Documented Atrocities
'Nanking' exposes the truth,
while 'Running With Arnold' manipulates it
By Andy Klein
One Missed Call (also reviewed this week) takes its story from a Japanese horror film. The documentary Nanking takes its story from a real Japanese horror – that country’s 1937 attack on Nanking, China, and the atrocities of the subsequent occupation, generally known as the Rape of Nanking.
Nanking (often transliterated in recent years as Nanjing), one of China’s largest cities, has served as the nation’s capital during various historical periods, including the decade leading up to World War II. In December 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army, having already taken Shanghai, overran Nanking and began a six-week campaign of physical devastation, mass executions, and rapes.
While most Westerners fled, a handful stayed behind, in hopes of using their status to protect as much of the population as they could. They called themselves the International Committee, established a Safety Zone of two square miles, and brought in as many people as possible. Even so, the Japanese military frequently breached the agreement and came in looking for Chinese soldiers to execute or women to gang-rape.
A number of film projects about the massacre are in the works, doubtless inspired by the success of Iris Chang’s 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, which revived Western interest in the episode. This documentary from Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman – the team behind the Oscar-winning Twin Towers – is the first to reach Los Angeles screens.
Guttentag and Sturman have gone outside the usual conventions for this sort of doc. Since most of the eyewitnesses are dead, they’ve employed a cast of familiar Hollywood faces to “act” the parts in a sitdown reading. That footage is intercut with historical films and stills, as well as – in by far the most moving portions – subtitled testimony from Chinese survivors in their late 70s and 80s and even from some Japanese soldiers.
The filmmakers try to balance the relentlessly depressing and horrible effect of the atrocities with the uplifting acts of the Westerners. It’s the same approach Steven Spielberg used in Schindler’s List, and indeed one of the most curious details of the incident is that the leader of the International Committee was Schindler-esque Nazi Party member John Rabe (portrayed by Jürgen Prochnow), a Siemens executive and longtime resident. He tried to use his party status to influence the occupiers; when that failed, he returned to Germany and – quite naively, in retrospect – wrote Adolf Hitler, asking him to rein in the Japanese.
For his efforts, he was detained by the Gestapo and, after being released, forbidden to publicly talk about Nanking. After the war, he was arrested for having been a party member and was then cleared by an Allied de-Nazification tribunal. Still, he spent the rest of his life in poverty, despite the contributions sent by those he had helped save.
The uplifting aspect is easier to appreciate now than it was for the participants. Missionary Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway) – one of the International Committee leaders who did the most in defying the Japanese Army – was unable to erase the impact on her soul; she committed suicide not long after returning to the U.S. In a chilling echo of her fate, Iris Chang – after years of absorption in the lore of Nanking, followed by threats and harassment from the Japanese right – also killed herself.
The actors acquit themselves well, but they are completely upstaged by the survivors, who tearfully recount childhood memories of seeing their families butchered, and by the actual atrocity footage the Westerners managed to sneak out of China. It is even more chilling to observe the joking, smiling demeanor of a few withered old Japanese soldiers as they tell of similar events.
In addition to the fictionalized Nanking projects in the pipeline, Japanese filmmaker Satoru Mizushima, outraged by the Guttentag/Sturman film, is making his own documentary about the conspiracy of liars who have perpetrated these exaggerated, even downright false, allegations. For support, Guttentag and Sturman have photographs, films, decades of investigations, and eyewitnesses from China, Japan, and neutral countries; Mizushima has the disbelief of a handful of right-wing Japanese nationalists. It is the Asian equivalent of Holocaust denial.
There are only one or two details to nitpick in this altogether gripping film. The real-life witnesses are not adequately distinguished from the actors, leading to a few moments of confusion; and the fact that Chris Mulkey’s character is a composite isn’t mentioned until the closing crawl.
Another new documentary, Dan Cox’s Running with Arnold, is less praiseworthy. Its main claim to fame stems from Alec Baldwin’s unsuccessful attempts to have his recorded narration removed from the final product. Baldwin had agreed to do the voiceover after reading the script; he didn’t see the actual footage until the dubbing sessions. Despite his unsurprising political dislike for the film’s subject, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, he felt that the film’s use of Nazi imagery crossed the bounds of fairness.
Baldwin is right, and the film has other problems that undercut its arguments. There are multiple factual errors and misrepresentations in the parts dealing with my particular field of expertise, leaving me distrustful of the parts I’m less knowledgeable about. That is, the narration refers to Arnold’s obscure 1967 Hercules in New York as Hercules of New York; the context implies that it was from the same period as the much later Conan the Barbarian. Context also suggests that the notorious flop Last Action Hero was a commercial triumph. We are told that Arnold was a millionaire by the time he was 22 – which is off by at least a decade. (I suspect that some genius subtracted 1947 from 1979 and came up with 22.)
It’s possible that some of these errors are the fault of Baldwin’s distress while recording the narration, but they still should have been fixed.
The Nazi references aren’t the only cheap shots; there’s also an unflattering shot of Arnold looking flabby and out of shape, and the unnecessary insertion of footage from Nixon’s Checkers speech to make a trivial and irrelevant point. Cox seems to be going for a freewheeling Michael Moore style, but his jokes just aren’t funny enough to justify it.
It’s a crying shame, because Running with Arnold catalogs a lot of the facts of the Governator’s duplicity and right-wing agenda and does a nice job of linking it to national Republican Party behavior. This is info that really should be run in front of the public more forcefully than it has been. Unfortunately, Cox’s film doesn’t engender trust.
Nanking. Directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman. Screenplay by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman & Elisabeth Bentley; story by Bill Guttentag & Dan Sturman. With Mariel Hemingway, Jürgen Prochnow, John Getz, Rosalind Chao, Woody Harrelson, and Stephen Dorff. Opens Fri. at Laemmle’s Royal.
Running with Arnold. Directed by Dan Cox. Written by Jerry Decker. Narrated by Alec Baldwin. Opens Fri. at Laemmle’s Sunset 5.
Published: 01/09/2008
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