Veterans sometimes say combat survivors give off a glow that protects them like an invisible shield. Jonathan Rhys Meyers radiates that glow until the final reel of The Children of Huang Shi, a terrific, fact-inspired moral adventure. Playing George Hogg, a British war correspondent who travels to China in 1937 to assess the looming Japanese occupation, Rhys Meyers pulls the audience into his clear-eyed gaze and compels us to see history afresh.
He may be a racy heartthrob as Henry VIII in Showtime's The Tudors, but in this role he possesses spiritual nobility.
When Hogg snaps pictures of a massacre during the rape of Nanking, he can barely look through his viewfinder. The director, Roger Spottiswoode, is a master at depicting tragedy from a point of view that draws us into human loss, rather than merely making us flinch at ugliness. He creates a harrowing kaleidoscope from Hogg's reaction to the atrocity and the photographs he uses to freeze it in time. In an age when digital tools bend real-life imagery, Spottiswoode reminds us of a camera's power to bear witness - or, in the case of his own movie, to bring underreported stories into history.
Spottiswoode's last great political feature, Under Fire (1983), was about a photojournalist provoked into a political act after seeing Somoza's brutal crackdown on Nicaraguan revolutionaries. In The Children of Huang Shi, Spottiswoode goes one step further: Selfless acts of courage transform Hogg into the sort of character other journalists write stories about. He throws himself into protecting and teaching 60 Chinese children at a remote orphanage at Huang Shi. When even that secluded spot grows perilous, he decides to lead them 700 miles over a rugged road to safety.
The Children of Huang Shi boasts physical sweep and emotions to match; it's an authentic epic made on location for $17 million (in Hollywood terms, chicken feed). No one practices classical storytelling as well as Spottiswoode, but the reason his best movies stay with you long after "the end" is that they embrace a modern viewpoint.
Hogg's choices don't come easily: every personal or political crisis in this film is split three ways. He must find his footing in a China that is splintering among nationalists, Communists and the Japanese invaders. Once he gives up journalism and commits to protecting three-score orphans, he discovers that he can support China profoundly without violating his Quaker-bred ideals.
