Film: Celluloid Retro-Fitters
For children of the eighties, Steven Spielberg is more than a revered auteur. He’s like a member of our extended family, a favorite uncle whose seemingly unending wellspring of stories has shaped, not only our tastes in film, but the way we view the world.
There will always be an ominous cloud in the back of our minds whenever we decide to go into the water on a beach day. Period adventures will inevitably trigger comparisons to the archaeologist in the fedora hat (more on that later). And you can’t even mention the word “extraterrestrial” without a mental image of a kind-hearted, long-necked alien popping into your head. When he’s firing on all cylinders, few filmmakers come close to matching his ability to burn a hole through our collective unconscious.
Ever since the emergence of a socially aware maturity in Schindler’s List back in 1993, though, Spielberg appeared to table the sense of wonder that made his earlier work such a treat to revisit time and time again. Sure, more recent efforts like A.I., Catch Me if You Can and Munich were notably devoid of the shameless manipulation that drives his detractors crazy. But for devoted fans like myself, we were left hankering for that purity, the unblemished innocence that made a Spielberg film, well, Spielbergian.
It’s a great pleasure, then, to report that War Horse, a grand, unabashedly cornball World War I epic, marks the reappearance of the Spielberg so many of us hoped had never gone away, a fully felt throwback to the days when the prolific member of the New Hollywood generation had, through his narrative prowess, a direct link to our emotions.
The tradition lives on in the tale of Joey, a brown colt purchased at an auction by a financially strapped English farmer to spite the greedy landowner (David Thewlis) dead set on evicting him and his family. True, Ted Narracott (the estimable Peter Mullan) hits the bottle when he should be paying off his sizable debt, and Joey, as Ted’s wife Rose (Emily Watson) points out, is way too scrawny to plow their field. Their son Albert (newcomer Jeremy Irvine) makes an instant connection to their new equine acquisition. Will the muscularly challenged steed be able to pull off a miracle?
This early chapter, lovingly adapted by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis from Michael Morpurgo’s novel and Nick Stafford’s acclaimed play, has a distinct Grapes of Wrath/How Green Was My Valley flavor, leaving no doubt that Spielberg is worshiping at the altar of John Ford, though as the director claimed in the Q & A via satellite following the advance screening I attended, the aesthetic and thematic similarities were not intended as a direct homage. We become so involved with the Narracotts’ underdog struggle that we’re a little disappointed when Spielberg abandons these vast rural landscapes, vividly shot by Saving Private Ryan cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, to throw us headfirst into the thorny morass of early 20th Century warfare. An inconsolable, tear-streaked Albert reluctantly hands Joey over to the chivalrous Captain Nicholls (Thor‘s Tom Hiddleston), who promises to move heaven and earth to return the four-legged companion back to his care, and off they go to war-torn France.
War Horse then morphs into an episodic, occasionally gut-wrenching and always engaging series of encounters between Joey and the people he meets as he makes his way through one battlefield after another. What’s refreshing about Spielberg’s depiction of the Great War is that, beyond the conflict’s ability to keep Joey apart from his owner, there is no villain in sight. (Even the German troops are portrayed in a sympathetic light.) I did, however, wish he’d refrained from shooting the sequences between the French and German characters in heavily accented English. I also found longtime composer John Williams’s stirring, wall-to-wall score intrusive at times. It’s fine, dependable work by the multiple Oscar winner, but there’s too much of it.
War Horse goes overboard in attempting to elicit our empathy. A climactic, clap-if-you-believe-in-fairies scene near the end made me long for the more detached craftsman Spielberg has become in the past two decades. But in spectacular sequences such as Joey’s frantic, death-defying gallop during a nighttime battle, he restores that elemental sense of awe that had been missing from his more recent work. The film also reminds us that Spielberg never gets enough credit for being an actor’s director. Irvine’s natural, wide-eyed screen presence is itself ample proof that the Bearded One hasn’t lost his knack for discovering new talent, or for capturing our imagination.
