"Dances with Samuri" and "Cold Mountain" will both be excellent, I think. They have a way to go to beat "Master and Commander."
November 30, 2003
Hollywood's New Toy: 19th-Century Action Figures
By A. O. SCOTT NEW YORK TIMES
This is shaping up as a big year for the 19th century, at least at the movies. No fewer than four studios — Fox, Columbia, Miramax and Warner Brothers — are staking their holiday box office and Oscar ambitions on long, expensive, wide-screen epics featuring elaborate period costumes and bloody, in some cases half-forgotten, military conflicts.
Last Wednesday, Cate Blanchett (with the assistance of Tommy Lee Jones) took on a gang of renegade Indians in "The Missing," set in the high desert of New Mexico in 1885. On Friday, Tom Cruise opens in "The Last Samurai," playing an embittered veteran of both the Civil War and the subsequent anti-Indian campaigns who leads a platoon of rebellious Japanese swordsmen against the better-equipped, American-trained Meiji Imperial army. By late December, when "Cold Mountain" opens, Mr. Cruise's former wife, Nicole Kidman, will be stoically holding up the home front as her on-screen lover, a Confederate soldier played by Jude Law, makes his way home from the battlefield. Meanwhile, back in 1805, Russell Crowe, in "Master and Commander," will continue his pursuit of a French warship — and also of a second best-actor statuette to go with the one he received for "Gladiator."
If Disney had not postponed the opening of "The Alamo" until spring, it might have been conceivable, if not necessarily plausible, that all five of the best-picture nominees for 2003 would be scored to cannon and musket fire and decorated with gold braid and brass buttons. As it is, more than a few Internet handicappers are holding a place, sight unseen, for "Cold Mountain," and assuming that at least two of the others have a reasonable shot. But whether or not these pictures actually resonate with Oscar voters, they were all clearly conceived with such honors in mind. Their nearly simultaneous release is the kind of culture-industry happenstance that takes on the markings of a cultural symptom. Hollywood is suddenly — that is, once again — heavily invested in the military pageantry of the past, which suggests that quite a few filmmakers are betting that the public will be interested, too. It is hard not to imagine some historical or symbolic connection between the long-ago conflicts they depict and the conflicts that trouble us now.
These movies may reveal more about the current state of large-scale, "important" filmmaking than about the current state of the world. The three I have seen — "Master and Commander," "The Missing" and "The Last Samurai" — look backward not only for subject matter but also for stylistic inspiration. They are all, fundamentally, action movies, their noise and brutality punctuated by quieter stretches during which some perennial themes — honor, duty, loyalty, tradition — are earnestly discussed. Curiously, each one also pauses for a gruesome glimpse of 19th-century surgery, as teeth are pulled, bullets removed and wounds stitched with impressive skill in primitive conditions. These moments might serve as metaphors for the movies themselves, which perform miracles of technique using old-fashioned tools. The directors, Peter Weir, Ron Howard and Edward Zwick, respectively, make relatively little use of the computer-generated imagery that has become a staple of action filmmaking, relying instead on the older arts of set-building, location shooting and the marshaling of hordes of flesh-and-blood extras.
These directors also, both overtly and implicitly, evoke past masters of their chosen genres. Many of the reviews of "Master and Commander" have noted that Mr. Weir has an ability to combine narrative sweep and psychological detail that recalls David Lean. Ron Howard, in "The Missing," is pointedly evoking John Ford's Technicolor tales of rescue and revenge on the vanishing frontier — "The Searchers" most obviously. Edward Zwick, mobilizing his samurai warriors for some of the most elaborate battle scenes in recent memory, is clearly trying to go back to the savage martial splendor of Akira Kurosawa. (He makes it about as far as Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" and Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves," which "The Last Samurai" in effect grafts together and transplants into 19th-century Japan).
All of these films aim to breathe new life into the kind of cinematic spectacle that hovers perpetually on the brink of obsolescence — to answer the perennial complaint that they don't make them like they used to. But of course they can't make them exactly like they used to, especially when it comes to war movies and westerns. "The Missing" and "The Last Samurai" (which is, despite its Eastern setting, generically a western), try at once to honor the grandeur and heroism of their movie traditions and to avoid ruffling contemporary sensitivities. "The Missing" is a curious hybrid of classic and revisionist western mythology, featuring an almost supernaturally evil Indian villain and, in the person of Mr. Jones, a spiritually enlightened, Indianized white man. The movie is also careful to suggest that the treachery of the Indians, which motivates Ms. Blanchett's righteous revenge, results not from their innate savagery but from the rapacity of the white man. Early in their pursuit of the bad guys, Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Jones encounter a cavalry unit (led by Val Kilmer), which proves to be both useless and corrupt, looting a homestead whose occupants have been kidnapped and killed. In "The Last Samurai," the post-Civil War American military is similarly bankrupt. Mr. Cruise's character is haunted by the guilt of having participated in the slaughter of innocents, and he finds absolution in joining the samurai revolt against a modern army advised by the man who once commanded him to kill Indian women and children. (In their heroic, doomed resistance to modernity in the name of quasi-feudal traditions of honor, Mr. Zwick's samurai also evoke the mythology of the Confederacy, minus the inconvenient fact of slavery.)
"Master and Commander" is a more satisfying entertainment, in part because it has no patience with such hand-wringing ambivalence. "The Missing" and "The Last Samurai," aware that they risk demonizing the Indians and the (nonsamurai) Japanese, compensate with the equally dubious strategy of romanticizing them and demonizing the white Americans. ("Why do you hate your own people so much?" Mr. Cruise's nemesis, a genocidally inclined American soldier, demands at one point.) The French receive no such treatment, in part because the conventions of the war movie are different from those of the western. The French in Mr. Weir's film, like the Japanese in a 1945 submarine picture, are simply the enemy, and as such deserve both hatred and respect, since they are, in combat if not in a larger moral scheme, the mirror image of the good guys. ("He fights like you, Jack," one of Mr. Crowe's officers remarks, speaking of the wily French captain.) But the difference may have as much to do with national temperament as with style or genre. The western, whatever its ideological coloration, nearly always revolves around a mythic idea of innocence, which is both lost and restored by acts of violence. War becomes a spiritual struggle that takes place not only on the battlefield but within the soul of the protagonist. The war in "Master and Commander" is never more (though certainly never less) than the political conflict between nations. It is a film committed to realism as both an aesthetic and as a world view — which may be the most old-fashioned thing about it, and also, in present circumstances, the most un-American.
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