'Tsunami': A Tale Where The Truth Would Do

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a man in a desperate search for his daughter in "Tsunami, the Aftermath," a two-part drama starting tomorrow on HBO. (By Kerry Brown -- Hbo)

Feel like making a movie? Want the world to beat a path to your film's door? Helpful hint: Keep the word "aftermath" out of the title. It gives the impression that the major piece of your story's action happened before the movie has even begun.

A handy case-in-point is "Tsunami, the Aftermath," a new HBO drama filled with arduous details of misery, torment and horror.

And just for variety -- a little more misery on top of that.

The three-hour HBO-BBC production, airing in two parts (tomorrow and next Sunday), follows the fates of various survivors of the monstrous, tragic tidal wave that struck the coast of Thailand in December 2004. Many survivors spend most of the movie searching for other survivors -- relatives and other loved ones -- and bemoaning the terrible toll in human lives.

It is moving, tense and sometimes agonizing to watch, but the film is plagued by the sense that there ought to be more to it. How many viewers, after all, will be startled to learn that a tsunami is not nice? It also seems odd -- with memories of Hurricane Katrina and its devastation of New Orleans and other cities fresh in the national consciousness -- that we're being asked to immerse ourselves, as it were, in a tidal wave that struck two years ago on the other side of the world.

No one, of course, should be indifferent to mass tragedy wherever it occurs. The global village is no place for provincialism. And the film, directed by Bharat Nalluri and written by Abi Morgan, conveys the sense and sensations of a horrendous catastrophe in stunningly intimate detail. We can theoretically learn much, much more about the nature of such devastation by observing the effects on one struggling family than we can from TV news reports filled with facts, figures and faceless statistics.

It turns out, though, that the families profiled in "Tsunami" are fictitious. The characters are composites based on the kinds of real people whose lives were engulfed by a capricious act of nature. A disclaimer calls the film "a fictional drama inspired by actual accounts of the Asian tsunami" -- one "based on interviews and research."

Oh. So this docudrama is mostly drama and only a little bit docu. Details about the tsunami's devastation are obviously true, but since the people in whose lives we become involved didn't exist, we're watching vignettes that could very well have happened, but didn't.

In an interview, Nalluri says that "truth" was his first concern in making the movie, but obviously he doesn't mean literal truth. Just "sort-of" truth. This can't help but detract from the impact.

The cast, meanwhile, isn't exactly chock-full of household names, unless Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sophie Okonedo are as familiar around your place as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. (The former are far better actors, of course, but who isn't?) Clearly the most recognizable name to U.S. audiences is Tim Roth, who very convincingly plays a rumpled, semi-cynical journalist teamed with a young Thai photographer as they attempt to document the scenes that stubborn, paranoid officials (perhaps with an eye on the future tourist trade) don't want the world to see.

Ejiofor conveys with tangible, aching anguish the plight of Ian Carter, a man searching desperately for the daughter he feels certain has survived the storm. If only he can wade past the bureaucratic roadblocks as well as the fields of debris. Told that his plight is common to natural disasters, Carter explodes: "There is nothing natural about any of this!"

Some of the imagery is striking -- a boat lodged in the second-story window of an apartment building, or a human leg sticking up from a pile of otherwise unidentifiable objects. But you will see very little of the tsunami itself -- basically the same shots of receding water that were shown on Western newscasts at the time.

Maybe it would be vulgar to whip up a tsunami in the special-effects department, but at least we would get a better sense of the storm's destructive power at the moment of its greatest impact.

"Tsunami" is rigorous and conscientious filmmaking about a subject whose grim importance lingers. It's a portrait of people trying to fathom and cope and, although the obstacles appear insurmountable, to conquer and prevail. But for all its haunting moments, it still seems a story told in bits and pieces -- a mosaic that we see only in sections without ever getting a truly panoramic portrait.

Tsunami, the Aftermath (three hours) airs tomorrow night at 8 on HBO; Part 2 will air next Sunday night at 8.