Steven Spielberg (2011)
War Horse reflects both the ET and the Saving Private Ryan sides of Steven Spielberg. The different talents he showed to make those movies the successes they were are clearly still intact but they don’t go together. The graphic reality of the warfare in this adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel is incompatible with the reliably miraculous progress of the story to its inevitable conclusion, which sees the young soldier Albert Narracott reunited with Joey, the thoroughbred he trained to be a workhorse on his father Ted’s farm in Devon, before Joey was sold by Ted to an army officer, to pay the rent he owed, at the outbreak of the Great War. This incongruence might have been less of a problem if the film had been told from a particular point of view – if it had compelling intimacy or characters – but all of these things it lacks. Joey the horse narrates the Morpurgo novel; it’s understandable the filmmakers didn’t try to replicate that but the screenplay by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall doesn’t have any bright ideas for telling the story differently. Because War Horse was staged in an extraordinary way in the theatre, using life-sized horse puppets, and because Spielberg has proved himself a cinema magician in the past, the conventionality of his screen version is disappointing. The more objective the world of the movie becomes the less you believe in it. War Horse, in spite of its technical accomplishment, comes over as an old-fashioned film – in its one-dimensional characters and the lack of complication in their relationships. This old-fashionedness feels like the result of a lack of imagination rather than impressive simplicity.
The story is undeniably affecting, though. I was in tears for most of the last half hour and filled up a couple of times before that. I feel a bit of a fraud criticising a film which got to me emotionally in a way that few other recent ones have done. As the closing credits came up, I could hear other adults sniffling around me. I think War Horse has this effect for two reasons. The main one is that it’s an inherently, almost primally moving story – the story of a boy separated from the animal that he’s raised and to which he’s devoted. The devotion – we’re made to believe – is reciprocated; and boy and horse both go through much hardship before they’re back together again. Once the joyful reunion has happened, there’s a further threat to their staying together and that threat is overcome. Finally, we see Albert’s homecoming to a beautiful landscape, his mother coming out to meet the returning hero, and his father, a Boer War veteran who’d lost faith in humanity, recovering it thanks, to the exploits of his son and the horse. The secondary reason why this is a tearjerker is the film’s very predictability. More than once I found myself crying before the big moments came – because I was anticipating them and was confident that Spielberg would bring them off.
The problem is that War Horse doesn’t need the World War I setting to deliver this emotional effect. The battle sequences are very well staged but they feel subsidiary – they come to life only when there’s an injured or ailing horse immediately involved. Between 1914 and 1918, Joey goes through a succession of owners, on both sides of the conflict but most of these episodes of ownership are dull. The characters in them aren’t badly acted but, with one exception, they’re uninvolving. In Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye promises the love of his life, at the moment of their separation, ‘I will find you again’, and he succeeds, to comical effect, in about ten minutes of screen time. At least in War Horse, when Albert makes a similar vow to Joey at the outbreak of war, a decent interval passes before he proves as good as his word. But you sometimes feel the film is merely marking time before they find one another. There are narrative details and strands which – you know as soon as they appear – are introduced for the sole reason of reappearing eventually to help deliver a big finish. It’s de rigueur that Ted Narracott’s regimental pennant from the Boer War, which Albert ties to Joey’s bridle when he’s first sold to the young cavalry officer Captain Nicholls, will return to the farm safe and sound, along with Albert and Joey. It’s obvious that the episode in France involving Emilie, an invalid girl who hides Joey and another horse in her grandfather’s barn when German soldiers ransack the farm, will get picked up again at the business end of the story.
The film is very well edited by Michael Kahn and superlatively lit by Janusz Kaminski, whether on Devon tors or in the trenches. The sequence in no man’s land, in which Joey is caught up in barbed wire and two soldiers – one British, one German – come to his rescue, is conceived obviously enough but it’s nonetheless impressive (the light gradually comes up as the two soldiers begin to see each other as individuals rather than the enemy). John Williams has written another highly effective score (there are hints of Vaughan Williams in it), even though Spielberg rather anxiously overuses the music in the first scenes of the film, all of which made me apprehensive. We see the perfectly handsome and wholesome-looking Albert gazing in wonder at the foal that’s going to become the horse Joey before anything else is underway. The Devon characters are primitively nice or nasty and the initial auction at which Ted buys Joey is pedestrian. In these early stages, we watch Albert and Joey defying the odds against them, repeatedly and mechanically. There’s barely an element of War Horse that’s unfamiliar or surprising. Unless you come to the film not knowing it concerns the Great War, you know that Albert’s eager, thick boyhood friend Andrew Easton won’t survive it. Ted’s farm even has a goose that knows a wrong ‘un when she sees it and puts the wind up the landlord who keeps pestering Ted for the overdue rent.
Although he’s rather bland, Jeremy Irvine is very likeable as Albert. When Joey comes into the ownership of watery Tom Hiddleston as Captain Nicholls, you hope he won’t detain the horse for too long, and he doesn’t: he and his commanding officer (Benedict Cumberbatch) are both killed in a cavalry charge. (I felt bad about responding so shallowly to the Great War but Spielberg makes it hard to do otherwise.) David Kross (from The Reader) and Leonard Carow are better, as young German brothers who next take possession of Joey, but it’s older actors – Emily Watson as Albert’s mother and, especially, Niels Arestrup, as the French girl’s grandfather – who provide War Horse with some welcome astringency. Peter Mullan has the wrong kind of realism as Ted Narracott – he’s too believably submerged in his melancholy – yet he stays with you more than anyone else in the cast, except for Arestrup. David Thewlis can’t do a lot with the rapacious landlord but Toby Kebbell (whom I didn’t like in Control) is excellent as the Geordie soldier in the no man’s land bit. Liam Cunningham and Eddie Marsan are both good in their small roles in what happens next, when the injured Joey is brought into the British medical camp.
Spielberg orchestrates this heartstring-tugging sequence flawlessly. Following the gas attack that killed his friend Andrew (Matt Milne), Albert is temporarily blinded and his eyes are bandaged. This means that, when he realises the injured horse is Joey, Jeremy Irvine doesn’t have to react to the big moment and come up to emotional expectations (which would be a test for any actor). Just as the injured horse is about to be shot, he pricks up his ears at the sound of the owl call he learned from Albert as a colt and which takes us back to the Devon countryside. Trying to convince the veterinary surgeon that he raised Joey, Albert explains the horse’s markings. Joey, covered in mud, doesn’t answer to this description at all. Then other soldiers clean off the dirt, revealing the four white socks and the diamond-shaped blaze.
22 January 2012