Moviegoers are getting a double dose of Spielberg this holiday season. The long-gestating The Adventures of Tintin is the filmmaker’s initial foray into motion-capture technology, and it’s no surprise that this animated feature, a collaboration with Peter Jackson and the first in a proposed series of adaptations, gives free rein to his considerable skills as a purveyor of nonstop action. (Look, Ma, no cameras!) He’s having so much fun evoking his own work (lots of Hitchcock references here as well), that he almost forgets he’s supposed to be adapting the work of Hergé (the pen name of Belgian comic book author Georges Prosper Remi), not updating setpieces from his Indiana Jones movies for a new generation. Not that the two goals are mutually exclusive, but still!
The title character, for the uninitiated, is a globe-trotting journalist with a gift for cracking tough cases, and attracting danger at every turn. For the light-haired reporter, the game is always afoot, a notion that Spielberg adopts to both the benefit of the film’s relentlessly paced intrigue, and to the detriment of Tintin’s development as a character. As voiced – capably – by Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot), Tintin is determined, brave, and…well, there really isn’t that much to him, is there? As Tintin uncovers the secrets of a model ship that he purchases from a street vendor, Spielberg uses the densely plotted screenplay by the dream team of Steven Moffat (BBC’s Doctor Who), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Joe Cornish (the nimble but overpraised Attack the Block) as the backdrop for an ingeniously conceived string of daring escapes, elaborate chases and thrilling rescues. The jaw-dropping centerpiece – a single uninterrupted shot that sends Tintin and his trusted canine sidekick Snowy careening through crowded Moroccan streets – is alone worth the price of admission. I still couldn’t shake off the feeling that a) Spielberg was in paycheck-pickup mode and b) Hergé‘s newshound would have been better served by hand-drawn animation. Let’s see how Jackson fares when he takes over for the next installment.
It’s a strong weekend for animals at the movies, but neither Snowy nor the multiple equine talent cast as Joey can match Uggie, the scene-stealing Jack Russell terrier in The Artist. This latest piece of Oscar bait Harvey Weinstein intends to jam down awards voters’ throats has elicited contempt from some of my colleagues for taking away accolades that should go, in their opinion, to worthier candidates. I say phooey! My misgivings with this irresistible mishmash of Singin’ in the Rain and A Star is Born shot in the style of a silent film – black and white photography, square aspect ratio, speeded-up projection rate, title cards – lasted all of five minutes. The film stock feels too contemporary, the increased speed too calculated, I furiously scribbled in my notepad. Then Jean Dujardin – and his million-dollar smile – waltzed onscreen, and I was a goner.
It’s the opening night of another surefire hit for silent movie star George Valentin (Dujardin) circa 1927. The lights come up, and Valentin tap dances for the crowd accompanied by his wonder dog. Writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, who collaborated with Dujardin on the OSS 117 secret agent spoofs, gets the viewer so wrapped up in the bittersweet bond between Valentin and Peppy Miller (the adorable Bérénice Bejo, aka Mrs. Hazanavicius), the up-and-coming chorus girl he plucks out of anonymity, that any concerns I had that this would be a gimmick-driven one-trick pony quickly fell by the wayside. Not unlike War Horse, The Artist uses nostalgia for the good old days of cinema, not as the endgame, but as a point of departure for the simple, yet never simplistic, tale it has to tell. As with so many real-life counterparts, the advent of talkies causes the decline of Valentin’s career, which coincides with Miller’s meteoric rise to stardom. How their paths continue to cross is handled in a way that’s gloriously free of quotation marks. Hazanavicius, Dujardin and Bejo make it all but inevitable to fall into the arms of this passionate valentine to the movies. So what are you waiting for?
The Artist opens Friday at AMC’s Sunset Place and Aventura auditoriums, Regal Cinemas South Beach, and Fort Lauderdale’s Gateway Theatre. The best seat in South Florida, however, will be at the Coral Gables Art Cinema (gablescinema.com), where, Chaplin willing, the film will find an avid, appreciative audience. The Adventures of Tintin is currently out in wide release. See it, if you’re planning to, in 3D. War Horse gallops into multiplexes on Christmas Day, and it should be your Spielbergian priority. Welcome back, sir.
