Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Seeing a Man About a Horse

Film: War Horse
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

About a year ago, an anonymous commenter told me on this blog that if I couldn’t understand art films and didn’t want to dedicate myself to truly learning about (in the case of The Color of Pomegranates) the Armenian surrealist tradition that I would be better off sticking to Spielberg. That’s an odd quantum level above typical trolling; normally, I’d be told to drool over the latest Michael Bay film. I like Spielberg sometimes. At the very least he has the potential to make a great film whenever he sets out to make one. Sure, sometimes you get 1941, but sometimes you get Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’ll always give him a chance.

That said, I knew going in to War Horse that I was setting myself up for Spielberg’s favorite movie pastime—black belt-level emotional manipulation. Spielberg has never seen an emotional moment he couldn’t milk nor has he come across an honest moment of real emotion he couldn’t play for that last tug of the heartstrings or slowly falling tear. The problem with being as emotionally manipulative as Spielberg can be is that I’m aware of it, and because of that, I’m on my guard against it. Any time there’s a Dickensian-style coincidence or a particular swelling of music, my heart hardens. I know what’s coming because I know he flat-out can’t resist going there.

So, anyway, War Horse. This is the story of a horse named Joey who starts on a farm. Joey is a thoroughbred and thus not really suited for farm work, but because this is not just a movie but a Spielberg movie, we’re going to discover that Joey can really work the shit outta that farm thanks to his training by Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine), who teaches him to come at the sound of an owl hooting. Joey can do what no other horse could do. He can plow up a field full of stones and make it ready for planting. In fact, in one moment of the plowing (with appropriately dramatic thunder, lightning, and downpour), the plow sheers right through a rock. Frankly, I think that says more about the plow than the horse pulling it.

Anyway, tragedy strikes and the family, having spent too much to acquire Joey in the first place, is forced to sell him to a soldier preparing to head off to the first World War. Once again, despite not being the sort of horse that should be rockin’ it out on the battlefield, Joey shows his worth in training. Once we get to the war itself, his new owner James Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) is quickly killed off, leaving Joey to be captured by the Germans. The Germans in charge of the horses are a pair of brothers who decide to leave the war and hide out in a windmill. They’re eventually discovered and executed (‘cause, y’know, Germans in a Spielberg movie), and Joey and his friend Other Horse (I’m sure it had a name, but I can’t really bother to care) are discovered the next morning by a French orphan named Emilie (Celine Buckens).

Emilie lives with her grandfather (Niels Arestrup). It is revealed that Emilie is fragile and has easily broken bones and thus can’t ride, but naturally, since these are magic horses, her grandfather gives her a saddle and she rides off only to have the horses confiscated by the Germans once again, this time in charge of pulling cannons.

Eventually, Other Horse dies and Joey breaks free, running into no man’s land where he becomes snared on barbed wire. This leads to a combined British/German rescue of the horse, and by coin flip, Joey returns to the British side. Meanwhile, our friend Albert from the beginning (Joey’s original trainer) has entered the war and has been temporarily blinded in a gas attack. When he hears about this miracle horse from no man’s land, he instantly realizes it can only be Joey the Horse and calls to him just as Joey is about to be put down for likely getting tetanus from the barbed wire. So man and horse are reunited, but when the war ends, only the horses of officers will be given transport back to England, leading to the heart-tugging conclusion.

I realize that I’m giving this short shrift, but I feel like it’s all that it’s worth. While certainly a well-made film (Spielberg, after all), it is needlessly maudlin and melodramatic. Spielberg has always been all about this sort of real-world magic, these massive coincidences that lead people to believe in some sort of magic in the world beyond them and guiding those special few touched by this magic to have lives of marvel and great serendipity.

I’m frankly pretty bored by it. Knowing this was Spielberg, I had no doubt that Albert and Joey would be reunited in the end. Spielberg heroes always accomplish everything they set out to do and always beat whatever the longest odds are. Good old Steven is a better filmmaker when he opts more for verisimilitude instead of sentiment. His sentimentality is too blatant, too obvious, and too planned to be anything like a surprise. Even when tackling larger subjects like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List, he still delves into the sentimental and still goes for that melodramatic tug on the heart. Sometimes he does this very, very well. In War Horse, these moments seem so telegraphed that there’s never a surprise.

Final analysis? War Horse is a well-made, large budget fable of soap opera proportions. Anyone who managed to be caught up in its sentimentality ought to be rightfully ashamed of him- or herself.

Why to watch War Horse: Classic Spielberg
Why not to watch: It’s as manipulative emotionally as any Spielberg ever, and more so than most.

22 comments:

  1. I think I told you this before... but I felt the film was an hour and a half of silly schmaltz, an hour of really good, and then a terrible last 5-10 minutes. And all throughout, it was just Sunsets: The Movie.

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  2. Yeah, I can see that, although I disagree about an hour of really good. I thought it was schmaltz for pretty much the whole running time.

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    1. I just remember liking the sequence where the horse it trapped in the barbed wire and the two dudes from opposing armies come out to help it. Schmaltz or not, that was a good section of the film.

