Tommy Lee Jones, who should have won an Oscar for goosing audience interest with a riveting performance as a fiery abolitionist in the lumbering “Lincoln,’’ takes on another formidable historical character — Gen. Douglas MacArthur — in “Emperor.’’
Jones is predictably wonderful as the gruff, politically ambitious egotist, who hopes to use his assignment as leader of the US occupation forces in post-World War II Japan as a springboard to the presidency.
MacArthur’s chief issue — whether to prosecute Emperor Hirohito for war crimes — is fascinating. But Jones can’t save a film that unfortunately keeps him off-screen for far too much time while detailing the drearily fictionalized romantic problems of his protégé, Gen. Bonner Fellers (the fine Matthew Fox of “Lost’’).
Congress is demanding the emperor’s execution, so MacArthur gives Fellers, who was posted to Japan before the war, the very difficult task of determining Hirohito’s possible complicity in war atrocities.
Even for a high-ranking member of the occupation forces like Fellers, it isn’t easy to conduct such an investigation in Japan — much less sort out the complicated and subtle closed-door interactions between the military, government and an emperor who’s considered a living god.
With the help of a local driver (Masayoshi Haneda), Fellers finds the time to also investigate the fate of Aya (Eriko Hatsune), a beautiful Japanese schoolteacher he fell in love with before the war — and whom he tried to spare when choosing American bomb targets. There are a series of schmaltzy romantic flashbacks of their budding romance, cut short when Americans are expelled from the country.
This part of the movie is a dramatic contrivance that undercuts the main story and slows down its momentum to a crawl. (Director Peter Webber was previously responsible for the great-looking but soporific “Girl With the Pearl Earring.’’)
Eventually, MacArthur decides the occupation would be compromised unless the emperor and his family are exonerated — and Fellers has to decide whether to accommodate his boss by coordinating the testimony of war criminals to that end.
That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion, but MacArthur demands an extraordinary and humbling concession from an emperor (Takataro Kataoka) who rarely ventures outside his palace — Hirohito has to come to occupation headquarters for an in-person meeting.
Ignoring aides’ demands that the general not look the emperor in the eye, MacArthur insists on also shaking his hand and posing with him in a photo-op that’s by far the most engaging scene in “Emperor.’’
“Let’s show ’em some good old-fashioned American swagger,’’ MacArthur says on his arrival in Tokyo. It’s too bad director Webber and the screenwriters, David Klass and Vera Blasi, didn’t take his advice to heart instead of largely wasting Jones and some very nice period details.