Small miracles

I joined a surprisingly large audience last night to watch the Japanese film I Wish.  "Surprisingly" large, because the film is in Japanese with English subtitles, stars a somewhat withdrawn and gloomy 12-year-old hero, has the sketchiest of plots, and ends in disappointment of the boy's original hopes (although with an ending that is nevertheless upbeat).

What the movie does have going for it, however, as amply displayed in the trailers that have been playing in recent weeks, is a wonderful cast of Japanese kids filled with the effervescence of pre-teen youth.  If we had seen the film in 1945, we might have felt even greater ambiguity about our bombing of Hiroshima.  On the other hand,  maybe not.  In 1945, Japanese kids probably didn't act like a bunch of unusually well-mannered (but mischievous) American kids, set down in a small town locale where only the signage seemed definitely foreign.

The film was apparently commissioned by Japanese Railways as publicity for a new bullet train service.  The railroad got more, I'm sure, than they bargained for.  Our hero, Koichi, is the child of divorced parents -- a status less familiar in Japan than in America.  He lives with his mother and grandparents, while his slightly younger brother Ryu lives in a distant town with their rock musician father.  Ryu -- extroverted, funny and bubbly in personality -- tends to steal the show from his more stolid brother.  (The two actors are brothers in real life, as well.) The boys stay in daily wistful contact by cell phone.

The plot centers on a rumor that Koichi has heard, a claim that if you stand beside the point where two bullet trains pass from opposite directions, the force field created will make your wishes come true.  Koichi's wish is for the St. Helens-like volcano that looms over the new town where he lives with his mother to erupt, causing the town to be evacuated and his family thus somehow to be reunited. 

Koichi recruits his two best schoolfriends to join him in a journey to the midpoint on the new bullet train route, the point where the trains coming from either direction will meet.  Ryu, with friends of his own from their father's town, meets them at the midpoint.  Most of the film treads predictable ground, watching adventurous kids who sneak away from their homes and attempt to make it on their own in adult society.  What's different about this film, perhaps, is the warmth and caring that Japanese society unexpectedly offers these wandering children.

Each kid brings to the midpoint his or her own wish, a wish that's written down on a signboard to be waved at the passing trains.  Most poignant is the boy who carries his dead dog in a backpack, hoping for its resuscitation.  This film isn't a fantasy, however, and the wishes aren't granted.  Not granted, at least, in the ways expected.

At the last moment, Koichi declines to make his own wish.  Since leaving home, he has realized the death and destruction that a volcano eruption would cause.  Sober and thoughtful child that he is, he decides to embrace the overall welfare of "the world," rather than sacrifice it  to his own selfish needs.

The name of the film in Japan was Kiseki (translated as "the miracle").  The Japanese title is apt on several levels, and the film itself -- although slow in its pacing -- is a something of a miracle itself in today's commercial film market.