3 stars (out of four)
My experience with horses is extraordinarily limited. The
only time I recall riding one, I was around ten years old and it seemed huge to
me. In hindsight I was probably riding a pony but never mind that. My brief
equestrian foray left me with two indelible impressions of the animal: its
strength – “Don’t pull its tail or it’ll kick you in the face and kill you,” an
instructor had gently advised me and the other young riders I was with – and
its smell. While no attention is given to the latter in War Horse, the former is more or less its main theme.
You don’t have to be a horse enthusiast to appreciate the
beauty of War Horse, Steven Spielberg’s
adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel set during the First World War
(and also recently made into a Tony Award-winning play). Indeed, it would be
hard to miss the visual elegance of the film, which is almost relentlessly
beautiful. Mr. Spielberg and his cinematographer James Kamiński make wonderful
use of the English countryside’s landscapes, the blue skies and green pastures
of which remain unpolluted by the sprawl of modern society.
This is a movie designed to be seen not on a TV or, heaven
forbid, a phone, but in a theater where its breath-taking wide shots can fill
the big screen: A windmill reflected in a pond’s still waters. Files of
soldiers marching through a golden field. Charred black trenches lit by
momentary bursts of fire and gunshots. A silhouetted horse and rider against
the blood-orange sky of a sunset. To seal the deal, all are set to a typically
sweeping John Williams score.
Though War Horse is
indisputably gorgeous, its story is sometimes less captivating than the images
used to tell it. The movie follows a horse, Joey, opening with his birth and
tracing his path across Europe as he changes hands throughout the War. The
first to become fixated by Joey is a haggard, alcoholic farmer, Ted Narracott
(Peter Mullan), who buys the horse at a market auction and brings him home to
his son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine). Ted’s wife, Rose (Emily Watson), scolds him
for making such a foolhardy purchase. They need a good workhorse to plow their
fields, not a thoroughbred meant for racing like Joey. If they cannot plow the
fields, they cannot grow crops and subsequently, they cannot pay their landlord
(David Thewlis), an improbably sinister man who revels in the family’s
financial troubles.
But how can Rose turn away a horse her son has already so
clearly fallen in love with? Albert swears he can train Joey (Albert is the one
who christens Joey with his name, though Joey receives a few more names from
other friendly humans during his travels) and train him he does. As the leading
non-horse in the film, Jeremy Irvine is a passable protagonist. The role of
Albert is nothing special and Mr. Irvine seems to have been cast for his pretty
face and brilliant blue eyes (which give Elijah Wood’s a run for their money).
Still, these opening scenes have a classically Spielbergian feel to them, a
wide-eyed and charming innocence.
Once Joey is shipped off to war, however, the film loses
some momentum. Had there been more vignettes like the opener, War Horse might have been an overwhelming success but not all
of the characters Joey meets or all the situations he gets into are compelling. He charges into battle with a British military captain (Tom Hiddleston),
briefly joins a pair of young German soldiers (Leonhard Carow and David Kross),
is taken in by a French girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels
Arestrup) and eventually finds his way into the trenches.
Steven Spielberg does not depict the trench warfare with
anything near the brutal realism of the D-Day sequence from his Saving
Private Ryan but he does capture the
looming sense of dread in the young soldiers’ faces and there is a stunning
moment set to bag pipes when they run out into battle. This segment also
features the film’s best scene, a quiet moment when two soldiers – a Brit and a
German – meet in no man’s land to untie Joey from tangled barbed wire. The
strength of the human drama in this scene eclipses just about every other scene
in film.
As you may have guessed from its title though, War Horse is less interested in its human characters than its
equine ones. The horses, Joey in particular, are given anthropomorphic
qualities such as compassion and self-sacrifice; we can actually understand
their motives for behaving the way they do. In one sense, this is remarkable.
In another, it’s awfully silly to see a horse glance back longingly at another
horse. Whether horses are capable of such emotions I cannot tell you. Perhaps a
true horse lover will be enthralled by moments like these.
Watching War Horse is
like flipping through a beautifully illustrated history book. It offers an
awe-inspiring and romantic view of the past without ever giving you too much of
a sense of how it felt to actually live through it. Either you’ll get caught up
in Joey’s journey or you won’t. For me, the sheer aesthetic power of the movie
was enough even when the story was lacking. It’s probably for the best too that
no one mentions the horses’ stench. That might have spoiled the mood.
- Steve Avigliano, 1/13/12
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