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  3. This was so bloody sappy. It was probably my most hated film of last year. I mean if you cut the cheese, that horse (however pretty) was like the horse of death. And do not get me started on that score.

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    1. But with the cheese, that horse is a step away from being Jesus the Horse, no?

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  4. I hated this film. Like passionately hated. Manipulative? Absolutely. But how many times can we watch a horse lose his owner, only to be found by someone who looks at the beast and immediately falls in love? Seriously. Recast Angelina Jolie as the horse and nothing changes.

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    1. Well, he's the most specialest horse ever ever ever! How could you not fall in love with it or see his qualities?

      Anyway, I prefer Penelope Cruz.

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  5. This is precisely why I have avoided watching it so far.

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    1. You're pretty safe not seeing it, regardless of its supposed importance.

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  6. Given my hatred for overt manipulation, combined with my crippling emotional inability to watch films about animals, I think I shall be skipping this one. And I am OK with that.

    Nice review. Made me laugh. And totally spot on re: Spielberg. His stuff works really well... for some films. But when he's trying too hard, it just FEELS like he's trying too hard.

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    1. You are okay with it. If I weren't a list completist, I probably would have skipped it. I really had no interest in it, particularly since I had the ending pretty close to pegged before I started the DVD spinning.

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    2. Just re: your comment about watching films with animals, I thought I'd give you a little forewarning about one of the list's films I watched recently: Hud, with Paul Newman. There's a scene in the middle that will utterly destroy you; I actually had to stop the movie just to sit back and go "whoa", it was that intense.

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    3. Adolytsi - Yeah, I've seen Hud. Yeah, I know the scene you're talking about. Yeah, I'll NEVER be watching Hud again. It was awful. Just... awful. Good movie, but I can't bring myself to go through that again. It was devastating.

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    4. Tough scene, but an important one. It tells us everything about Homer that we need to know.

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  7. Pretty much exactly as my review went, only with added humor; I laughed every time you mentioned "Other Horse", and I wouldn't have known its name either if it weren't for Wikipedia's page on the film.

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  8. This was one of the 2011 Oscar Best Picture nominees that I didn't write a full review of because I didn't feel it was good enough to recommend. It was a combination of cute kid's movie about a boy and his horse, and a gritty war movie. The combination of the two just didn't work for me. And only Spielberg could have gotten a PG-13 rating for this film with crowds of men and horses getting mowed down my machine gun fire. It's R level violence meant I wouldn't recommend it to kids, and its sappy, only-for-kids animal story meant I wouldn't recommend it to adults.

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  9. For the number of people who seemed to like this film, I'm a bit surprised that all of the comments so far have echoed my sentiments.

    Evidently, "Other Horse" is actually named Topthorn.

    @Chip--exactly. I'm not sure who the intended audience for this film actually was.

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  10. I will probably be seeing this pretty soon because I decided to start trying to watch more of the recent films from the 1001 List that I haven't already seen and War Horse is one of the films readily available at the local library.

    I'm wondering how many people know about a 1934 film called Keep 'Em Rolling, a film about an artillery sergeant whose love for his horse helps him keep it together during World War I. It has two things going for it that (to me) make it sound a lot more inviting than War Horse: Walter Huston is the artillery sergeant; and it's only 69 minutes. I watched it on AMC more than 20 years ago and it's one of the movies that comes to mind when the discussion turns to World War I movies.

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    1. Good luck with this one. It's worth noting that the critical praise for this is substantially better than what I have to say about it or what most of the commenters here have had to say about it.

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    2. Geez Louise! It's been over a year since I said I was going to watch it pretty soon. But I watched half of it before I went to work and I'm just about to finish it.

      It's dumb, but wondrously so. I roll my eyes a lot but it's never boring. Just stupid. (For example, I very much doubt that the German Army was in the habit of executing suspected deserters just minutes after finding them in a windmill in the middle of the night without a trial.)

      I have no idea what this is doing on a list of movies that YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE! Spielberg is one of the directors lucky enough to have a worshipper among the editors.

      I should add that I'm a sucker for World War I movies. I don't think I've ever seen one that was so bad that I didn't find something to like about it. (Scratch that. As I was typing this, I remembered Legends of the Fall.)

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    3. I finished War Horse last night. I don't usually stay up to 3 am to finish a movie, but I really wanted to see the end after I got off work.

      I really love most of the battle sequences as the film nears the end. The scene where Albie and his cannon fodder comrades are running across No Man's Land really show the idiocy of WWI tactics. My favorite depiction of WWI trench life is the fourth series of Blackadder, but it's also really well done in War Horse.

      And the scene with Joey running around, escaping a tank by running over the roof and then darting across the battlefield and getting stuck in the barbed wire. And the tommies and the jerries coming together to rescue him. It may be the best single scene ever from a WWI movie.

      Now that I've seen the whole thing, I can (almost) see why it's on the List. People remember the good stuff and forgot that much of the first hour was a load of bollocks. It makes me think of the people who think Saving Private Ryan is a great movie because the first forty minutes is awesome.

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    4. I still think this is ultimately sentimental hogwash. This is Spielberg at his most Spielberg-y, and that doesn't usually fly for me.

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