Emperor is confusing. By that, I don't mean that the story is confusing. I mean that I am shocked by how stupid and desperate Hollywood can become when they are trying to promote a movie. When you see the advertisements, Emperor appears to be a great, rousing biopic ala Patton, with a bombastic performance by Tommy Lee Jones as General Douglas MacArthur. The ads show just about every MacArthur part in the entire movie in just under 30 seconds. Considering Gregory Peck's turn in MacArthur in the 70s was just as interesting as watching paint dry, I was really looking forward to a rousing new attempt to portray MacArthur with an actor who I think would have been perfect to play him. Instead, I got a procedural starring Matthew Fox (of Party of Five and Lost fame), playing General Fellers, the man who was tapped by MacArthur to determine whether the US should put Emperor Hirohiti of Japan on trial for war crimes at the end of WWII. (SPOILER ALERT! We don't)
At the same time, the movie meanders down a path where at the same time Fellers is conducting his investigation, he is secretly trying to locate a Japanese woman he fell in love with in the States in 1938. We get an extensive backstory on their relationship through flashbacks at different times throughout the movie. Now, I have NO problem with movie romances. I love a few of them (Crazy Stupid Love, Sweet Home Alabama, Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, and Something's Gotta Give jump immediately to mind). I don't mind procedurals, especially when they are about true events, like Emperor. The underlying events in Emperor are fascinating, especially in the emphasis that everyone in the US at the time wanted Hirohito to hang and the political pressure to do so was palpable; but also that the generals knew that doing so would would be the spark on a powder keg that would erupt Japan into a full scale revolt. This is interesting and compelling stuff. The search for a long-lost lover is also compelling against this backdrop. But, curiously, the movie falls flat on both. Neither story is portrayed in any particularly interesting way. In fact, the whole point of the love affair flashbacks seem to be to demonstrate that General Fellers has an insight to the Japanese psyche and love for the culture of Japan that makes him uniquely qualified for the job. I'm pretty sure some of the side plots of MacArthur checking up on Fellers and the political pressure back home were meant to build tension, but they really don't. In the end, the movie feels like a dispassionate reading of an encyclopedia entry of the events, not a dramatic rendering of them. This is a movie after all, not a documentary. It's supposed to be exciting.
And here's where I'm going to get back to my original paragraph. The movie's ads make it seem like it will be about MacArthur, but instead it's about Fellers. It's almost a bit-and-switch. I guess the reason the studio presented it as such is that they, like us, don't really know what the movie is about. If they portray it as a historical romance, no one would go. So in order to get butts in the seats, they portray it as a rip-snorting retelling of MacArthur's life, hoping to get history-minded men into the seats, like modern day PT Barnums. The most egregious example of this in recent times was that cinematic stinkbomb Pearl Harbor. These are the two reasons I gave it 2.5 stars. The real story is actually very interesting, and I would like to have seen more. The actions undertaken in the movie had enormous geopolitical ramifications for the United States, Japan and Asia, even today. But instead, we get an uneven and bland retelling of very important events, which, ultimately, come off as dull in the end.
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