I’ve been trying something new with my moviegoing, based off a recent David Bordwell blog post in which he affirms that the front row is the best place from which to watch a movie. I can’t quite get all the way in with the front row (though I did try it with Shame, my eyes called upon to do quite a bit of up-and-down movement there, more often than I thought to expect). I’ve been contentedly duking it out from the second or third row, however – which, in addition to almost completely eliminating the risk of cellphone-happy douchebags blazing their screens up in front of you, is sure as sugar the best place in the world to see a movie like War Horse.
War Horse is oldschool filmmaking par excellence. My eyes swept back and forth along that wide, gorgeous, cinemascope frame like a parched man drinking up water. That War Horse is a great film is, I admit, a bit of a surprise; that it is the most traditionally Spielbergian film (and yet not, at the same time) that the director has made in nearly two decades pretty much left my jaw on the floor. This is an enchanting return to form from the filmmaker I grew up with.
And it’s about a horse. One’s ability to enjoy War Horse will be, I think, entirely proportional to how likely one is to empathize with a horse as a principal character, though perhaps I am underestimating its universality. Before heading into the movie theatre, I would have thought my likelihood to invest in the adventures of a horse to be about zero, hence my surprise when – indeed – I took an immediate liking to Joey, and enjoyed following him, and, yes, even began to gasp aloud when bad things happened to him. Which, with him being the titular War Horse of War Horse, things inevitably do.
I said the film was the most traditionally Spielbergian, and not, film I’ve seen in decades. It feels like vintage Spielberg to me because it seems to fit, emotionally, within the temper of the movies he was making in his heyday – back when critics particularly enjoyed throwing spitballs at him for not being a “serious filmmaker.” (Its parallels with Spielberg’s first “serious” masterpiece, Empire of the Sun, are worth a research paper or two.) And War Horse is, after all, a film about a horse – so perhaps we might be forgiven for basking in the earnest, heartwarming cartoonishness of it all. (Will Joey plough the field? Will Joey hide in the windmill? Will Joey survive his run across No Man’s Land in the middle of trench warfare and oh god I’m crying again.)
And yet, I cannot help observing, this is one of the most formally daffy motion pictures ever made. It’s about a horse, and it skips across a kind of unmotivated anthology of human vignettes that occur around Joey as he moves from foal to farm animal to war horse and back again. As a narrative experiment, War Horse is within a stone’s throw of potential failure, but instead comes off so successfully that it only makes me think of the masters of old, among whom Spielberg must now reasonably be counted. You might not think of “formal daffiness” first when considering Steven Spielberg, but I must admit that largely every film he’s made since Jurassic Park has been, to varying degrees of success, an experiment of one kind or another with the traditions and expectations of film form. (Say what you will about A.I. – you ain’t never seen a movie do that before.) In this regard, War Horse is the most prismatic of Spielberg’s latter work. It feels to me like a crystallization of all the storytelling acumen he has built up since he was shooting Schindler’s List in black and white in the snow in Krakow, back in early 1993. A film of paradoxes, War Horse has youthful vitality and sheer love of the craft in spades, yet also feels like the mature, considered work of later Kurosawa or Bresson. In other words, it’s a great fuckin’ film – a masterpiece – and it feels assured, and complete, and risky, and effortless.
The gang’s all here, and like Spielberg himself, they all bring their A-game for the first time in a long time. This is the best John Williams score for a Spielberg movie in fifteen years, easily. This is the only Janusz Kaminski photography in colour that I think bears comparison with his masterful black-and-white photography in Schindler’s. Michael Khan, no slouch in the editing bay, finds the beat and the rhythm of what could have been a facile story with subtlety and grace, building to a series of showcase scenes – most of them involving the war – that will remain high-water marks in his collaboration with Spielberg when all the accounts are tallied and scores settled.
And as the cadre of humans who temporarily impose themselves on Joey’s life, the cast is nearly uniformly superb – Jeremy Irvine, Tom Hiddleston (who I’d have liked to see more of), Benedict Cumberbatch, Emily Watson and Peter Mullan all bring inestimable talent to what could have been peripheral roles. If the casting stumbles under the weight of Niels Arestrup and his shrill granddaughter, Celine Buckens, well, it’s largely forgiven by the final act. And, appropriately enough given the subject matter, I find myself also wanting to give kudos to the performance of the horse, or more properly horses (and their team of trainers), who perform as Joey throughout the adventure. This is a magnificent, enchanting animal, who earns the gut-wrenching pathos of the most frightening moment Spielberg has lensed in the 21st century, when Joey makes that all-or-nothing dash for freedom across the barbed-wire strewn chaos of No Man’s Land.
One last thing. Spielberg speaks often of his ambitions as a purveyor of cinema – his fondness for long takes, for letting the audience be the editor rather than him imposing himself upon them, and for pure cinema and its unique, wordless power to motivate and involve through the use of its intrinsic elements. When watching War Horse I became aware that the film would work just as well as a silent movie, would work just as well in black and white; would likely work just as well as it does right now if it was made in any filmmaking decade between 1900 and today. The word “timeless” gets thrown around a lot, perhaps not judiciously, but War Horse earns the description and gallops with it. This is great cinema.