A WWII Hero's Unlikely Exploit

But How Much of 'Huang Shi' Is True?

The epithet "based on a true story" has got to be a film director's dream. It's so freeing. It virtually invites self-indulgence. You can't argue with a true story, after all, because "It's true!" Like "Titanic." Or "Pearl Harbor." Or the old chestnut "Night and Day," which presented the "reality-based" Cole Porter as happily married to Alexis Smith. Fact, in the movies, is a lot like a license.

It allows a director like Roger Spottiswoode, whose "The Children of Huang Shi" is based on the real adventures of George Hogg, to forgo a lot of rudimentary construction of character and plausible argument to get to the nut of the story -- Hogg's arrival as a reporter in 1938 Nanjing, his narrow escape from the invading Japanese and his eventual journey toward safety on the edges of the Gobi Desert, which included finding a way to get 60 Chinese orphans over a treacherous mountain range.

Hogg is worthy of our attention, but whether he did anything to deserve Spottiswoode's soft-shell treatment seems unlikely. It's not that "Children of Huang Shi" doesn't stir the cockles of humanity in our collective soul. But the script by James MacManus and Jane Hawksley follows a Point A to Point D storytelling continuum, and Radha Mitchell's performance as self-trained nurse and opium addict Lee Pearson is the kind of demi-operatic display that usually requires a rose in the teeth, "Liebestraume" on the piano and a cameo appearance by Chloë Sevigny. As it is, we cannot argue with Lee Pearson because she is true. We think.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who apparently shoehorned George Hogg in before his reign as Henry Tudor (on "The Tudors"), has never quite found the right role for his arresting good looks and what seems to be a simmering crockpot of pathos waiting to be loosed from his soul. This isn't it, either. But Chow Yun-Fat -- who, given his massive Asian audience, may still be the world's most popular screen actor -- is charming as Chen Hansheng, a Chinese partisan who may not like Chiang Kai-shek, but really hates the Japanese. And Michelle Yeoh (who starred with Chow in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") is her usual smoky self, as a combination madam and retailer in old Nanjing. Really, though, the best thing about "Children" is the cinematography by Zhao Xiaoding ("Hero," "House of Flying Daggers"), which is so distracting, because it so greatly outclasses the rest of the movie.

The Children of Huang Shi (114 minutes, at AMC Loews Shirlington, Landmark Bethesda Row and Cinema Arts in Fairfax) is rated R for violence.