsy Pollock. Reviewed at Culver Studios, Culver City, March 25, 1997.
Reuters/Variety
Talk about laying it on thick. There is a factual basis to this World War II drama about women prisoners, captured by the Japanese, who form a vocal orchestra to reach the heavens while they grovel in the mud. What should have been an affecting film becomes a rank blend of sentiment and sadism in the hands of Bruce Beresford, the Australian writer and director. Beresford, who can blow hot (Driving Miss Daisy) or cold (Last Dance), strikes a sour note throughout.
Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, Julianna Marguilies and Jennifer Ehle are just few of the actress luminaries gathered to play the European, Australian and American women who fled Singapore after its occupation only to find their ship bombed and their rights ignored as the Japanese herd them into camps. Those women who choose to sleep with Japanese officers are bileted in style; those who don't must suffer gross indignities.
It's Close's and Collins' characters who come up with the idea for a vocal orchestra. No pop stuff, either - real classical pieces. The Japanese resist at first, cracking their gun butts into female jaws and midriffs, and devising tortures that involve beating, burning, impaling and beheading. Did such tortures exist ? Yes, Did Bersford have to film them with such lip-smacking attention to brutal, race-baiting detail ? I don't think so. Everything in this film feels overdone, from Close's noble suffering to McDormand's accent and bearing as a German doctor. Beresford locks the brilliant Best Actress Oscar winner (for Fargo) in a caricature out of Hogan's Heroes. Only Ehle, the lovely star of TV's Pride and Prejudice, finds the grace for restraint. The singing of the choir is gorgeous, but even here Beresford gooses our reactions, cutting to shots of hardened guards weeping. Didn't this cornball propaganda go out with wartime films like So Proudly We Hail! ? It should have.
To Sumatra now, and a prisoner of war camp in the Second World War. But the prisoners in Paradise Road are not your usual breed. They are women - English, American, Australian, some Dutch, one German Jew - rounded up by the Japanese after the ship ferrying them from occupied Singapore is bombed. True, they suffer the expected brutalities: they fight in the shower, and try to escape. But they also sing: not just any old piece, but adaptations of classical music, the New World symphony and Bolero, in performances that bring tears to their enemies' eyes. A writer's whim? Far from it. Bruce Beresford, the director of Driving Miss Daisy, wrote his script after going through documents, interviewing survivors and locating original sheet music.
The prisoners, played by Glenn Close, Pauline Collings, Jennifer Ehle and company, use the music to alleviate their hell and spite the Japanese. A few bars of Dvorak from these caged songbirds (the Malle Babbe Women's Choir from Holland is their soundtrack stand-in), and the director should have us eating out of his hand. And he does, up to a point. But Beresford perversly cuts the music short to keep the film moving on other front. Since this is a PoW film, the Japanese must be seen to be nasty. One prisoner is set alight, another kneels in the blazing sun surrounded by spikes. Soon the film adopts a see-saw pattern: one scene of prison brutality for severy scene of music rehearsals. This gets boring.
Bereford is also kep busy letting his multinational cast strut their stuff. As the choir's instigator, Collings exudes her trademark smiles and Christian bonhomie. Close, endeavouring to be English, is unnaturally clipped. And how can Ehle keep on being so pretty despite bad food and gruelling work? Yet despite the bits of fakery, Paradise Road respects these courageous woman, and is at its best watching tension rise and fall as friendships form across bounderies of class and nationality. If I were a teacher I'd mark it six out of ten
Also from the Times, 12/6/97:
Female prisoners held by the Japanese in wartime Sumatra alleviate their hell by singing complex arrangements of classical music. Glenn Close wields the baton; Pauline Collins keeps everyone smiling, including Jennifer Ehle. Beresford's film, based on real events, could shed some of its PoW cliches with benefit, but the portrayal of tensions and budding friendship is absorbing. The music is pretty good, too.
Again from the Times, 12/7/97:
Bruce Beresford's new movie has precious little that is new about it. Set during the second world war, it centres on a group of women - among them Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Pauline Collins, Jennifer Ehle - who are captured by the Japanese and thrown into a Sumatran prisoner of war camp, and who form a "vocal orchestra" - humming the classics to keep their spirits up. Boy, do they keep their spirits up: the movie feels so buoyant with uplift, it's a wonder they roped it down to earth to spool through the projector. The movie knows only two gears: vaulting from either barbed wire or boleros - without going via anything in between, where most known human characteristics are to be found; and it leaves the cast with precious little to chew on, except their own virtue. Close in particular, as the crop-haired conductor, skirts dangerously near to Julie Andrews territory; while the only recognisably human voice is provided by the mordant Frances McDormand. And guess what? She plays a German. Oops.
Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road tells the true, harrowing story of women interned by the Japanese in the Second World War in Sumatra, after the boat taking them from Singapore was bombed. It is a tale of man's inhumanity to woman, with the Japanese in almost parodically sadistic form: beatings are regular, provisions meagre, one woman is burnt alive, another forced to kneel for hours on end or face being impaled on a pair of carefully positioned spikes. As one spirited American (Julianna Margulies, from TV's ER) puts it: "If I ever get out of this, I'll never say a word against New Jersey."
Beresford has written a sharp, wry script and assembled a fine cast, which includes Jennifer Ehle, as a displaced but doughty socialite; Pauline Collins, as a rather irksomely virtuous missionary; Cate Blanchett, as a perilously rebellious Australian nurse; Frances McDormand, as a much-suspected German Jewish refugee; and Elizabeth Spriggs as the imperious old lady of the troupe. They all take second billing to Glenn Close, who as the camp's dominant personality is a cross between Dame Freya Stark and Joan of Arc.
It is Close's character who orchestrates the group's greatest act of resistance - literally "orchestrates", for she forms a "voice orchestra", whose melodies soften even the odd Japanese heart. It was this choral defiance, entirely factually based, that I found to be the film's chief stumbling-block. Whereas in The Bridge on the River Kwai you were never quite sure whether the building of the bridge represented triumph or lunacy, here Beresford seems to view the women's Swingle-Singers-style warbling entirely without irony. The problem is not, of course, that the act itself was worthless, but that viewed in such redemptive terms it becomes a sentimental distortion of the war's true impact.
That said, this is an immensely well crafted and engrossing picture. If Beresford had matched his undoubted story-telling prowess with stronger ideas - about war, or women, or the Japanese - it might have been really remarkable. It's unlikely, at any rate, that Twentieth Century Fox can be counting on it doing much business in Tokyo.
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