Beating a dead horse

Millions of horses died in the Great War. The image of those enormous and elegant, muscular and lithe bodies collapsing, terrified, cut up, scattered, tangled in wire, rotting across muddy European plains alongside the unfathomable numbers of human dead and dying is a very powerful, poignant one. It isn’t difficult to understand how storytellers would be drawn to it. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel, so I can’t attest as to whether or not it works on its own, but as adapted for the screen by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, adapted into something that doesn’t feel much like a children’s movie (except that it feels naive and oversimplified), and adapted in such a manner that the horse is no longer the centre of the story (and instead fills that centre with corny stock characters), War Horse is astonishingly hollow, simultaneously mechanical and sentimental, faux-innocent, and thus secretly cynical. In short, it brings out the worst in Steven Spielberg, whose direction of actors has never been more leaden (he gets what I can only hope will be the worst, most strained and artificial performance the normally great Peter Mullan will ever give), whose camerawork has never felt more thoughtlessly money-coated (he seems to need a crane just to shoot inserts), and aesthetically droopy (there’s a closing day-for-dusk shot that has to be seen to believe how ugly it is). It may be the nadir of Spielberg regular John Williams’ long career of composing wildly over-animated scores; every time anyone so much as smirks it’s like E.T.’s flying past the moon.

Perhaps Spielberg felt that War Horse would be a return to past glories; after tackling Normandy, he could now sink his teeth into the Somme (from the Holocaust to The War of Worlds, nothing seems to charge the elder Spielberg’s batteries like colossal, senseless death counts). Indeed, Joey, the thoroughbred-turned-plow horse-turned-war horse, becomes something of a Private Ryan. Everything stops, literally, to tend to him. Brits and Germans meet in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield and band together to rescue Joey from a lonesome, slow demise. A field doctor stops attending to a glut of agonized wounded soldiers just to help Joey. At some point, the magical aura surrounding this horse and the way it prompts everyone to ignore all else becomes, arguably, kind of offensive.

It doesn’t help that the horse is just, you know, a horse. There’s nothing all that cinematic about him. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński have no special way of rendering him charismatic. I adore horses, but just sticking one in front of a camera doesn’t make me instantly teary-eyed; the fact is, their allure, the particular nature of their features, isn’t easily captured on film... But really, I’m just struggling to make sense of why War Horse is such a dud. I think rather than generalize or theorize I should just say that this is one of those pictures where, scene-by-scene, over the course of its grueling runtime, you’re sort of baffled by all the small, wrote, bad choices that slowly accumulate: the lame comic relief (a goose), the forced emotions, the speechy dialogue. Spielberg, so much more at home with lighter material (E.T., Catch Me If You Can), has gone to war once more, and this time he really got creamed.

Will wonders never cease? Too much aliens and awe overwhelm the winsome ordinary in Close Encounters

It’s easy to chuckle over the fact that Steven Spielberg’s finest movies exhibit more of a knack for collaborating with alien puppets than with actual human beings, yet revisiting Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) serves to remind us that there was a time when America’s biggest brand-name director could evoke an extraordinary sense of the mundane. Close Encounters’ messy households full of noisy toys, cluttered kitchens, kids beating the shit out of dolls, parents hollering over each other and broadcasted cacophony possess a spontaneity, liveliness and sensitivity rarely repeated in later Spielbergs. Here, the amiable clamour of modern domesticity nicely juxtaposes the cosmic awe that eventually overwhelms everything. 

(So well orchestrated is the familial hum that, in combination with the emergence of the toxic emergency and its accompanying carnival atmosphere, one could arguably spot raw material for Don DeLillo’s White Noise within the movie’s best sequences.)

It has a brilliant first line—“Are we the first ones?”— and a great B-movie set-up, those stoic faces of air traffic controllers all lined up like Rushmore or reflected spookily on the radar screens. It has a little kid with the unlikely name of Barry, cute, boldly inquisitive in that particularly American way, and dopey as all hell, his only comment upon witnessing an alien air show being “Ice cream!” It has a terrific Richard Dryfuss flipping out, tossing uprooted shrubs, bricks and trash into his house to make an impressive installation in the living room, which, in one of the most inspired shots, looms between Dryfuss negotiating desperately with his deserting wife on the horn and a TV frantically whipping out exposition. It has good old Bob Balaban and, bizarrely, Nouvelle Vague forefather François Truffaut as his own kind of alien: a Frenchman, and the only one to acknowledge the heroism of Dreyfus’ crackpot. “Zey belong here more zan we,” he solemnly declares.

Unfortunately, Close Encounters also has John Williams, perhaps the biggest ham in movie score history, supplying accompaniment so bombastic and illustrative as to go over like a limpid parody of the same 50s sci-fi flicks Spielberg is trying to elevate to some sort of blockbuster art. And it has those pesky, anemic aliens, big on minimalist music and laser light shows, who take forever to finish with the New Agey dueling banjo shtick and land the damn ship already. The final act of Close Encounters is way more boring than contact with extraterrestrial life has any right to be, but we can still enjoy the earlier sections, evidence that ordinary humans anticipating a miracle are more fun than the miracle itself.