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War Horse – Art 1/5 Ent 3/5 Worth 2/5
War Horse … what a pile of horse shit. It’s a mess but I think it won’t fall on its face for the same reason people like John Williams’ scores: his medley of motifs and nullified excitement are a perfect swill to please test audiences whose collective spirit sees the spice of life as nothing beyond ketchup. This film takes a number of elements that all make me wince, and binds them together for a weird melange that would be understating an understatement to stick with calling it a waste of time. The film seems to use a horse (crowd pleaser – ladies, children and cowboys love horses) as a vessel to travel the frontlines of World War 1 to show the mutual humanity between the three main combatants – England, France and Germany. The “Lost Generation” folks told us quite enough about that theme, thank you very much, but Spielberg resurrecting it is the redundancy to end all redundancies.
The inspired and imaginative films that made Steven Spielberg synonymous with Hollywood success in the ’70s and ’80s are hard to replicate today. The culture has absorbed Indiana Jones and Jaws. The adventure that stirred Spielberg’s imagination as a child does not translate as well to a world both full of its visual vigor (increasingly seen in traditionally more ‘calm’ genres like romance and comedy) and yet disillusioned by its painful simplicity. The paeans to a golden age America connect with fewer audiences as we’re saturated with baloney talk of Imperial decline and shared global concerns. What prolonged Spielberg’s central place in American culture was to encapsulate the drama of World War II as the defining arc to the story of the 20th century. Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Pacific all carved Spielberg’s name into our conscience and showed a side of Indiana Jones that wanted to boil to the surface. Spielberg couldn’t keep going back to that well, so he had to change it up and look at the other industrialized total war.
The problem with World War I themes and stories are that there isn’t an awful lot to tell anymore, because it’s in many ways bested in terms of dramatic impact and scope by the second war, which is closer to us in any case. Lawrence of Arabia is the be all and end all when we begin talking of depiction of that era in film, and that’s incredibly hard to live up to. The themes in Lawrence of adventure, freedom, the antihero, tragic falls have no match when it comes to the stifling meatgrinder war in Europe. And that’s hard to depict as anything other than the shower scene in Schindler: industrialized murder on a massive scale. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory pointed the camera away from the trenches, and managed to say something obvious about the madness behind that war (and others), but redoing that becomes overly tired quickly. Bertrand Tavernier’s Capitaine Conan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement were both decent films that exemplified the growing impossibility of reviving World War I’s relevance for a modern audience. Both ‘worked’, and were insightful pictures, but incorporated so alien a time and mentality to fail utterly at transmitting any deeper meaning to today’s popular mind. The Canadian turd of a film Passchendaele showed just how powerfully stupid and sentimental one could get in this regard.
The only theme that could hold any possibility in the future would be comparisons from Second Reich Germany to the People’s Republic of China in how it grew into an international system already set in place by the Anglos (British, now us), or how the deadliness and endless scope of wars we haven’t fully understood come to haunt us more quickly than we’re capable of reforming our motives. It’s worth remembering that the British Expeditionary Force that had served Britain so marvelously for so long was ground up to bits in the matter of a few days as soon as they met the Germans in 1914, and that voluntary force of professional soldiers gave way to collective responsibility to die. Think it can’t happen again?
So where did War Horse go wrong in that tradition of lightweight first war classics? Right at the horse’s ass end of it. It’s in many ways the same level of sentimental boredom as Passchendaele, just with a more grandiose sense of self-importance, a legion of professional studio people polishing the manure, and a litany of talented actors carrying the manure from scene to scene. The young boy whose attachment to the horse is the stuff of Hallmark channel ridiculousness pierced my thick armor of pessimism when I realized Spielberg may be tempting me to feel bad for laughing at a mentally retarded person. No, that can’t possibly be the case. Jesus fuck, I hope not. Plowing through a trivial romance of explosions and manufactured drama, the horse is a guide through the depravity of war. Barf. I felt like a condescending comparison to Robert Bresson’s masterpiece Au hasard balthasar was warranted, in which he pits a horse as a metaphor for the passion plays of Jesus. But if you’re reading this review, you’re not here for the horses, and War Horse wasn’t about a horse, it was about Spielberg getting to command people around a battlefield again and say the obvious, again.
