War Horse (Tuesday, December 13, 2011) (115)

I should say right up front that War Horse is probably not a movie for me. I really hate animal movies because I think they're generally overly sentimental and rather thin when it comes to content ("Look - you can see the horsey is scared. I'm scared for him.!"). I also find episodic stories like this one frustrating because the moment you get to know any characters, the story switches to a new set of characters and a new situation. War Horse is a terrible, dumb, empty movie that has a greater level of Spielbergian emotional manipulation that I have seen in a long time, possibly ever. If at any moment you are emotionally ambivalent or unsure of what is going on, the director will come down on you with a sledgehammer to make sure you understand exactly what he's trying to do.

Based on a book by Michael Morpurgo, the story is about a thoroughbred horse named Joey (oh, how sweet - his name is Joey!) who is raised by a young man in England before World War I. There's a whole lot of stuff that happens with nobody believing the horse is worth anything and him almost getting shot. Actually, every person who "owns" him at any point almost gets him shot. This is the horsey torture porn thread of the story. The horse is sold to an officer in the British military who takes him to the Front at the beginning of the Great War, at a time when the Brits thought the war was going to be old-fashionedy with horses and swords and all. Of course the war was not like that, and horses were only used up and then discarded as the war went along. Joey is first stolen by some German deserter boys, then taken to a small strawberry farm and looked after by a French girl, then is stolen back by the German army to pull stuff with. At some point there's "miraculous stuff" that happens.

As much as the film is called "War Horse," there are really only three sequences directly involving the war and fighting, and one of those is very brief. It's more "Around a War Horse." This is basically Forrest Gump with a horse. The moment you get to know and like any particular character or story, it switches to be about something else, with new characters and a new set of rules. Every character falls deeply in love with Joey, though I don't know why. I guess I'm a heartless person, but just showing me a horse with big eyes doesn't make me fall in love with him. I guess I need more content or reasons to fall for him. Well, really, I don't fall in love with movie animals, because I can't interact with them and make any sort of personal connection. I don't go in for anthropomorphizing of animals, and I think that's my problem here. There is no reason why Joey doesn't get killed several times - which I guess is not totally true... the reason he doesn't get killed is because he's the star of the movie and is written that way. He doesn't seem to have any particular traits that help him. Sure he's a fast runner, but so are so many other horses.

This is a very cruel and violent movie, which on its surface would seem like a "family film." Putting aside all the guns that are aimed at Joey for non battle-related reasons, Spielberg has a fascination with disgusting, uncomfortable situations, like the penultimate sequence when Joey runs into no-man's-land and gets rolled up in barbed wire. All I could think about was the endless and cruel beatings in Gibson's loathsome The Passion of the Christ. Is Steven suggesting Joey is Christlike? ("Take these oats, brothers. They are my body.") I don't really see the point in all this. Yes - it's war and war is hell, but it seems like most of the war stuff is much more bland than Spielberg has shown in past films (Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List), except when it deals directly with Joey, when he gets particularly frank and mean. This is not a movie for kids. (I'd like to thank my mother, here, for showing us The Great Santini when I was about 5. Because it's a movie about dogs. Right - a dog who is shot. Thanks, Mom!)

Spielberg is anything other than subtle in this film. There are loud bangs, open wounds, cuts to what look like tears in the horse's eyes (they're not tears, by the way. I'm not sure horses can cry), and lots of sentimental garbage with drawings and journals of Joey. We are reminded over and over again that the war changed from being about "gentlemen with horses" to being a technological nightmare with trenches, tanks and machine guns (I wish we could come up with a phrase for this war about how it was so big and how it might be the last war because it was so violent and terrible). The final sequence is so over-the-top with digitally enhanced "magic hour" lighting that it's almost painful to watch both from a technical point of view (magic hour is already gorgeous, Steve, you actually don't need to touch it with a computer) and a thematic view (OK, we get it. It's a happy, beautiful, wonderful, sentimental ending).

There is a single wonderful shot in the film, as the British soldiers mount their horses before the first battle of the war. It is reminiscent of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (a film I love) and Malick's The Thin Red Line. I wish that one shot could be excised from the final film here and put on display on a 5-second loop. This would leave War Horse with nothing but garbage... all the easier to send to the soap factory.

Stars: 1 of 4