The Timeliness of War Horse

To judge a year in cinematic terms is easier to do some years than others, but in particularly strong years one can see strong trends in thematic elements explored throughout some of the more popular films of the year that reflect a certain air in the zeitgeist. As the Bush era was drawing to a close, darker fare like No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood were among the first names out of the lips of those familiar with the cinematic atmosphere of 2007. Entering the Obama age, an uptick in hopefulness brought about films like Slumdog Millionaire dominating the filmic discourse. Whatever this says about our current place in the annals of history this year — disillusionment with the social climate, a yearning for a better time — the trend as of late has dealt with strong feelings of nostalgia, revisiting your past, even confronting your new future. One could have seen this last year in 2010 between an emotionally awkward youth reshaping the social landscape at the costs of leaving behind those who simply couldn't keep up (Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevii) with the new era in The Social Network or a British monarch who needed serious help in adapting to the new technology of radio to keep his country together as war loomed in The King's Speech. More notably this year is how much those themes and sentiments have been vocalized so clearly in such a plethora of the very defining films of this year.

Terrence Malick's magnum opus The Tree of Life, arguably the most aesthetically significant cinematic event of the new millennium, juxtaposes at once the reflection of suburban childhood in the 1950s with the prehistoric past of the Earth to dwarf its significance in the longer scheme of its epochs of the past heading into future millennia. Owen Wilson's character in Allen's Midnight in Paris literally finds himself able to go back in time to his favorite era only to find there the same weariness of their own times. Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive mimics the flashy stylings of 80s action flicks with a sense of slowly churning dark dread underpinning the action sequences (not unlike the 1980-set No Country for Old Men) the same way Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist harkens back to Hollywood in the silent era as unwilling stars from the time watch it transition to sound. The introduction of the new technology resonates with those in the industry as it clearly parallels contemporary Hollywood as 3D increasingly finds profitability in the marketplace, as evidenced by Martin Scorsese's utilization of the newly expressive potential the technology adds to the cinematic language in Hugo, a film in which film pioneer Georges Méliès himself stops shying away from his past in the film industry and acknowledges just how forward he pushed the new medium in his own time.

What positions this year as a landmark in Steven Spielberg's career is how his two films this year places into the conversation in very similar means. The Adventures of Tin Tin uses a 3D motion capture technology on the surface but is still said to flow with the very cinematically adventurous gusto that defined Spielberg's career in the first half of his career with films like the Indiana Jones series. War Horse, however, is singularly as definitive of Spielberg's abilities and career as anything he's ever made. John William's swelling score awaits viewers of this film at every turn as a backdrop to Janusz Kaminski's lensing each shot in the vein of films like The Searchers or Gone with the Wind, among others. Nothing in the film is left unsaid, nothing is made unclear, parts of it as as sweet as the most cinematically sugary entries in his canon as the scenes of World War I trench warfare seem as brutal and viscerally trying as the storming of Normandy he chronicled in Saving Private Ryan. As he operates on this film full throttle firing on every cylinder in the most Spielbergian sense, it either works for you or it doesn't. For me I was much more easily able to look pass the emotional obviousness of some of the scenes, the predictability and the clear need to suspend disbelief at certain points because the rest of the film simply worked. The score that informed every emotion you were meant to feel, each reaction shot as a close-up allowing the talented group of actors little in way of subtle emotional expression, something about it still just managed to keep me tuned in and enjoy the ride at every turn.

If this kind of thing has never worked for you in a Spielberg film, though, it's not going to now. That reason being that the main functionality of War Horse in the cinematic conversation, what feels like the central purpose in every bone of its being, is how it harkens back to its own artistic voices behind the film at their peak in the same way that Drive does to 80s action films or The Artist does to the silent studio films and, in fact, this did somewhat to the quintessential American films of John Ford in spite of its strictly European settings (but not entirely unlike how the largely French creators and cast behind The Artist approached that film with accessible contemporaneity). Maybe better and less obviously than any other film has attempted to this year, War Horse will best satisfy the nostalgic thirst clearly evident in the desires of moviegoers this year at this time by simply being closest to that thrill and classic feel of such a story told this way that seems to have been missing in the marketplace for so long. The romanticization of the landscape, the scope of the story going between Scottish farmers and German soldiers and French civilians all affected by the War, the risk and stakes apparent in trench warfare, and the very resilience of this central character you find in this strong horse and the universal sentimentality he inspires in anyone who crosses his path.

A probably drawn out opening act that establishes this horse and his young owner's borderline Equus-like obsession with him embodies the spirit of a youthful pre-World War naïveté that can reflect a spectator's fond memories of when they themselves felt that same spirit before surrounding events hardened them to the point where Peter Mullan's character as a drunken father was in the beginning bogged down by his own traumatic memories of war and a life plagued by poverty and poor luck. Exaggerated though it may be, though at a certain point exaggeration becomes the norm in a film like this, Mullan's character almost serves as the entire audience who watches all of the events in this film unfurl in a way that forever wipes away that spirit of pre-war naïveté amongst everyone else and the realization everyone seems to come to of just how cyclical the nature of these sorts of sentiments are that our moviegoing sensibilities seem to be feeling as evidenced by the strikingly similar themes in all of these films out there this year. Last year we went through being confronted by a future we were unsure how to face to a nostalgic escape to the past only to find that it's our present and, ultimately, that scary future that we must ultimately face and come to terms with.