Who’s This Now?
Izuru Narushima’s Kenji Miyazawa biopic isn’t going to win him any new readers outside Japan.
Father of The Milky Way Railroad
Director: Izuru Narushima • Writer: Riko Sakaguchi, based on the novel by Yoshinobu Kadoi
Starring: Koji Yakusho, Masaki Suda, Nana Mori, Yudai Toyoda, Min Tanaka, Maki Sakai
Japan • 2hrs 8mins
Opens Hong Kong September 7 • I
Grade: B-
I think it’s safe to say that if, after watching a biopic about a prominent – and beloved – kid lit author and poet, you have to hit the Wikipedia to find out who this beloved kid lit author was, why he remains so popular, and the titles of some of his most renowned works, the biopic has failed in its mission. Miserably. If you didn’t want to pick up Spring Snow after watching Paul Schrader’s Mishima, it failed. If you didn’t want to fire up the Anita Mui and Whitney Houston playlists after watching Anita or I Wanna Dance with Somebody, they failed on some fundamental level. So let’s put that out there. Izuru Narushima’s Father of the Milky Way Railroad | 銀河鉄道の父, about the short life of Japanese literary titan Kenji Miyazawa (Masaki Suda, We Made a Beautiful Bouquet) fails.
Narushima’s cursory examination of the life of the, by all accounts, iconic writer is caught up in that most Japanese of cinematic quagmires: the soft focus of hagiography (think Mori, the Artist’s Habitat), with an added layer of distance; Miyazawa’s life is looked at from his exacting father’s POV. Wait, what? Really? How anyone is supposed to get a handle on an artist’s influences, drivers and what makes them tick when examined from a perspective not theirs is baffling. And yes, a biopic by its fundamental nature is someone else’s POV, I get that. But there’s something about the extra step that makes Father of the Milky Way Railroad extra opaque. Who is this Miyazawa dude? Why should I check out his writing? I still have no idea.
Still don’t know what he’s writing
Railroad starts with Kenji’s birth, or rather, it starts with his father Masajiro Miyazawa (the always appealing Koji Yakusho) racing home to Hanamaki after the birth of his first, and always favourite, child. He’s a pawnbroker’s son, and he and his wife Ichi (Maki Sakai) are slowly taking over the business from Masajiro’s father, Kisuke (Min Tanaka). It’s early in the 1900s, and schools are rare, but when Kenji gets old enough Masajiro sends him off to both middle and high school. He comes back a radical, an activist for greater equality, a vegetarian and a convert to Nichiren, away from the family’s devout farm sect of Buddhism. His ideas and desires led him to clash with his father, he was extremely close to his younger sister Toshi (Nana Mori), and was devastated by her death from tuberculosis. He was a teacher, cellist, and geologist, and has become a legend for writing Night on the Galactic Railroad and Matasaburo of the Wind among others.
None of that, however, gets any real time the film, which is essentially about Masajiro. And even by that metric Railroad shows and tells, but never truly enlightens. Masajiro and Ichi outlive 50% of their children, but we get no idea how he responds to this. We get no sense of Ichi at all; she’s just there, a woman with no real function. Masajiro obviously favours Kenji, so how do his other children feel about being afterthoughts? Were they? If the Kenji Miyazawa biopic is going to be about his father, let’s at least learn about him. But it feels like Narushima and screenwriter Riko Sakaguchi have literally adapted Kenji’s Wiki page rather than Yoshinobu Kadoi’s book, though it’s possible that’s as skin-deep as the movie. The way the film flops around is no one’s fault; Yakusho and Suda are both fine, and do what they can with what plays out like an inoffensive, unquestioning TV film, and in fairness, biopics are hard to get right. Too much worship feels kiss-assey (looking at you, Bohemian Rhapsody), too much critique feels like a hit piece. Railroad is a contradiction of itself – handsomely mounted but flat and visually uninspired. Detailed but surface-y. Comprehensive yet somehow uninformative. Now that I think of it it’s kind of a perfect biopic. Viewers familiar with Miyazawa’s work may get more from Father of the Milky Way Railroad, but if you’re looking for a revelatory portrait of an artist as a young man, best look elsewhere. — DEK