‘I Wish’ deftly embodies hopes, dreams of young

LOS ANGELES – Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, who has that rare ability to capture the essence of childhood with effervescent sensitivity, has done it again with “I Wish,” the story of a family separated by divorce and the two brothers who scheme to bring everyone back together.

Tapping into that universal hope of so many kids of broken homes, Kore-eda has conjured up a Tom Sawyer-esque adventure for 12-year-old Koichi, who lives with his mother and grandparents in Kagoshima, in the southern Kyushu region, and his younger brother Ryunosuke, Ryu for short, who chose to stay with his father in Hakata, in the north. The boys, wonderfully played by real brothers Koki and Ohshiro Maeda, stay in touch by cellphone, but Koichi in particular longs for an intact family, and that longing shapes the rest of the film.

The great elegance in Kore-eda’s work is that the writer-director allows the story to emerge from everyday moments, one event triggering the next – such as Koichi’s school assignment to write about his father’s profession, which leaves the youngster feeling his dad’s (Joe Odagiri) absence sharply and triggering his push to reunite the family.

When Koichi overhears one of his classmates say that the new bullet train – which will connect the brothers’ cities – has some wish-granting powers, a plan is born. Each boy enlists his friends to raise enough money to buy tickets to the town that is exactly halfway between them, since in theory if you make a wish just as the northbound train passes the southbound for the very first time, it will come true.

With seven kids, two cities and tight train schedules involved, the stage is set for a lot of things to go right and wrong.

In the brothers, Kore-eda is examining two sides of the same coin. Koichi, the serious one, is careful with his studies, caring with his friends and family, always contemplating the reasons why – especially why anyone would choose to live in the shadow of an active volcano, which he now does. It makes for a nice metaphor that his life is literally covered in the ash that drifts down every day.

Ryu is the jokester, a roll-with-the-punches kind of kid who is weathering the separation much more easily than his older brother. But Ryu also looks out for his struggling rocker of a dad, their house more a crash pad for the band than a home.

The power released by the passing trains is a whimsical myth, one the filmmaker uses to keep the tone much lighter than his acclaimed 2004 film, “Nobody Knows,” with its moving story of four siblings abandoned by their single mom. In “I Wish” there is more mischief afoot. As the kids scramble to set up plans to skip school and fool their parents, hopes and dreams are explored.

Kore-eda has said that in thinking of his story of trains and brothers, he was inspired by the image of the four boys in Rob Reiner’s classic “Stand by Me” walking along the train track. Though Koichi and Ryu are worlds away from rural Oregon and the 1950s, “I Wish” has a similar carefree feel of kids just being kids in that time before innocence is completely lost.