"Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck." -George Lucas
In the face of George Lucas's derision for easy emotional manipulation, his friend and sometimes filmmaking collaborator Steven Spielberg, prodigiously talented though he may be, has never had a problem using even the cheapest tool in his vast arsenal to get a desired effect from his audience. And with War Horse, he shows us that he's not above a little old-fashioned ani-manipulation; change cat to horse, and neck wringing to barbed wire entanglement, and you get the idea.
War Horse consists of a series of fable-like episodes, all connected by the titular horse, a brown beauty who is able to communicate his inner thoughts and feelings through movement and gestures more like a Disney cartoon than an actual animal. The film's first episode concerns the purchase of the gorgeous beast by a lame old drunkard; if the old man's son can't get this scrawny show horse to plough their field, they won't be able to harvest turnips to pay their rent, and their cruel landlord will take away their family farm. Yes, I'm serious.
As boy trains horse, every tiny victory produces treacly, overblown music from the soundtrack, which virtually wallops you upside the head with a bassoon to make sure you understand the touchingness of each scene. The movie is insistent on shoving the alleged connection between the boy and the horse into your face, and as a result, the entire relationship is suspect, because the audience is never able to discover it for themselves. Spielberg has become quite consistent at creating a very specific world that exists just outside of believability. Suspension of disbelief notwithstanding, events feel staged or too far fetched, and though he works with immensely talented actors, they rarely seem like more than humanesque automatons (it's no wonder Haley Joel was so perfectly effective playing just that in A.I.). In War Horse, the actors speak in stagey, folksy wisdoms that gave me flashbacks of endless Republican presidential debates. After all the buzz I had heard about this movie, how it was a shoe-in for a Best Picture Oscar nomination, I found myself a half an hour into the film utterly confused: was I crazy, or was this movie terrible?
Only when war is finally declared, and the boy and horse are separated, did I begin to see what all the fuss was about. The closer the horse gets to the World War I battle front, and the less the film relies on dialogue, the exponentially more powerful it becomes. War Horse is Spielberg's first opportunity to explore the iconography of WWI, and he does a stupendous job. The carnage of battle is never shown directly, but the film's different vignettes show the toll the Great War took on Europe, the incredible loss and destruction, with poetic visual metaphors. There are several breathtaking shots and sequences: perfect rows of soldiers standing at the edge of an ancient grove of towering trees; the cavalry rising, fully mounted, out of a sea of yellow grass; and my personal favorite, a series of close-ups, a parade of dirty faces in the trenches, that are illuminated one by one by exploding mortars, finally revealing a startling twist in the story. That last sequence has a silent film-like quality to it; the opening scenes could have benefitted from a similarly direct, and yet elegant, approach.
And yet, there are times when Spielberg's cleverness is a liability. In building sequences like elaborate domino designs, he sometimes doesn't seem to realize that the audience can recognize the patterns that speak to their construction. In one scene, a doltish young man gives a goofy smile to his friend in the trenches, and everyone in the theater knew that he'd be the next to die. As I mentioned before, every scene incorporates some ingenious visual metaphor, and while one must praise Spielberg's insistence on achieving visual poetry, he sometimes ends up with something closer to Dr. Seuss than T.S. Eliot. And when the subject of the work is the horror of World War, that doesn't always feel appropriate. There has been a lot of debate over the effectiveness/offensiveness of the use of the Girl in the Red Dress in Schindler's List, and anyone with a problem with that kind of storytelling will likely have a problem here. In some of the film's darkest moments, there also seems to be a giddy delight taken in the cleverness of it all, which undermines its power; in those moments, the movie feels more like watching a precocious child playacting with army figurines than a mature artist tackling one of the horrors of the 20th century. I often think of the line from Spielberg's own Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Kazim asks Jones his intentions concerning his search for Christ's Grail: "Is it for His glory, or for yours?"
In the last scene, we're taken back to the farm as a spectacular red sunset blazes behind in the background, in a moment equally John Ford, Frank Capra, and Victor Fleming all at once. It's beautiful scenery, and evocative filmmaking, but as the coda to the story, what does it tell us? Has any message been received? Not only does Spielberg undermine his chronicling of wartime suffering with his aggressive cleverness, but as in his World War II movies, he can't seem to help but glorify the imagery of war, even in this ostensibly anti-war family film. I left the theater with mixed feelings. But whether you feel that the film has a meaningful message to impart, whether you feel that the emotional toil the director puts you through was truly earned, there's no denying Steven Spielberg's ability to put the camera in exactly the right place is practically unparalleled. In fact, even in the opening scenes, which were almost painfully bad, each new shot had me thinking: this is a guy who needs to make a 3-D movie, NOW. The Adventures of Tin Tin, which seems aligned with some of Spielberg's other strongest tendencies, is in theaters now. I've got my fingers crossed.
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