If nothing else, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse—his second film to be released in a single week, God bless us all—is as achingly sincere a movie as I’ve seen in a long, long time. I mention this mainly because sincerity is an increasingly rare quality to see out of anything these days, and as a result it’s likely to be met with some polarization. I will not deny it’s a manipulative movie, but this is nothing new when it comes to Spielberg’s oeuvre. His movies have never been afraid of throwing on a healthy layer of cheese, but War Horse is interesting in that it is coming out at a time when this style of filmmaking has more or less gone out of style. Some will inevitably find it cloying, but I’d be lying if I said this movie didn’t play me like a fiddle. With War Horse, Spielberg has taken a simple story of a boy and his horse and turned it into a moving and unique portrait of World War I and its impact on an entire continent.
The eponymous horse of war is Joey, who was raised by the English farm boy Albert (Jeremy Irvine). We follow him from birth up until he is thrust into the midst of World War I, where he falls into the possession of the British Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), two young German soldiers (Leonard Carow and David Kross), an old French man (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter Emile (Celine Buckens), and is finally almost worked to death in the German military. Meanwhile, Albert must sit at home hoping for Joey’s safe return, until the war eventually pulls him into combat as well.
The reason Spielberg is always so successful with his handling of such pure emotion is that he is willing to take his time in telling the story. He makes sure to earn every last tear instead of simply asking the audience to cry because what they’re looking at calls for it. War Horse clocks in at a not-so-lean 146 minutes, but the film works because of its length rather than in spite of it. A lesser director might have started the film right on the eve of World War I, but by the time Spielberg gets around to that we’ve already been wholly invested in the lead characters’ plight. The first act is devoted entirely to the strained relationship between Albert’s father (Peter Mullan) and his landlord (David Thewlis), and how Joey eventually factors into solving that. These scenes, plot-wise, have just about nothing to do with what is to come. Yet they are vital, for without them much of the war-centric stuff in the final two acts would ring hollow. Spielberg doesn’t rush things (he hasn’t his entire career), and his gift is that he makes the experience captivating rather than tedious.
Thematically, War Horse most obviously evokes Spielberg’s own Empire of the Sun, which examined a world at war through the eyes of an otherwise-innocent child. It was the film that most clearly illustrated Spielberg’s transition from a director of blockbusters into a filmmaker that examined the darker side of humanity. It’s true that War Horse doesn’t explore the most revelatory of themes (news flash: war stinks, y’all) but instead of simply showing us the mere horror of war, it is also able to find the humanity within it. World War I was one of the most devastating conflicts that Europe ever saw, but most of the casualties didn’t ask to be thrown into the fray. (Most obvious among these unwilling participants are the horses, hence the film’s focus.) As a few characters say throughout the film: “the war has taken everything from everybody.” In War Horse, everyone (and everything) feels the consequences of battle. Spielberg’s accomplishment is that he shows us this in ways we haven’t seen before.
And there’s the key. He shows us. Much like I said in my Tintin review, Spielberg has become a great director because he has made a career out of showing rather than telling. War Horse contains no grand monologues about the film’s themes and what is being shown to us. Everything is done through visual storytelling, and that will always be ten times more effective than learning lessons through bad dialogue. In fact, there really isn’t all that much dialogue in War Horse, and if there is it’s mostly done for expository or plot reasons. As always, Spielberg is the man at the controls, and he tells his story like the master director he is. If War Horse has any real flaws, they come in the final act, when Spielberg (perhaps unavoidably) ties things up a little too neatly. But the wonder of the film is the journey, not the destination. War Horse is not about whether the central plot of the boy and his horse gets resolved. It’s about Joey and Albert’s episodic odyssey through one of the darkest times in European history, and how their story is actually the story of the war as a whole. This is a film of tremendous ambition and heart, and Steven Spielberg may be the only man who could have pulled it off so well.
Grade: A-
P.S. – I just want to express my surprise at some of the War Horse hatred I’ve seen on the Internet. No, it’s not a perfect movie. It’s just mystifying to me how people can react with such vitriol to something as pure as this. If Spielberg were to release E.T. today instead of 1982, I’m not so sure the reaction would be all that different from what we’re seeing here.
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