This past weekend I went and saw War Horse, and it was Not How I Thought It Would Be.
The commercials, as you have probably know, talk up the enormous quantity of accolades that the film has earned. Lots of critics have named it to their Best of 2011 lists, it’s nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture, and will probably be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar as well.
Plus, it’s about a horse! In the First World War! I figured I would love it, cry my brains out, love it more, find a hitherto unexpected hidden reserve of tears, cry again, and then leave the theater in a deep swoon, loving War Horse more than any movie ever.
This is not, in fact, what happened.
To be sure, there were a lot of things I loved about the movie. Days later, I am still reeling from some of the more perfect moments, of which there were an abundance (especially the scenes with just Albert and Joey, or just Joey and his horse pal Topthorn). The cinematography (except for the last scene) was beautiful. The sweeping English countryside, the claustrophobic trenches…all of those things were amazingly well-filmed, and I heartily believe that any and all cinematography awards Janusz Kaminski wins for War Horse are truly well-earned. Most of the writing is also good, although I have not read the novel on which the film is based, and so can’t speak to it as an adaptation. I even liked the acting, mostly. The horses who play Joey do a fantastic job – the horse parts of the movie were the best parts by far – and most of the other characters ranged from sufficient to terrific. Jeremy Irvine, who plays Albert, the boy to whom Joey belongs, does drift into melodramatic sludge occasionally, but for the most part he’s good. The only really unfortunate acting in the movie belongs to Peter Mullan, who plays Albert’s dad. I would have been much happier with the whole movie if he had fallen down a well early on.
Now then. As I said, the parts of the film that I liked best were the parts with the horses. In some ways, this is most of the movie, obviously, but the beautiful cinematography is paired with a set of extraordinarily charismatic horses, and that makes the directorial failings with the human parts of the movie stand out a lot more.
Yes, I said directorial failings.
Here’s the thing about Steven Spielberg: He really IS a brilliant, visionary director. He understands storytelling more than almost anyone else making movies these days. Sometimes he wields his considerable narrative skill and directorial vision and you get things like Jaws, E.T., or Saving Private Ryan (although the framing device on that one is a giant fail). But sometimes you get into the directorial soup with Spielberg, and he presents you with manipulative-and-not-in-a-good-way things like Always or A.I.
War Horse made me feel used, and I am not happy with that. It was so beautiful, and Joey was so compelling…but I have some significant issues with it overall.
For one thing, the timeline of the war itself doesn’t make any sense. I suppose it’s possible that if you don’t know ANYTHING about WWI it helps, but I’m not convinced. When I saw it, for example, there were people in the theater who expressed considerable bafflement about the gas in the trenches; they had no idea what was going on, and the narrative didn’t help. Also, while many reviews have discussed the ways in which Spielberg shows the true horror of the trenches, that’s ridiculous.
The film is rated PG-13, and the battles show what an error that is. It should have gone with a straight PG, or even an R. There’s almost no gore in the movie, although there are terrible, endless vistas clotted with dead horses. But a movie about WWI with no blood? I can’t quite manage that. Although there are a lot of dead horses, mostly they’re just lying down dead, not any of the scores of much more horrible kinds of dead that the War offered horses. The battle scenes are exactly like the battle scenes in a Narnia movie – a lot of dust and yelling, and then a lot of people and animals lying dead on the ground. They are the opposite, in terms of realism, of the same kinds of scenes in Saving Private Ryan. Also, in terms of the the War and its timeline… Sigh.
THERE MAY BE SPOILERS COMING UP HERE, SO STOP IF YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THAT
The film starts in, maybe 1911, ish, although that was never made clear. In 1914 the war starts, and then Joey goes off to war with handsome and extremely decent Captain Nicholls. Bad things happen, on account of how it’s a war, and Joey ends up with some Germans, and then he ends up with a French girl and her grandfather, and THEN back with the Germans. Suddenly a title appears on screen: SOMME – 1918.
SERIOUSLY. SPOILERS.
If you know a little about the First World War, you know that the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, was one of the most terrible things that happened, in a war full of terrible things. If you know a lot about the War, you know that there were two battles there, the terrible one in summer 1916, in which the British lost almost 60,000 men on a single morning (approximately one third killed, the rest wounded or otherwise lost), and the not quite as terrible two-part battle in 1918, which helped wrap up the war. You also know that the second Somme was primarily Canadian and ANZAC forces, not nearly as many Brits.
So it’s confusing, to say the least, to suddenly have that title up on the screen, when previously the movie has had almost zero titles or any guide to where/when you are in the war. It’s confusing also because it’s presented as being a battle from which only a handful of men return, which would make it more like the 1916 Somme, not the 1918.
Midway through this bewildering scene, which cuts back and forth between Albert on the English side and Joey on the German side, Joey goes wild and charges through No Man’s Land, wrapping himself in yards and yards of barbed wire. This is almost impossible to watch, because Joey is wonderful and the visceral punch of his fear and the wire… Yeah. It’s a lot, and it will hurt your brain and your heart and make you feel sick. But: THERE IS NO BLOOD. The horse is almost completely unscathed by being COMPLETELY wrapped in barbed wire that he has been dragging with him until it pulls him down. And yet his beautiful flanks and his white-starred forehead are completely unwounded. He gets one bad cut on his chest, and that’s it. And then the battle is over, and Albert is wounded – he’s been gassed, and is temporarily blinded (most men who had terrible facial scarring from gas to their eyes stayed blind, which also annoyed me about the movie). And then… Well, you know how it’s going to end, right? Right.
And don’t even get me started on the accents: apparently all English people sound just like Samwise Gamgee, all French people sound like Pepe le Pew, and all Germans sound like the guys on Hogan’s Heroes (not Col. Klink, but the slightly more dashing and less ridiculous senior officer whose name I can’t remember). #headdesk
Again. There were many, many things I loved about this movie. But Spielberg should have tried harder to decide what kind of movie he was trying to make, and then he should have stuck with it. He knows how to make a terrifying war movie that shows the true horror of war, and yet with War Horse he has made a movie fraught with peril and emotion – horses! children! trenches! – that, in my opinion, points out rather weakly that war is bad, and sometimes goes as far as actually glorifying the nightmare.
Did War Horse break my heart? It did, a little. I’m glad there’s a movie out that shows what it was like (more or less) for the millions of horses who served in the First World War, because that’s a topic that most people really don’t know anything about, and I think they need to. This article, from The Guardian, does much more than I can to talk about the horses in the actual movie, and because they were the best part of the film, I think you should read the article. Maybe if Spielberg had done more with the horses, and less with the humans (especially Albert’s dad), it would have made his message about waste and horror clearer.
The movie is gorgeous, and I want to say again that there were a lot of wonderful moments in it. A LOT. But I can’t get past the things that disappointed me, and the bizarre ideas that people will get from the movie about how World War I actually went and what it was like. In War Horse, battle is bloodless, everyone is decent and kind (even the bad guys aren’t really all THAT bad), and the good guys always win.
