Coen Brothers to write script for Angelina Jolie-directed 'Unbroken'

I feel a little protective over Laura Hillenbrand's nonfiction tour de force, Unbroken. She works with amazing material--the endurance against all odds of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic track star who survived first in a lifeboat for 47 days and then in a Japanese POW camp--but it's what she does with that life story that makes it special. In her hands, Zamperini's story is about his will to
survive. In the face of complete and utter hopelessness, he summoned and directed that will, and that's what helped him make it through. Powerful stuff.

Angelina Jolie wouldn't be my first choice for director of this movie, but she's taken an interest in the Universal project. Even more curiously, she and her fellow producers hired Ethan and Joel Coen to write the script for the adaptation of the 496-page novel. It's a bold decision. The Coen Brothers' works often have a style that distances the work from reality (see: Raising Arizona), turning their main characters into darkly comic figures with distinctive accents. But they also have works that, absurd as they are, feel intensely real and true to their genre, like Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Although not particularly
prominent in the book, there is plenty of ambient dark and gallows humor. How else can one survive without food on a lifeboat, or while under the thumb of fickle and cruel wardens of POW camps? I imagine that the Coen Brothers' screenplay will bring these elements to the forefront.

As adaptations go, this one has a number of major challenges. First, there's the length of the book, 496 pages. Then there's the fact that there are four distinct parts: Zamperini's childhood (likely to be elided) and time as an Olympic track star, his work in the army, his plane crash and survival in the lifeboat, and his years in the POW camp. The latter two are the most important, but couldn't be more different. It will be like watching Life of Pi and then seeing the same characters segue into Schindler's List. Seriously. Apparently, Universal has been trying to adapt the Zamperini story for decades, even before Hillenbrand's book came out. Her take on events combined with the Coen Brothers' script may be enough to finally crack this incredible tale that you would never believe if it hadn't actually, in fact, happened.