War Horse and the future of Spielberg

It’s Oscar week, and in anticipation of writing up my list of the ten best movies of the year, which I’m hoping to post in two parts tomorrow and Friday, I’ve been catching up on some of the notable movies I’ve missed, although not all of them. In fact, this will be the first year in a while in which I won’t see all of the Best Picture nominees, not so much out of a lack of time than because there are two I have no interest in watching—and you’re free to guess which ones. But of the remaining films, War Horse is one that I really wanted to see: as a director, Steven Spielberg, who for all his shortcomings remains the major Hollywood filmmaker of the past forty years, has been rather less prolific over the past decade, as his attention has shifted increasingly to producing, so his latest movie is always something of an event. And War Horse is undoubtedly worth seeing, as much for its final limitations as for its considerable strengths.

First, the good news. Spielberg’s eye, which I’ve written about at length before, is on full display, and it does marvelous things: the cinematography is gorgeous but only occasionally showy, and Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Janusz Kaminski offers up small wonders of subtle reveals in the visual play between foreground and background. A cavalry charge through a wheatfield is one of the most beautiful things Spielberg has ever done, and throughout the movie, we’re treated to the work of a director equally at home with intimate detail and epic scope. The occasional nods to David Lean and John Ford aren’t merely homage, but a nod from one legendary filmmaker to his peers. And for most of its first hour, aided by fluent editing from the great Michael Kahn, the film convinces us that we’re about to see something truly special.

Around the halfway point, however, doubts start to creep in, and by the end, although War Horse is never anything less than watchable, it starts to seem sentimental, contrived, and—most unforgivably—confused about its own intentions. Is this movie about a brave, beautiful horse, or is the horse simply a narrative device to introduce us to a series of human vignettes? If it’s the former, it just doesn’t work: the horse never emerges as a real personality, and it even disappears from the action for long stretches at a time. The clincher is the movie’s decision to have all characters, regardless of nationality, speak in accented English: I can understand the reasoning—otherwise, nearly half of the movie would be in subtitles—but it still strikes me as misguided. If the movie is really about this horse, it doesn’t matter if we can understand what the humans are saying, and perhaps even better if we can’t.

Instead, we’re implicitly told that our attention belongs on the human characters, even though none of them ever really repays our interest: for the most part, they’re symbolic figures, although a few—notably a French farmer played by Niels Arestrup—are given sporadic life by the actors involved. Spielberg remains our great visual storyteller, but here, as elsewhere, he displays an odd streak of timidity when it comes to constructing focused narratives. On his greatest achievement, the Indiana Jones trilogy, he evidently deferred to George Lucas, and many of his recent films, even ones I admire—Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Munich—suffer from a kind of ambivalence in the second half, as if he can’t decide what they’re about, even as individual scenes remain ravishing. Spielberg’s future depends, more than ever, on his choice of material and the quality of his scripts. And War Horse, for all its flaws, is only a reminder of how much is at stake.