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