'The Wind Rises': Hayao Miyazaki's final film shouldn't be marred by controversy

City Paper grade: A- 

A vague tension permeates The Wind Rises, the final film directed by animation auteur and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. How could it not? Since debuting in Japan this summer, this semi-fictionalized biopic of Japanese aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi has been the subject of controversy. Western film festival audiences saw Miyazaki romanticizing the Japanese World War II machine, as Jiro designed the prototype of the fighter plane used in the attack on Pearl Harbor; Japanese right wingers took offense to Miyazaki’s pacifist lens in his depiction of their country’s fever for war in the 1930s and ’40s. These reactions, while not unreasonable, distract from the film’s essence — a hope-filled, wide-eyed portrait of a man who only wishes to build beautiful things. For Jiro (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), those beautiful things are airplanes. The Wind Rises follows Jiro through his childhood to his enrollment in engineering school in the wake of Japan’s Kanto earthquake, to his time working for an aircraft manufacturer and his romance with tuberculosis-stricken Naoko (Emily Blunt). While the film is a departure from Studio Ghibli’s fantasy-heavy back catalogue, Miyazaki’s visual shorthand is stronger than ever, striking a grounded biography with ephemeral flights into dreamlike impressionism, like when images of shattered aircraft machinery smolder at Jiro’s feet, hinting that Japan’s plunge into war is quickly approaching. The tale is handled with incredible poetic sensitivity and dulled sadness; we know how this story is going to end. But Jiro doesn’t. Near the film’s end, a roomful of engineers are mulling over his final blueprints, trying to find a way to make the plane lighter. Jiro earnestly suggests removing the guns. The entire room bursts into laughter.