Dad Tragedy: Bridge on the River Kwai

The Bridge on the River Kwai is a movie about middle-aged nihilists coping with getting older any way they know how: by wearing a slick red Sam Browne belt and crying a lot, by getting super intense about the punishment box, by pec workouts and malingering. That's not its primary point, of course – it's a war movie, specifically a War is Hell movie, very specifically that rare War is Hell movie that balances its themes with a recognition that World War II was a morally meaningful conflict. I saw Benjamin Britten's War Requiem this year, so I know not everyone makes it that far.

But on a whole, it's a movie about getting older and grieving your youth, seeking meaning wherever you can find it, and how sometimes midlife crisis means committing acts of treason. No wonder it's an ultimate dad film, even more so than Patton or Lawrence of Arabia. A post-Billy Joel generation was raised to think its title has no The, and that's a crime too, but it's at least very on brand for Joel to mention it.

If you haven't seen this movie – and I feel like maybe fewer people today have? – its plot is meandering but simple. Alec Guinness is Colonel Nicholson, a British prisoner of war in Thailand. Nicholson is a bore and a martinet who's been captured along with dozens of his men and is now at a prison camp commanded by Sessue Hayakawa's Colonel Saito. Saito's orders are to construct a bridge using POW labor, and his tactics in extracting it are ruthless. While Nicholson initially resists Saito, he later becomes obsessed with building the bridge as a symbol of British ingenuity, a moral victory, and a monument to a life he's uncomfortably conscious hasn't amounted to much. There's more, including a major subplot about a character I refer to exclusively as Surprisingly Jacked William Holden, but it's basically a two-hander between Nicholson and Saito.

Guinness gets the credit for carrying the film (it won him his Oscar), and it's true that he's superb and uncompromising as the wretchedly uptight Nicholson, but to me it's Hayakawa's movie. (Hayakawa's was the only Oscar nomination the film didn't convert, because of racism, I assume.) Saito is a stereotypical character on the page – he's weak, dysregulated, an engineer who needs to be taught the British art of bridge-building – but Hayakawa plays him intelligently and transcends the brief. Some artists have this capacity to make a type of guy into a specific guy. Hayakawa's sensitive, unnerving performance defines Saito by his grief for the time – forty years ago, perhaps – when he didn't hate himself. He tells Nicholson that he'd studied art in England as a young man, and that his father forced him to switch to engineering. As a result, he vacillates between Anglophilia and a disgust for everything English. It plays into his growing obsession with Nicholson, whom he initially tries to break and then is broken by, though not in conventional terms. Nicholson kills him with kindness, and not intentionally.

The Bridge on the River Kwai isn't a homoerotic film; it's one of the least erotic films I've ever seen, actually. It is a love story, but with the twist that neither party is very capable of love. In the first act, Saito spends a lot of his time throwing Nicholson in overheated metal boxes and demanding that he do manual labor, which the Geneva Convention forbids. In the second act, Nicholson learns to stop worrying and love the bridge, and then begins to confide in Saito, treating him as a friend even though they have an ugly history and no obvious bond. It's a pas de deux, or folie a deux, in which two people are obsessed with each other, but cluelessly, and not at the same time. Here, again, Hayakawa makes all the right choices. Once Nicholson warms up to him, he goes cold. All of the florid rage and mania seems to go out of him. He passes abruptly from operatic emotion to puzzled watchfulness. It's as if he's thinking, "I've been accused of being rather unwell in my time, but you, sir – are you okay?"

It's not quite that I think this film is queer. The eroticism is nonexistent, the romance strictly one-sided (albeit on both sides). But it's got a closetedness to it which is interesting. Kwai is, to a surprising extent, a film about clothes – who gets to be tidy, who gets to be comfortable, who gets to be shirtless (William Holden). Nicholson tries to stay neat, but he's wearing a wrinkled mess of a uniform and carrying a swagger stick he's made out of a regular stick. Even at his best, we don't get the sense that he's ever cut a prepossessing figure in uniform. He wears his clothing like a grim set of bicycle panniers. The trousers and tunic give the impression of being attached to him, rather than worn by him. Saito, conversely, is stylish and vain. In dress or undress uniform, he is debonair, his regulation open collar somehow louche, his leather polished but never overdone. One of the youthful things Saito is mourning is surely his immense personal beauty – Hayakawa, though there's little sign of it left by 1957, was once a Byronically stunning matinee idol. Saito's vanity, and Nicholson's refusal to have a body, are both closet-coded. I do think there's something there, and it's too tropey to be wholly unintentional.

I hope nothing I've said has given the impression that this is a beautiful tragedy, although there's certainly beauty in the way it's shot, in the quality of the acting, in watching good art thoughtfully made. No, what touches me to the quick is the comical, hapless mediocrity of the two protagonists. It has important themes and it executes them well, but it's centrally about two very average men – Saito ambitious but talentless, Nicholson lacking in either – who have everything in common. They are servants of opposing empires, middle managers who've spent their careers maintaining the slow, deadly grind of colonialism. They both want to connect with each other. And yet they can't even do that. It's not because East is East and West is West, or even because they're on the attacking and defending sides of a brutal world war. It's because neither of them really knows how to think, or what they want out of friendship. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a reminder that even at the most tragic moments in human history, there are a lot of guys who just kind of suck.