Spielberg’s Horse Running on Life Support
If any movie released in 2011 screams, “Oscar Bait!,” louder than Steve Spielberg’s War Horse than I haven’t seen it. The esteemed director of Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List and Jaws has crafted a motion picture that feels entirely manufactured. There is little organic about this adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel, few scenes that ring with emotional authenticity, the final product nothing more than a beautifully photographed children’s story playing upon the basest fantasies of human-animal relationships.
Jeremy Irvine in War Horse © DreamWorks
Not that there isn’t anything wrong with that, per se, and in all fairness there are a number of moments in this WWI boy and his horse adventure that strummed my heartstrings and maybe me look upon the screen in weepy splendor. Even more, there are even a handful of scenes where Spielberg and writers Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) and Richard Curtis (Love Actually) achieve a melancholic splendor bordering on miraculous, the film partially trotting into Au Hasard Balthazar territory channeling vintage Robert Bresson.
Sadly, they’re just aren’t enough of these types of moments and sequences to warrant spending 140-plus minutes with this overly familiar opus. The vignettes are better, stronger and more interesting than the central narrative is, and whenever the picture focuses upon young Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) pining for his lost horse Joey, taken by the British Army into the heart of the war against Germany, it becomes something of a saccharine bore. Everything involved with that tale, the early portions on the boy’s farm, the stuff with his mother Rose (Emily Watson) and father Ted (Peter Mullan), the penultimate moments in France, is sentimentalized cliché, all emotional drumbeats hammered home with a thundering hand that is as heavy as it is obnoxious.
Yet, the stuff where Joey breaks free, the moments where he comes into contact with a pair of German brothers who have deserted the Army, the scenes where he spends a sublime respite with a young French girl and her loving grandfather (an excellent Niels Arestrup), all have a delicately rapturous quality that hints to everything the movie could potentially be but frustratingly isn’t. Even better are the sequences where Spielberg allows the story to be seen entirely through Joey’s eyes, lets him take center stage in a way that puts the viewer into the animal’s headspace. These are extraordinary vignettes, each one showing the talented auteur at his best, making the routine rote familiarity of all the rest even more disappointing.
It’s hard to talk about many of these points in the film that I adore because to do so would potentially ruin them. At the same time, to not speak of them in detail makes it sound like the motion picture as a whole is something akin to an utter disaster. It is not, far from it if I’m being honest, and to say I disliked War Horse wouldn’t be true at all. My problem is that the strengths of the picture don’t only not outweigh the weaknesses, they actually augment them. The places where Spielberg (working in close tandem with composer and frequent collaborator John Williams’) pull back, allows situation and scene to speak for themselves, uses restraint, only underscore just how pedestrian and overblown the rest of the picture, especially the bookends, unfortunately is.
Still, I cannot dismiss just how striking Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is, the way it eerily channels John Ford in so many of the Irish sequences, especially those at the very end. Additionally, veteran editor Michael Kahn’s work is as seamless as ever, while Rick Carter’s production design borders on the rhapsodic. Finally, as hard as I’m being on the film as a whole I can not dispute the filmmaker’s continued genius in regards to casting, the majority of the supporting roles inhabited by veteran character actors who fill them to virtual perfection.
And so it moderately kills me how I cannot get over just how pedestrian much of War Horse feels, how so much of it moves in rhythms and tones as old and as tired as any the cinematic medium has ever crafted. I just kept having the feeling that Spielberg, for all his strengths, for all his dynamic vision, was going through the motions, and while some scenes achieve a luminous virtuosity the majority, most notably the central saga of Albert and Joey making their way through WWI hoping for a happy reunion, fall shockingly short. It left me cold, barren, emotionally empty, and if saying so makes me come across as a heartless cynic than I’m okay with that, Spielberg beating a horse that, while not dead, is so close to being so it essentially finds itself on life support.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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