LIFE DURING WARTIME: COME SEE THE PARADISE, HIDDEN AGENDA
"All's fair in love and war" goes the saying, and indeed, it's been particularly true during war. History is filled with stories of how during war, people, armies, governments, etc., commit acts that would be thought unthinkable during peacetime. There's always justification for those acts put forward by someone, but are those acts really justified. Alan Parker's COME SEE THE PARADISE and Ken Loach's HIDDEN AGENDA, which are set around two very different conflicts, both grapple with this question.
In the case of COME SEE THE PARADISE, the act in question is the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, as we all know, Japanese-Americans were put into camps because the U.S. government feared their ties to their homeland would be too strong, and they would lead an attack themselves. This despite the fact that many Japanese-Americans ended up serving America during the war. Even the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1944 decision, declared the camps were constitutional. Nowadays, though there's still a quite vocal faction in favor of the camps, more and more people believe they were wrong, and Parker's film is on this side.
Parker follows one particular family, and one particular member, Lily Kawamura (Tamilyn Tomita). At the beginning of the film, it's the end of the war, and she and her daughter are waiting for her husband, Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid), who is supposed to be coming by train. In a flashback, we see how they meet. Jack is a union organizer who is blacklisted in the east, so he makes his way out to Los Angeles. Lily is a seamstress. The two meet through Jack working for Lily's father (Sab Shimono), as Jack is a projectionist and Lily's father owns a group of movie theaters. They fall in love, even though Lily's father and mother (Shizuko Hoshi) oppose the union, and get married in Seattle. Then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and while Jack goes off to fight, Lily and her family are sent to the internment camps. Each member of the family deals with the camps in different ways; one of Lily's brothers becomes pro-Japanese, one fights for the American army, Lily's father is accused of being a spy and becomes a broken man, while Lily herself just strives on, trying to keep her spirits, and the spirits of her daughter, up.
Parker's film received mostly negative reviews (except from Roger Ebert), and for the life of me, I can't understand why. It is true Parker has the common device of putting a white character in a story about a minority group so the white audience can have someone to identify with. However, whereas in most stories, that's out of place, Parker doesn't have Quaid as the central character here. While he's important to the story (like the Kawamuras, he's an outcast in his own country, though for him, it's because of his politics, not his skin color), the story is really about the Kawamuras. And Parker treats each character with humor and compassion, and allows us to see each of them as characters, rather than types. So instead of being preached to, we're shown how they suffer, and can feel it all the more. If there's a weakness for me, it's the framing device, which feels unnecessary. Though it does put Lily front and center, as a device, it feels like a sop to those who can't stand a historical story without it being a flashback. Still, this is a powerful movie.
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