War Horse (**3/4)

It’s rare that you see a movie these days without the slightest shred of cynicism or guile. Though he may have been among the generation of directors who helped make us all a bit more cynical, and be depicting World War I, a war that inspired much cynicism, Steven Spielberg is not afraid to be sincere, or even a bit corny in this case. When even Batman movies are celebrated for their darkness, the sincerity of this adaptation of a Michael Morpurgo novel (also made into a play) is somewhat refreshing. Beginning just before the war in Devon, in the English countryside, Spielberg gives us a virginal, literally wide-eyed farm boy (Jeremy Irvine) whose love-at-first-sight bond with the horse he calls Joey bounds an otherwise episodic film that slightly reminded me of The Red Violin, in which a musical instrument, not an animal, is passed from hand to hand. In the course of this film, “Joey” finds himself among the allied Brits and French as well as their German enemies (though all dialogue is rendered in English), and everyone seems like a fine fellow, or gal.

This is not to say the film is without social critique. Though there is not a moment in which anyone discusses why the war is being fought, that itself suggests the pointlessness of it all. Spielberg is judicious in depicting the violence—this isn’t Saving Private Ryan—but the few combat scenes make an impression. In the first, Spielberg shows us a phalanx of men on horseback, and machine guns, but not the horses falling. Instead, we see the battlefield littered with corpses. (The film evokes also of the significance of animal power just before it would give way, in battle, on the road, and on the farm, to the internal combustion engine.) Later sequences are set among the trenches so peculiar to that conflict. There is also a class-consciousness in the film. A foolish British commander is, like the landlord threatening to foreclose on the farm boy’s parents, just another person controlling the lives of ordinary folk.

Though most of the above is intended as praise, the entirety of the thing has a cloying quality not unlike certain romantic comedies—like Love Actually, actually, whose screenwriter, Richard Curtis, collaborated with Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) in adapting Morpurgo’s novel. Like Love Actually, War Horse is full of appealing but thinly drawn characters who disappear—or die—before their stories become compelling. It is possible for a war story to be also a fable, but the realism here only emphasizes the heavy hand of the storyteller. The way the farm boy’s dad buys the horse on a whim—risking the farm because he has a feeling about the horse—is indicative of the approach. Of all the characters, only his wife, played by Emily Watson—emerges as somewhat three-dimensional.

Spielberg has rarely made a bad film, and maybe never a dull one. This is neither, and would actually be a good film to see with a child, one just old enough to begin to understand war and to appreciate a glimpse at the world on the cusp of modernity.

IMDb link

viewed 2/4/12 1:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/4–2/5/12

Buck (***1/2)

The easiest way to describe this documentary is to say it’s about the guy who helped inspire the main character in the Nicholas Adams novel, and later Robert Redford film, The Horse Whisperer.  Buck Brannaman, who served as a technical advisor to Redford, doesn’t call himself that, which is just as well. It sounds kind of new age-y to me, as if Brannaman is some kind of magician speaking incantations into the ears of wayward horses. In fact, Brannaman makes his specialty—not so much people with horse problems, but, as he says, horse with people problems—seem as down to earth as possible.

He says at one point that he doesn’t so much help people with horse problems as horses with people problems, and it isn’t new age-y because you can see the way he does it, amazing even seasoned horse people. In revealing Brannaman’s own difficult childhood, the film draws an obvious but nonetheless moving parallel between the ways animals and humans alike are mistreated. Brannaman’s gift is not magic either, as his own transformation comes with the help of others. I am not a lover of horses or animal stories, but this human story was unexpectedly captivating.

IMDB link

viewed 6/13/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/24/11 and 8/9/11

Secretariat (***)

Even with a great pedigree, no one can predict with certainly that a horse will be great, and so Secretariat’s owner got him after losing a coin toss. (The winner took another horse that seemed more promising.) Still, he was not a true underdog, like Seabiscuit. He did not meet a mysterious and tragic end, like the title character in Phar Lap, another great drama about a racehorse. So some obvious dramatic angles are missing here. Instead, this is is a straight inspirational drama with a mild but definite feminist angle. The horse’s owner, Penny Tweedy (née Chenery) (Diane Lane), was a housewife and mother of four who learned the business in her 40s, made some smart decisions, and got a bit lucky. Taking over her father’s Virginia horse farm in the late 1960s, she defied her husband’s preference that she stop spending so much time away from their home in Denver. Pointedly, the film does not apologize for her having done so.

