Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson and David Thewlis
Directed By: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay By: Lee Hall and Richard Curtis
Based on the Novel By: Michael Morpurgo
Produced By: Revel Guest, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg
Distributor: Touchstone Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 146 minutes
Website: warhorsemovie.com
Budget: $70 million (estimated)
Genre: Drama
Release Date: December 25, 2011
War Horse is Steven Spielberg’s impossible tale of a magical horse in World War I-era Europe and the nearly-endless series of people who fall hopelessly in love with it. It is based on a novel told from the horse’s point of view and a stage play whose main selling point is its realistic puppetry. Spielberg abandons these inventive hooks in favor of telling the story in the most cloying ways imaginable, all slow pushes into close-up and swelling music and helicopter shots of rural farmland at dawn. The squalor of rural England has never looked more picturesque.
The film opens with the birth of this enchanted horse, witnessed by a young Jeremy Irvine, who immediately becomes unreasonably infatuated with it. When his drunken father (Peter Mullen, Tyrannosaur) sets eyes on the horse at auction, he too is bewitched, and leverages the family farm just to possess it. Irvine goes to work training the horse, which to him means gazing dreamily into its soulful eyes while offering whispered words of encouragement.
Even though the horse single-handedly plows the family’s craggy fields with help from a miraculous thunderstorm, fate conspires to keep it from the family. When a flood ruins his crops, Mullen is forced to sell the horse to a British military officer (Tom Hiddleston, Thor), who, having set eyes on it, realized he must have it for his own. So strong is Irvine’s love for this horse that he volunteers to join the army on the spot just to remain in its presence, but he is too young to serve.
He has little to fear, for the horse’s uncanny specialness protects it wherever it goes. Hiddleston literally sketches loving portraits of it in his notebook like a 10-year-old girl until he is killed in battle. A young German soldier catches sight of the horse and instantly understands the depths of its soul. He and his younger brother desert their unit on the eve of battle just to spend a little more time with the horse. They are also killed.
The horse is then found by the niece of a French jam maker. She is supposed to be sickly in some nonspecific way, but the inspirational power of the horse gives her the strength to ride once again. She is later killed. And so the film goes, following this majestic, unearthly horse as it meets and enraptures any number of simple-minded people who are then killed. When the horse is finally freed by a soft-hearted trainer who can’t bear the thought of working it to death, John Williams’ perfunctory score triumphantly swells.
It is at this point that the Steven Spielberg of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial collides headlong with the Steven Spielberg of Saving Private Ryan, as the horse accidentally rides straight into a war zone, thick with the smoke of artillery and lit with the hellish glow of explosions. Bloodied, broken and tangled in a web of barbed wire, it collapses in this nightmarish battlefield, between opposing trenches. Luckily for the horse, soldiers from both sides catch a glimpse of it, and even through the smoke and fog they become so ridiculously enamored with it that they PUT THE WAR ON HOLD and work together to rescue it.
The horse is then taken to a British field hospital, where an injured Jeremy Irvine is conveniently being treated for mustard gas-induced blindness. But sight means nothing once you’ve seen the horse. He senses its presence just as snow begins to dramatically fall, and saves the horse from being put down by a snooty general. With the boy and horse reunited, the war finally ends, which would be a fine conclusion to this overly-sentimental tale. But Spielberg isn’t even close to being done yanking on the audience’s heartstrings, so he tacks on an additional six or seven endings just to make sure he’s stolen every tear he can.
War Horse is not a good film. It is well-crafted, but outrageously saccharine, even for Spielberg. There is no scene he believes can’t be improved with a lingering shot of a horse looking off nobly into the distance. Even with the grab bag of clichés discussed by the sprawling cast, the only evident themes are that horses are pretty and maybe war is dumb. But most disturbing is the lack of a clear intended audience. Any children unfortunate to be brought to War Horse based on its family-friendly promotional campaign will be permanently traumatized by the film’s graphic depictions of war. Adults will have a similar reaction to its unrelenting mawkishness.
In the film’s final scene, Spielberg borrows heavily from John Ford’s The Searchers as the boy and the horse return home from war. Their wordless sunset homecoming is a masterful example of the power of filmmaking. It is decidedly the least Spielberg-ian sequence of the entire movie, and one of the few times in two and a half hours that he shows anything resembling directorial restraint.
1 Star (out of 5)
