It’s a curious thing to think that an award-ready Steven Spielberg World War I epic based on a raved-about stage play that is being released at Christmas could somehow still be considered under-the-radar. Coming just one week after his collaboration with Peter Jackson’s special effects team, The Adventures of Tintin, War Horse may suffer from this rare double release feat by being the more modestly old-fashioned of the two. The Adventures of Tintin is the easier sell for family audiences looking for an adventure spectacle to cap the holiday season, while War Horse is a property unfamiliar to many and thus they know little of what to expect. The people I have talked to about the joys of the picture seem nonplussed and suspect that a movie about a boy and his horse that spans the entire course of The Great War would transcend its simple plot synopsis and boyhood adventure story shorthand.
In episodic detours winding throughout war-torn Europe, the horse finds itself favored by a starched British captain (Tom Hiddleston) who displays a kindness and reverence for his steed that all but assures tragedy will befall him on the battlefield, an old man and his granddaughter shown little mercy by ransacking German soldiers, and a series of grunts who come upon the resilient equine.
The first headlong charge into the fight finds Spielberg channeling Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in a blur of headlong bravery that plays like a less gory, family-aware version of Saving Private Ryan’s D-Day siege, employing savvy filmmaking tricks to mask the carnage and finding the poetry in human folly (a riderless horse, a windmill’s blade obscuring an execution). The director’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski gives the film an unobtrusive sense of sweep and grandeur with his floating camera – most impressively matching Kubrick in haunting tracking shots through murky trench warfare.
Jeremy Irvine in War Horse. Photo by Andrew Cooper, SMPSP – © 2011 – DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC.
In spite of the title, I was not expecting War Horse to be as mired in actual combat as it was; the middle section of the picture is a harrowing experience that benefits from Spielberg’s acumen with this kind of material. A meeting between a British and a German soldier in a barb-wired hellscape straight out of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood is a genteel, humorous, rose-colored highlight echoing the famous 1914 Christmas Day treaty in a film which proudly indulges in sentimentality without losing its poignant edge.
A word of caution to those sensitive to animal peril in the movies – the horse suffers great injuries in the course of his tour of duty (the special effects will make it all too real and frightening for some), but it is the very fact of capturing the animal’s profound endurance that should make us thankful to Mr. Spielberg for taking the emotional resonance of the stage production (limited to masterful puppetry) and giving it muscular, panting, excruciatingly beautiful life on the big screen. Though Hugo is still my personal favorite picture this year, I would not begrudge War Horse a victory lap.
Gregory Fichter
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