Andrew Eaton-Lewis: The Impossible is the disaster movie equivalent of Dances With Wolves

EWAN McGregor is getting a lot of praise for his performance in The Impossible. I’m glad; his good looks, easy charm and charisma usually distract attention from his skill as a character actor.

That’s not a problem likely to make many hearts bleed, so it’s no wonder he’s underrated.

Shame for him, then, that there has been a backlash against his new film. The Impossible, some say, is a “whitewash” of the 2004 south-east Asian tsunami, since it dramatically recreates a disaster that killed over 220,000 mostly Asian people, but its lead characters – as is the norm in Western cinema – are white. It is, by this logic, the disaster movie equivalent of Dances With Wolves or Blood Diamond.

This is a difficult subject, and it’s unfair to burden The Impossible with more responsibility than it can bear. Its problem, simply enough, is that it happens to be the first major movie about the tsunami (unless you count Hereafter), so it is facing the kind of close scrutiny that the second or third will mostly be spared. And actually it is not really “about the tsunami” at all. It tells one real family’s very personal story and is quite open about this. Nobody has accused it of racism, as such, just of representing a kind of general Western self-absorption, a lazy assumption that white people are only interested in stories about white people.

There is some truth in this, I’m sure, although how much of a problem you think it is might depend on your politics, and on how you feel about terms like “imperialist” or “soft power”. The film’s Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona has said he needed mainstream stars to raise the budget he needed (recreating a tsunami on an epic scale isn’t cheap, presumably). This excuse – it’s just how the system works – is common in movie-making, but it’s still a disingenuous way to dodge responsibility and awkward questions. Bayona could have made a different kind of movie with a smaller budget. He just didn’t want to.

Reading about this film, I keep thinking of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – an Indian story, with Indian lead characters and stars, by a British director, that made nearly $400 million at the box office and won eight Oscars. That was some achievement, and yet Hollywood mostly still appears to regard it as a fluke rather than any kind of template for future success. What’s wrong with this picture? Something is. «

Twitter: @aeatonlewis

» Last week Andrew... realised it’s sometimes best to leave favourite childhood movies in the past. Flight Of The Navigator was much, much better in my head than it was through 39-year-old eyes last week. And my ten-year-old is unlikely to trust my recommendations again