Film Review: War Horse (2011)

War Horse proves that it takes a big talent to make a good film, and an even bigger talent to make a flaming wreck of a film. Steven Spielberg is the culprit. It's not as though he hasn't done this before; 1941, Always, and The Terminal were all wretched, but War Horse is Spielberg at his nadir.

The story is syrupy even by Spielberg's standards. Basically, Joey the wonder horse becomes the object of affection for all who come in contact with him. He's first owned by Albert, a teenage boy living in Devon. World War One commences and the horse is requisitioned for the military, and a cavalry officer falls hard for Joey. The cavalry officer unwisely charges some German machine guns and Joey ends up in the loving hands of a German private. He then comes into the possession of a charming young French girl before being reunited at the war's end with Albert, who takes him back to England.

Yes, it's a preposterous story, but it's part of a director's job to make the preposterous seem plausible, and Spielberg doesn't make us understand why everyone gets dewy-eyed over Joey. It's true that horses have always been beloved animals (there's a whole sub-genre of kids' lit devoted to them), but this story is in such a rush to gallop Joey and his owners through one cinematic set piece after another that we're completely baffled as to why people want this beast. The longer the film goes on the more ridiculous this affection seems. Of course, on a symbolic level the horse is supposed to represent beauty, peace, and home, and while that goes part of the way to explaining his appeal to his owners, it still doesn't excuse the clumsiness with which Spielberg handles the story.

This brings up Spielberg's great weakness as a director: at heart he's a creator of showstopping moments and sequences, not a director whose focus is always on the story at hand. When he's at his worst, Spielberg's first thought is how to make a shot or a sequence look glorious, not how it's going to advance the story or develop a character. And in Spielberg's world this means every shot has to look like it was taken on Planet Sumptuous. The first section of the film is set in Devon, and in Spielberg's Devon every landscape and interior looks like it could be eaten for dessert. When it rains in this Devon it rains clotted cream. Albert's family are supposed to be poor peasant labourers but they live in a thatched cottage that's so picturesque, so tastefully furnished, you wonder if they're interior designers who've come down in the world. The chocolate box look of this film never ends. The war in France, except for a few muddy bits in the trenches, looks great. And Planet Sumptuous appears to orbit two suns, which is handy for Steven because there's always a stunning-looking dawn or sunset to light every shot. The final scene in the movie features a sunset so fiery I was wondering if one of the suns had gone supernova.

The fussy, prettified, over-produced look of War Horse even extends to the actors. Apparently, Joey can't be owned by unattractive or ordinary-looking people. At the very least he must be owned by people who've done catalogue work for J. Crew. The acting is decent, even though a lot of the actors have to fight their way through West Country accents that give rise to memories of various Monty Python sketches. And none of the actors can compete against the mouthwatering set decoration and ravishing cinematography.

So much energy has been devoted to the look of this film no one, it seems, took a hard look at the script. It's just plain, old bad. The peasantry of Devon spout rural cliches Thomas Hardy would have rolled his eyes at, and the interlude with the French girl is sweetness on steroids. The final section of the film showing Joey's return to Albert doubles down on the silliness. Battle-hardened Tommies unite to get Albert his horse back, and the only way the whole thing could feel more ridiculous and sentimental is if a song and dance number broke out.

The only reason to watch this film is to see how artistically corrupting great success can be. There's simply no one who's going to tell Spielberg that he's going too far, and the result is a film that's simply rotten with self-indulgent flourishes. There is one good thing about War Horse: every third frame of it would make an excellent wallpaper for computer monitors.

Book Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) by David Mitchell

It's clear David Mitchell did a Ph.D's worth of research for this novel set in 1799 Japan, and, unfortunately, every bit of it ends up on the novel's pages. Historical fiction requires a delicate balance between creating a rich and believable historical background while at the same time not allowing it to act as an anchor on the storytelling, and in this case the pudding has been overegged.

The novel's plot is not overly complicated. The titular character arrives at the Dutch trading station of  Dejima in Nagasaki Harbour in 1799 as a simple clerk in the pay of the Dutch East India Company. Jacob soon runs afoul of his scheming and corrupt superior and, more importantly, falls in love with a Japanese midwife named Orito. Orito attracts the attention of Lord Enomoto, a powerful noble who controls a mysterious shrine high in the mountains several days journey from Nagasaki. Orito is enslaved by Enomoto and put to work in the shrine, which turns out to be a perverse and evil cult that sacrifices babies. The bulk of the novel is concerned with Orito's imprisonment in the shrine, and an attempt to rescue her by Ogawa Uzaemon, a member of the samurai class who is also in love with Orito. The final quarter of the novel suddenly introduces a new danger for Jacob: a British frigate comes into Nagasaki Harbour and demands that the Dutch surrender their trading rights.

There's a fair bit going on there, and at times the story proceeds at a gallop, but far too often the novel is marred by narrative digressions and anecdotal asides about characters who are not central to the plot. These literary "speed bumps" become maddening after a while. One example: when the frigate arrives, one of the Dutch contingent (an Irishman, as it happens) is terrified he'll be recognized by a particular British officer. The Irishman was a convict in Australia and escaped after killing a guard. The Irishman's story is told in very full detail, and it all turns out to be redundant since the two never even come close to meeting. This is only one of many speed bumps in the book. Some of them are diverting, but most of them feel like a showoffish display of historical research.

Leaving aside the incessant history lessons, Mitchell's prose has a nice rhythm to it, and his imagery and descriptions are lean and effective. He also gives the novel some extra resonance by making it clear that his characters are part of global changes as well as personal ones. The Japanese characters are coping with the inevitable intrusion of Westerns ideas and technology into their hermetically-sealed culture, while the Dutch are coping with their nation and empire being eclipsed by the British.

The main characters I didn't find terribly compelling. Jacob is conscientious, good at his job, fairly pious, and moral. In short, dull. He's faced with all kinds of difficult choices and situations, but that doesn't change the fact that he's not someone you want to spend a lot of time with. The same can be said for most of the Japanese characters, who, thanks to a repressive, status-conscious society, are terribly circumspect in what they say and do. The most colourful characters are minor ones, and they tend towards the cliche. Marinus, a Dutch doctor, is an Enlightened Man of Science™, and as such his orotund utterances are stuffed with rhetorical flourishes, Latin words and phrases, and the driest wit. He's mildly entertaining, but he feels like a stock character. The working class Dutchmen in Dejima are easily indentified: Mitchell makes them sound like a cross between a Thomas Hardy peasant and Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa character from Pirates of the Caribbean. Did they really need to sound like caricatures to let us know they're not of the same social class as Jacob and Marinus? And speaking of dialogue, Mitchell is overly fond of italicizing key words in almost every spoken passage, as though he doesn't trust the reader to figure out where the emphasis lies in the sentences. It's really irritating.

Autumns has received nothing but rave reviews, which I can only put down to critics rewarding Mitchell for his hard work in the library. As an entertainment, as a piece of historical fiction, Autumns is a distant second to anything by Patrick O'Brian. And better still is Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie (review here), which strikes a perfect balance between history and narrative.