War Horse (2012)
You must have heard the joke by now – A War Horse walks into a pub and the barman says ‘Hey, what’s with the long film?’ and lengthy it is, as over the course of two and a half hours Steven Spielberg programmes his viewfinder to ‘epic’ mode with an adjacent instruction of ‘majestic sweep’ in this grandiose adaptation of the 1982 Michael Morpurgo novel and subsequent smash hit theatre production which has enjoyed sold out-runs on both the London and New York circuit. It’s not difficult to see what attracted the king of gloopy sentimentality to this project, what with the mud drenched butchery of the First World War being stoically witnessed by a faintly anthropomorphized protagonist whom immediately seizes the audiences heartstrings, whether its doe-eyed youngsters, a stressful family dynamic or an inadvertently abandoned extraterrestrial you don’t need to absorb the credits to assess who’s behind the camera. Spielberg’s touchstones for this project are also fairly obvious, he’s clearly spent the last year reviewing the work of his heroes John Ford, David Lean and Victor Fleming as the film has an almost anachronistic feel of Hollywood that thrives on awe-inspiring spectacle and widescreen landscapes, heck there may even be a touch of Stanley J. Kubrick in one sequence but naturally I’ll come back to that. If you enjoy the strand of Spielberg’s career that privileges the historical epic, whether that be the pollen hued wheat fields of South Georgia in The Colour Purple, the corpse strewn beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan or the desperate refugee camp of The Empire Of The Sun then War Horse will gladly to report for duty, it’s rather unsubtle juxtaposition of bombastic spectacle and saccharine emotion won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this just about managed to sabotage my low blubber diet.
Devon, South West England, the early 20th century. The proud but struggling Narracott family of farmers have a new acquisition to the family courtesy of hard-drinking Ted (Peter Mullan), the cavalier patriarch of the family whose unmentionable experiences in the Boer War have left him with a limp and a bitter taste for the demon drink. When he brings home a noble young stallion his teenage son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) is soon besotted with the latest addition to the family, and sets about breaking him in to the gruelling tasks of rural life. His fierce yet loving mother Rose (Emily Watson) fears that her husbands booze soused pride has got the better of him and the outrageous 30 guineas he has paid for the mare means they won’t be able to settle their rent to scheming landlord (David Thewlis) who is hungrily eyeing the Narracott farm as a small addition to his development portfolio. But soon events of a wider nature overtake these local concerns, the First World War is declared and Ted is forced to sell Joey to the Army in order to alleviate his financial pressures and assist in the war effort, and Albert makes a tearful promise to one day be reconciled and reunited with his equine brother. The film then moves into vignette, episodic mode as Joey’s sojourn in France sees him passing from master to slaver, from British to French then German, both military and civilian, a pious observer of a land racked by terrible slaughter and carnage.
Your reaction to War Horse will probably be dictated by your resistance to Spielberg’s iconoclastic cloying sentimentality, this is probably his most directly manipulative picture since he embarked on those literary translations back in the mid 1980’s but if you’re amendable to such fare then there is much to enjoy. The epic scenes are a veritable smorgasbord of grandiosity with a capital ‘wow’, with call-backs to epoch defining scenes such as this and heightened, treacly lighting affectations such as this, which are particularly resonant in the films closing moments. The already famous charge through no-mans-land by Joey is simply breath-taking from a compositional and editing stand-point, and an extended trench battle sequence is equal to the horrific D-Day landings that opened Saving Private Ryan, Steveo has evidently been reviewing other presentations of celluloid battle for inspiration and influence. On the other trajectory the cloying score and occasional wince inducing exchanges between Joey and Albert might have you fumbling for the vomit bag, but the film is outrageously open about its facade and mannerisms so from its opening scenes so you’ll be able to assess if you need a refund. I’m obviously getting soft in my old age as for the most part I was swept along in the scope of Spielberg’s expansive canvass, although I grimaced at a few moments that ladle on the syrupy melodrama if you let yourself go then even a potentially ham-fisted collaboration between a British Tommy and German infantryman (which made me cringe when I heard about it on a podcast review) actually works on-screen as the noble stallion ushers forth a shred of humanity in the midst of the horror. Harkening back to a simpler time with some impressively fustian arrangements, War Horse may just trot away with your heart;
*Whilst we’re on the subject of bearded tyrants, this article is shocking, at least once every paragraph I had to check the date and make sure it wasn’t April 1st – words fail me, particularly utterances such as ‘these people?’
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