Have you ever noticed in war movies just how lucky
the main character always seems? Like for instance, if the army is charging
into impending doom, than the people on the left may get shot and the people on
the right may get shot, but the hero always seems to go unscathed. Bombs go off
nearby but they never seem to hit their mark. At the end, the hero is
surrounded by a sea of corpses, but he always is not dead, or if he does die, it
always happens in the final battle, you know the one right before the movie ends.
This may not be realistic but it is a basic necessity of storytelling. If you
killed off the main character in the middle, then well, where does the story go
from there? We aren’t all geniuses like Hitchcock.
“War Horse,” is an ingenious solution to that
problem. In this movie, we follow a horse, not a person through the mire of
World War I. The horse impossibly survives (as it must for storytelling
reasons) but the various people that own it are still subject to the dangers of
the War. In effect, because a horse is not much of a main character even though
the story follows it, we are introduced to and say goodbye to a series of main
characters that are not required by the storyline to have blindingly good luck.
When they should die, they do. Moreover since the horse is not a person, it has
the ability to be captured and switch sides in the war. The warhorse here does
exactly that, starting off with the British, than being captured by the Germans, and
back and forth again. Since everybody the horse meets is neither too cruel nor
vicious, the movie, even though it takes place in a war, does not have a bad
guy or evil side. So unlike other war movies where you would root for the good
side because you don’t want the good guy to die or the bad guy to live, in this
one you just want the war to end. As anti-war
movie structures go, this particular one is rather ingenious.
The emotion and dialogue of this movie remind me of very old movies. There was less cynicism in those movies
(perhaps because of the time or perhaps because the movies weren't very good) and that lent them a certain unapologetic sappiness.
For that reason, this movie is kind of hard to get into, particularly in the
beginning when there isn’t a war going on. The movie makes a big deal about the
horse being able to plow a rocky field. An actual crowd of neighbors turns out
to yell inspirational things as if they were in a Disney movie about an underdog sports team while the surly landlord becomes disgruntled because the farmers may
actually be able to pay the rent and keep living on the land. It’s a bit too
much for peacetime. When the war starts to pick up, the forthrightness and
sincerity of the characters feels a bit more comfortable. In a life and death
situation, a certain level of sappiness can be forgiven and even be appealing. The ending is ridiculously beautiful or plainly ridiculous
depending on how you feel about group hugs and glorious sunsets that tint the entire landscape
a golden hue of sepia. I liked it.
I also like how we have apparently gotten to the point in special effects where we
can manipulate the rate of snowfall to that exact point where it looks the most
beautiful and not the least bit cold. The cinematographer of the movie, Janusz Kiminski, should be a shoo-in for an Oscar
Nomination.
There is something that is rather weird about this
movie. Look at the posters and the commercials and the unapologetic sappiness.
This is being sold as a family movie and it is rated PG-13. At the same time,
the director Steven Spielberg (same guy who directed such very R historical
masterpieces like “Schindler’s List,” and “Saving Private Ryan.”) has once
again done his homework. We see the arc of World War I, from the first fights
on horseback to the stalemate of trench warfare. We are also treated to the
murder of deserters; the horror of waiting for the artillery to maybe hit your
part of the trench; the suicidal nature of a trench assault against machine
guns; and to top it all off, a nerve gas attack. This is a PG-13 movie. The
way Spielberg pulls this off is by a conspicuous lack of blood. We may see a
line of men run into machine gun fire, but when they are hit with bullets, they
merely scream out, crumple, and collapse.
There is however no blood. Even when the camera zooms out over the battlefield
for a crane shot, we may see a field littered with corpses, but the kids should be unaffected because the corpses aren't leaking blood. And when a 14 year-old-boy is executed by a firing squad for deserting, for the sake of the children, the camera is
conveniently located behind a rotating windmill. So we see the boy standing
there with a firing squad in front of him. The windmill rotates and obscures
the boy for a moment, the firing squad shoots their guns, the windmill moves again, and reveals the now dead corpse of the boy on the ground. Thank God for the kids that there is no blood. PG-13.
This is disconcerting for a couple of reasons.
First of all, are we really fooling the kids? They aren’t stupid. If someone
gets shot with a gun and dies, they have obviously violently died no matter how
much blood is actually seen. And if we hear guns going off and see the dead
corpse of a boy that was one moment before still alive, isn’t it obvious what
happened whether a windmill partially obscured our view of the event or not.
Secondly, isn’t it a bit disrespectful to the people who died in the war by
pussyfooting around what actually happened? (Deserters were indeed shot in
WWI.) At least that is what I thought was the very point Spielberg was making when he bluntly showed how people died in “Schindler’s List” and “Saving
Private Ryan.” There was something very noble about those movies. Spielberg
made you look the characters in the eyes and recognize their humanity before they were brutally killed. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t gratuitous.
It just was. I’ve got nothing against family films and nothing against
realistically violent war movies, but to combine the two harms both genres.
This movie should have been rated R and there should have been blood. If you want to make a nice family movie, don't make it about the horrors World War I.
One of the lasting legacies of Steven Spielberg is what he has done to the MPAA ratings system. No other single director has made such a big impression on it. The very reason we have a PG-13 at all is because Steven
Spielberg somehow got “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” rated PG. Lots of
parents took their little kids to see it and sort of thought that the whole
tear-out-the-heart-for-a-human-sacrifice scene a bit too much. (By the way I
love that movie.) Then with “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” he
introduced the rule that no level of violence would ever make a movie NC-17.
Now he has again raised the bar for violence in a PG-13 movie by killing an
untold amount of people of all ages. In his defense, Spielberg gets away with
this because all of these movies are very good and basically respectful. The problem is that our rating
system is objective, so if a movie director wanted to do something really
disgusting on the PG-13 level, all he would have to do is point to “War Horse,”
and say, “See, if this has already been done before why aren't you letting me do it.”
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