Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is masterly, accomplished, stirring, a real bang-up, show-off job — and watching it, I kept wishing it had been made by someone else, someone younger who hasn’t already proved dozens of times, beyond the point of redundancy, how much he cares about what he puts on the screen.
Because Spielberg does care, and not just about the movies he makes himself. His forebears are with him every step of the way: With War Horse he tries on many masks, including those of David Lean, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick and David O. Selznick, just because he’s Steven Spielberg and he can. He wants to be everyone and everything at once: At times it’s way too much, but at others it’s a relief. In an Oscar-grabby end-of-year movie landscape littered with itsy-bitsy fuzzy-wuzzy literary adaptations and colorless apologias for lady monsters (I’m looking at you, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Iron Lady), why shouldn’t there be room for an old-school road-show picture with crazy-ass classical-filmmaking values? There’s something to be said for just sitting back and delivering yourself into the hands of a guy who creates a dissolve in which a piece of bumpy knitting transforms itself into a rock-strewn, hardscrabble landscape. Who else today would dare?
Maybe it’s that unapologetic cornpone aesthetic, even more than all that virtuoso filmmaking, that makes War Horse so engaging. From the moment you see the foal Joey, having only recently squeezed forth from his mother’s womb, finding his matchstick legs on sturdy English soil, you’re either in the game or you’re not. Later, when Joey’s a bit older, he’s bought by an impoverished farmer, Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), to spite his arrogant landlord (David Thewlis), who also had been eyeing the horse at auction. The purchase is immediately…
Deanna Russo Denise Richards Desiree Dymond Diane Kruger Dido Diora Baird Dita Von Teese Dominique Swain
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