There is a point in 1944, near the end of the time covered by “The Children of Huang Shi” where native Chen (Yun-Fat Chow) says to goodhearted British journalist George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), “you and I come from good families. We have the luxury of living according to our beliefs.”
But the whole point of this 2008 Aussie film, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, is to explore the moral question of when we just have to “step up” and take responsibility for others – this time, sixty orphan children in China while working as a free-lance journalist (rather adventurer) in China during the invasion by Japan from the late 1930s to 1945.
George makes a lot of his Oxford education and discomfort with Chinese, and seems green and naïve about war as he is “rescued” while leaving the decadent shelter of 1937 Shanghai. He meets a nurse Lee (Radha Mitchell) and Mrs. Wang (Michelle Yeoh) as he is drawn into the world of rural poverty (only one pot to cook in and only old rice to eat). The locals call him “Pig” instead of “Hog” – a trick I saw in Army Basic myself as “the proles” treat those spoiled upperclass people with “too much education”. Finally, yes, he is confronted with the fact that the orphans will not live unless he plays papa and takes responsibility for them. The movie may take some liberties win the mandatory romance with Lee as they travel across mountains and deserts and escape the Japs.
George does meet a tragic end in the mountains with disease, and is regarded as a hero, as an almost Christ-like person – even if the script showed his temptations and upper class vanities along the way. The film presents the journalists’ dilemma: when is the writer just an “objective” voyeur, and when must he jump in and fight. Hogg speaks a metaphor about turining to his typewriter when others carry guns; today that instrument might be a laptop or a Blackberry. Remember the film “A Mighty Heart.”
This rather monumental period war film is distributed in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics, which seems to have taken over the indie market.
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