Overlooked Movie Marathon 2: Tokyo Story (1953)

Something interesting that happened when I asked on Twitter for some of the greatest movies ever made was that I was suggested many foreign films.  There are two reasons that this could have happened.  The first reason is that there are some great foreign movies out there among the greatest movies ever.  This is easily part of the equation.  Great movies come from all different countries, not just the United States of America.  That’s easy to see.  The other reason is that I’ve slowly been watching many of the great American movies and it’s getting tougher to make a list of unseen greats that includes American movies.  Of course, American films will always be included in the equation because there are so many more well-known American films than other films.  But my point stands in that I’m narrowing down the top American pictures.

The foreign films taking over this marathon include the movie I’m writing about right now, Tokyo Story.  This is a tougher one for me to write about but this will be a post that is better written for it.  Why?  I wasn’t in love with the movie like I was the previous four movies.  Or three.  How many have I watched?  The General, Singin’ in the Rain, Metropolis… Is that it?  Fantasia!  That’s right.  So this is the fifth movie.  Five movies in, and I’ve hit one that I don’t love.

Tokyo Story is about an elderly Japanese couple who travel to Tokyo in order to visit their now adult children.  They discover that their children have not met their expectations, and that the children do not truly care about them.  Tokyo Story is much more a film with an emotional core than a film that is based around plot.  Not a lot of events actually happen within the runtime of the film, but the emotion within the film drives the story and the characters.  It’s about how life does not always happen the way you would like it to, and that the people who care about you care about you, regardless of relation to you.  It is meaningful, but didn’t truly grip me until the final third of the movie.

The biggest issue that I had with Tokyo Story was the initial third.  The movie started off really slow.  To put it in basic terms, the first half hour or so of Tokyo Story was packing, unpacking, dressing, and undressing.  That doesn’t really excite me at all, and might I was losing interest rapidly.  It was an introduction to the main characters in the movie, but I feel like it could have been done better.  Many people might disagree, as there is love for this movie throughout the classic cinematic community, I believe.  But I didn’t feel any investment in the packing and unpacking scenes at the beginning of the movie.  They seemed like a way to extend the length of the film without bringing anything worthwhile into it.  I don’t mean to be that guy, the one who says a movie could be shorter and just get to the plot.  In the case of Tokyo Story, I feel there could have been a better way to introduce the characters than through extended scenes of packing and unpacking.

That’s about all the negativity that I have toward Tokyo Story.  After those initiating scenes of the movie, I have no qualms with the pacing or story structure.  The movie dives into the emotionality of the characters, their attachment to the past, and how the present time in which the film takes place has shattered their illusions of a bright future.  Tokyo Story truly is a movie about the disillusionment you face as you get older.  For the most part, that tale is told expertly.  At 23, I felt the message that the movie was putting forward, and it hit me pretty hard.  Life never ends up the way you expect it to.  You have to live with that.  That’s all that there is to do.  You can’t change it.

Tokyo Story is a good movie.  Is it one of the greatest ever made?  I’m not sure that I agree with that.  There’s nothing in the movie that made me think it was a great movie that everyone needs to see.  I’m not going to tell anyone not to see it, but at the same time, I wouldn’t tell anyone to go out of their way to see it.  Tokyo Story is good, but not great.  That’s how I see it.  It has some great messages to tell, but sometimes doesn’t tell them in an interesting way.  However, what it does get right heavily outweighs what is doesn’t.  I’m happy to have seen it either way.

Up next in the second annual Overlooked Movie Marathon is Harold and Maude.  I know almost nothing about the movie.  I know the basic idea.  This is one I’ve been meaning to see for a while, so now that it’s in the marathon, I’m going to watch it.  I’ll see you next time with my writeup for that one.