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.

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

Letters from Iwo Jima (***)

? Clint Eastwood’s companion film to his Flags of Our Fathers tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the view of the Japanese, in particular the commander Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and a private played by singer-actor Kazunari Ninomiya.

+ Eastwood’s mostly subtitled film (with a script by newcomer Iris Yamashita in collaboration with Flags scribe Paul Haggis) is most fascinating for its unique perspective. Watching the huge American naval contingent arrive provides quite a different sense from the same scene’s counterpart in Flags. Brief flashbacks and the interactions of the soldiers provide a military and cultural context for the willingness of the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, resulting in a stunning casualty rate exceeding 95%. Yet the movie shows them as brave but not fearless, not the automatons that the Americans suspected. Kuribayashi, the commander, had spent time in America, and his character merges the Japanese and Western sensibilities. Cinematically, Letters gives a more vivid portrait of the geography of the island and the elaborate tunnel system that the Japanese had created in anticipation of the battle. Both Watanabe, who’s played similarly powerful men in The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Batman Begins, and Ninomiya give appealing performances. The 60-years-ago flashback device is more effectively used than in Flags.

- Although powerful, the movie feels overlong at 142 minutes. Additionally, the more historic movies I see, the more I’m convinced of the merits of on-screen titles, which in this case would have better conveyed the passage of time. It’s hard to tell that the battle took over a month, and the war preparations over half a year.

= *** Unlike Flags of Our Fathers, which primarily depicts the aftermath of the battle, this is all-war, all the time. Depicting combat at its most desperate and horrific, it’s a better film than Flags, but it may seem tedious to some.

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Flags of Our Fathers (**1/2)

? Clint Eastwood directed this film about the Battle of Iwo Jima, among World War II’s bloodiest, and the three men (Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach) who became accidental celebrities as a result of being captured in a famous photo.

+  The battle footage is nearly on a par with the harrowing opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Eastwood conveys the horrors of war with a gruesome realism. The story of Ira Hayes, an American Indian played by Beach, is the most inherently dramatic.

- The script by Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) and William Broyles (Jarhead) is based on a book by Ron Powers and James Bradley. Bradley is the son of the Ryan Phillippe character, John Bradley. Thus the movie carries over a flashback structure that I found weakened the story. For a good deal of the movie, I wasn’t even sure which of the main characters was being portrayed some 60 years later, nor who the guy was interviewing everybody. What’s more, it barely mattered. What’s the use of a scene in which an old guy worries about being a bad father when in none of the movie have we seen him as a parent, and that may or may not have anything to do with the war? Nor do we know anything about the son except that he’s become a researcher? On balance, I think a more chronological approach, plus replacing the present-day scenes with period ones, would have done more to bring the characters to life. As with Jarhead, the movie had a meandering quality. The scenes seemed to add up to less than their sum. As with Crash, the movie hammers its messages home early and often. Simply, they are that war is hell, that the soldiers mostly don’t think of themselves as heroes, and that not everyone always behaves heroically. With the spate of recent war films, the first, at least, is old news.

= **1/2 The story of how the Iwo Jima soldiers became propaganda tools is certainly interesting, but I had the feeling I would have liked the story more had it been a documentary. Admittedly, though, the fictional approach does allow for some brutally brilliantly re-created battle scenes.

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