The screenplay is by Mike Rich, who has penned other inspirational sports films, notably The Rookie. Rich plays up Chenery’s feistiness and simplifies or sentimentalizes some events, but sticks to the facts when it comes to the horse racing. (The corniest moment is probably when her father’s assistant brings Penny coffee. Asked how she knew Penny wanted two sugars and cream, she replies, “That’s how your Daddy liked it.”) Director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) does a fine job filming the races. Seen close up, with dust kicking in the air, it seems almost a violent sport, in contrast to how elegant it looks from afar. And even if you know the outcome, Secretariat’s performance in the 1973 Belmont Stakes is still pretty astonishing. A nice one to watch with the kids.

IMDB link

viewed 9/2/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/2–10/7/10

Fish Tank (***1/4)

This coming-of-age drama is, very roughly, the poor girl’s version of An Education. In that film, the teenaged, Oxford-aspiring heroine sees a romance with a man in his 30s (Peter Sarsgaard) as a way to escape her own dull life. Fifteen-year-old Mia isn’t dating the older man—her mom is—but if Sarsgaard’s character represents the lure of finer things to a middle-class girl, then Connor (Michael Fassbender) represents the lure of middle-class life to her. Katie Jarvis, a non-actress plucked from a train station in Essex, England, by writer-director Andrea Arnold, plays Mia with a minimum of artifice, and Arnold writes her as such. (The accents in the movie are not those of posh London and make some of the dialogue tough on American ears, although Fassbender at times sounds sort of American.)

Mia’s mother looks more like an older sister and acts more like a nasty roommate who drinks too much, but she’s presented more as a lousy parent than a villain. The housing project she and her two daughters live in seems tolerable. Still, Mia is an angry girl, and a loner, and Connor’s affability throws her at first. While the story becomes more provocative, Arnold avoids sensationalism. Her point is to show, not to shock. Mia won’t be going to Oxford, but she too winds up with an education.

IMDB link

viewed 2/20/2010 on pay-per-view ($7.99) and reviewed 2/21/2010

Flicka

? Mary O’Hara’s 1941 novel My Friend Flicka was made into a movie a couple of years after that, and a TV series in the 1950s. Here, Alison Lohman essays the role undertaken by Roddy McDowell in 1943, the teenager who falls in love with a wild mustang. Her parents, Wyoming ranchers played by Tim McGraw and Maria Bello, disagree about whether to let her keep the horse.

+ This is old-fashioned in a good way. Only the abbreviated title attempts to be hip, even though the story is reset in the present day. The relationship between the brother and sister is not the major aspect of the film, but it’s something you don’t see that often. McGraw and Bello also seem like a real couple. In fact, each of the family members is fairly well drawn, and the family dynamic seems organic.

- Lohman is a good actress, but she’s a 26-year-old playing a high-school girl. The supposedly brilliant American History essay that she writes about how the Western settlers nearly wiped out the wild mustang seems remarkably obtuse in its failure to mention the other occupants they nearly wiped out. The story is ultimately very conventional, and the ending anticlimactic.

= *** I don’t know what’s with all the girl-and-horse movies (Dreamer, Racing Stripes) lately, but this is probably the strongest of the lot, a bona fide family movie that won’t leave the older viewers feeling sugar shock.

IMDb link

Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (***)

This girl-and-horse movie is set in Lexington, Kentucky, though you wouldn’t know it by most of the accents. As with Seabiscuit (whose race scenes were shot on the same track), it’s the story of a broken-down horse and its (metaphorically) broken trainer/owner (Kurt Russell). The added element is Dakota Fanning, who here cements here reputation as the go-to girl for playing precocious pre-teens. (She’s in four films just in 2005.) Call this Weebiscuit. As with Russell’s recent Miracle, the title gives away the fact that this won’t be the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy, so the end is pretty anti-climatic. However, debuting director John Gatins (who scripted the decent formula picture Coach Carter) otherwise keeps the clichés and the melodrama to a minimum. I’m not sure I’d tell adults to leave the kids at home, but it’s a family film they won’t roll their eyes at. As movies about young girls bonding with their dads thanks to a horse go, it’s a cut above 2004’s Racing Stripes, which was actually about a talking zebra that thought it was a horse. Kris Kristofferson plays the estranged dad of Russell’s character. Incidentally, the horse that inspired the film is Mariah’s Storm, another filly that returned from a leg injury like the one “Soñadora” here sustains. Notwithstanding the title, the humans are all invented by Gatins.

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circulated via email 10/27/05 and posted 10/18/13