COME SEE THE PARADISE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
COME SEE THE PARADISE is a film about racism from a writer-director who has been accused of making films with racist overtones (MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, MISSISSIPPI BURNING). It is also about the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. And it is a love story.
The film was created by Alan Parker and stars Dennis Quaid and Tamlyn Tomita as the lovers whose interracial marriage was opposed as much by her father as by the "antimiscegenation" laws of California. They elope to Seattle to get married, Seattle and Washington state being known as an unusual place even in the 1930s in such matters. They become separated when the so-called internment camps are opened and all persons of Japanese ancestry removed from the Pacific Coast states and the U.S. enters the war.
The pre-Pearl parts of the movie present a wonderful evocation of Los Angeles' old Little Tokyo, with its mix of old and new country. The movie has a lush, detailed look to it. In one of the Seattle papers there was story about the reactions of several local ex-internees to seeing the film. One person was quoted to the effect that the movie showed the camp surrounded by three barb-wire fences, just as his camp was in real life, which detail delighted him for its authenticity. The camp is never identified, but I assumed it was meant to be Manzanar in the Owens Valley of California.
If it was Manzanar, the site of which I visited twenty years ago, its appearance in the film points up my only real dissatisfaction with the COME SEE THE PARADISE (aside from the title, which is an obscure reference to the movie house where Quaid worked for Tomita's father, played by Sab Shimono) was that to some extent it soft-pedaled the camps and the situation. Someday a really hard-hitting dramatic movie (as opposed to a documentary such as one done on the camps in the late Seventies) will be made; in the meantime, this film is better than nothing, a first step, as it were, in realizing the dramatic potential of this sad episode in U.S. history.
Much is glossed over, such as dissent within the camps among the internees about their own loyalties. There is, in the interest of balance, I suppose, a brief, conventional defense is offered by a minor, white character. However, there is no doubt that the film views the camps as an injustice and a cruel punishment of innocent people. From my friends who experienced the camps directly and from my own reading, I know that only the smallest modicum of the pain and confusion and greed and meanness and little heroisms were depicted in this film.
The performances by Quaid, Tomita, and the other actors are uniformly excellent. I've never liked Quaid better and I want to see Tomita in lots more movies. One of the pleasures of the movie is see many unfamiliar faces, ethnic actors who are usually buried by the mostly lily-white nature of main-stream film-making. Indeed, one especially delightful scene features one of Lily's brothers (Lily being Tomita's character) who is trying to be a film actor but can only get parts as Chinese houseboys. (Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto shows up in camp show, too.)
The love story begins well, but does tend to get lost in the hurly-burly of the war, which is probably what happened for a lot of people, but which is not particularly good story-writing or film-making. The two principals play off each other well in their love scenes, but their love scenes are more tender than passionate for some reason.
Shall I say the film was not hard enough by half on America? This is not an angry film, but it is sympathetic and probably new information for a lot of people. America seems to have made progress since those days, even if much distance remains to be covered. The film is strong, the performances are strong, the look is strong. I am happy to recommend COME SEE THE PARADISE.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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