Save the Children!

The first quarter-hour of Children of Huang Shi flies by so energetically, with derring-do and crashing incidents, that a filmgoer may easily confuse the picture with a large-scaled historical romance. But Roger Spottiswoode’s picture, while an epic of sorts, is not one of those. Its biographical story portrays an odyssey of rare personal sacrifice and heroism.

British journalist and editor James MacManus was stationed in Beijing almost a quarter-century ago when he happened on the story of George Hogg, a young Englishman who became involved with a group of orphaned boys in the war-ravaged China of 1937, and undertook to protect them from the simultaneous perils posed by the Japanese invasion of China and the sometimes predatory corruption of the defending Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek. MacManus worked on a screenplay for years, and in the late 1990s Spottiswoode read it and determined to make the movie that’s finally in general release.

It relates the tale of Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a young Oxford grad and the son of Quakers, who roamed the world looking for adventure and a role in his tumultuous era, and found himself in China soon after the Japanese began their often brutal efforts to conquer the country. In this version, Hogg is captured by Japanese soldiers and saved from certain death in a hairbreadth rescue led by a Communist partisan named “Jack” Chen (Chow Yun Fat). Chen and an apparently selfless American nurse (a convincingly hardbitten Radha Mitchell) send Hogg upcountry to an orphanage at Huang Shi to recuperate from a wound, but it seems they have an ulterior purpose.

Once at the orphanage, which turns out to be abandoned by its staff and run by the boys in a regime that seems to be tending toward the anarchistic territory of William Golding, the idealistic Hogg finds himself taking charge. At first reluctantly, then passionately, he becomes teacher, surrogate parent, and literal savior of the boys.

The filmmakers have taken some obvious-seeming dramatizing liberties with this unusual historical narrative. Yun Fat’s Chen is a rather jauntily fatalistic insurgent who seems to owe more to Hollywood-style conventions than accuracy, but the movie does supply some tension and character complexity in his quiet moral tug-of-war with the pacifistic Hogg in their interactions with the boys.

Despite the attempts to enliven the historical record, there’s a curious distanced quality in the movie, as if Spottiswoode hadn’t quite found a way to convey Hogg’s passion and his own undoubted commitment to the material. A smaller part of the problem is Rhys Meyers’ winsomely boyish appearance and lack of gravitas, although by the end of the movie he is more convincing.

Children of Huang Shi does make clear the extraordinary nature of Hogg and the boys’ story. And at the very end, in a Schindler-esque moment, several survivors who may owe their lives to Hogg’s heroism pay heartfelt tribute to him.