Screen

...The trouble comes with treatment of character, which, as David Denby of New York magazine noted in a long cover essay (June 22, 1986), is not the specialty of film-school graduates trained primarily as video technicians...

...In that order...

...A study of national differences gives way to generational ones...

...Indeed, Spielberg's weakness in handling a mature character, or rather handling character maturely, is based on his obliviousness to his own overindulged obsessions...

...the commander disappears, and, at the end (you guessed it) it's the Boys against Brutes, since Boys everywhere are "just like us...

...Spielberg also manages a nerve-racking gothic scene when Bale returns home (calling E.T...

...Then-as if to prove, on a technical level, he was in fact making two films-Spielberg blacks out the screen and resumes the story with the subtitle "four years later.'' All that time, and so little pain...

...Spielberg may be recalling the war films- Sands of Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal Diary, the original Gung-Ho -that were staples on American television when he was growing up in the 1950s...

...Any obsession can be fruitful...

...Gone with the Wind...

...He presents two unreconciled images of Japan in his film: militarist (represented mostly by the internment camp commander) and humane (represented by a young Japanese boy, Bale's Asian alter ego, who trains enthusiastically to become a kamikaze pilot...

...Sadly, in Empire Spielberg has tackled tragic material unsuitable for his special gifts...

...It seems that we are about to go from the frying pan into the fire...

...in nearly every movie (often appropriately) Spielberg oediplays Me and My Mom...

...Look at what My Life as a Dog tackled-only to emerge pure...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...look how wittily Hitchcock handled his with blondes...

...But he is constantly undercut by a tendency toward mawkish, heavy-handed gestures by the director...

...Indeed, Spielberg even pulls off the film acolyte's obligatory bow to movie tradition with a witty shot of Bale, alone and bewildered just after the invasion, beneath a poster for the 1939...

...Ex-Catholic De Palma blood worships Father and Son...

...But Spielberg wavers between a genuine sense of human tragedy and the old films' heroic hullabaloo...

...The worst scene in the movie follows some stirring depictions of a dysentery-infested prison center...

...Empire feels like two films: a stirring, even scary epic spliced with a stagy, unconscious self-glorification...

...But Spielberg shies away from the deeper issues to provide an unbelievable, happy tableau of Bale saluting Japanese pilots as if he were their colleague and then taking their counter-salute-all, naturally, to inspirational orchestral flourishes...

...But Empire's real parallel among recent films is Brian De Palma's The Untouchables...

...A director can return to the same theme, or change subjects and deal with a similar theme (as Spielberg has done here with growing up), and still mature artistically...

...One could accept even this united nations of youth more easily if Spielberg's images weren't go grossly sentimentalized...

...Granted, Spielberg's narcissistic childishness is more benign than De Palma's, and in films located in the world of childhood or myth (E.T., Close Encounters) is a potent source of film magic...

...Several scenes especially reveal Spielberg's problem, because they almost surmount it and give familiar concerns of his-threats to home, childhood adventures-some mature feeling...

...But he never delves deeply- beyond the myth of boyhood innocence and affection to the underside of the same feelings, where aggression subsumes play and eros colors filial love...

...Fortunately, he does not repeat the racial stereotypes that dominated them...

...the distance between child's play and real war is slyly elided in a strong, early scene when Bale jumps into a ruined aircraft...

...Bale's manic love of fighter aircraft can be treated ambivalently...

...Nevertheless, Empire amounts to a vast directorial Freudian slip...

...Directors like De Palma and Spielberg know what they're doing on one level: they are technically proficient, skilled in film lore, able to recreate some of the effects of the grand masters-De Palma with Eisenstein, Spielberg with Kurosawa, whose genius at action sequences Empire sometimes manages to match...

...But these images are never brought together...

...English child actor Christian Bale, as the son of a British diplomat in Shanghai, almost saves the movie with his portrayal of grace and near-madness under the enormous pressures of war, separation from his parents, near-starvation, and the knockabout world of an internment camp...

...Tone is all...

...after the Japanese takeover and finds only spooky hand- and footprints on the cosmetic powder scattered across his mother's ransacked room...

...Bale forces the Japanese to take him to a work camp, first glimpsed in a terrifying scene of human masses breaking rocks to make a runway...

...Like the former, it has been made with the help of the Chinese government, and partly concerns the invasion of China by Japan in World War II...

...Worse than the avoidance is the celebratory element in the film, the frequent resort to special effects, the E.T.-like hands held over Bale's head by a doctor, and the tarty musical climaxes from John Williams's half of the score (the rest features some fine hymns sung by the Ambrosian Junior Choir acting as a pre-war boys chorus in Shanghai...

...Like the latter, its point of view belongs to a young English boy...

...Empire is a curious case of arrested development: Spielberg wants to depict maturity but is too close to the childish...

...As in The Color Purple, all evil is external to the main character, although here, at least, Spielberg seems to suspect otherwise...

...In some artists, this refusal can be a fruitful source of protest against time, or, if handled ironically, bittersweet humor...

...The Freudian suggestions are powerful, as is the aura of sex between Bale and a mother stand-in at the internment camp (Miranda Richardson) who drinks water from his cupped hand with some highly charged sips...

...It's a nice pun on art and life...

...Empire of the Sun practically begs comparison with The Last Emperor and Hope and Glory...