War Horse | Little White Lies

War Horse

13 Jan 2012 / Released: 13 Jan 2012

A young man standing close to a brown horse, gazing at it affectionately in a rural setting with grassy hills in the background.
A young man standing close to a brown horse, gazing at it affectionately in a rural setting with grassy hills in the background.
4

Anticipation.

Steven Spielberg seems a natural choice for this family-friendly theatrical phenomenon.

3

Enjoyment.

Heavy-handed melodrama with flashes of brilliance.

3

In Retrospect.

An unsatisfying fable that fails to engage all ages.

A strange sort of hybrid, wound­ed by the inter­nal ten­sions between what it might be.

Before its acclaimed stage adap­ta­tion, War Horse was a children’s book with big ambi­tion. Through the eyes of an equine pro­tag­o­nist, the nov­el explored sweep­ing themes around the cen­tral dynam­ic of war: its arbi­trary waste­ful­ness, its expo­sure of human cru­el­ty, and its capac­i­ty to bond as much as divide.

These uni­ver­sal themes made it a nat­ur­al choice for Steven Spiel­berg, a direc­tor with a fond­ness for mod­ern, melo­dra­mat­ic fables with guar­an­teed cross-gen­er­a­tional appeal. But the suc­cess of the War Horse stage play presents Spiel­berg with chal­lenges beyond the usu­al dif­fi­cul­ties of adap­ta­tion: how to switch from pup­petry to real hors­es? How much real­ism to inject into the depic­tion of war? And how to retain that all-age allure?

Spielberg’s answer is to adopt a form of hyper-the­atri­cal­i­ty, with real loca­tions some­how ren­dered as stage-set rur­al idylls, with weird choco­late-box hous­es, and stone walls that look like poly­styrene. The stag­ing, cos­tume and over­all palette are redo­lent of MGM’s gold­en age’ of Tech­ni­col­or, with Devon and Picardy as the Land of Oz.

The dia­logue, the nar­ra­tive struc­ture, the sta­t­ic move­ment of actors, all seem con­spic­u­ous hang­overs from the stage play, which sup­pos­ed­ly reduced Spiel­berg to tears. But while this the­atri­cal­i­ty express­es a uni­fied – if trans­posed – style, it jars with the more obvi­ous­ly cin­e­mat­ic ele­ments Spiel­berg introduces.

Where­as, in the stage play, the pup­petry allowed anthro­po­mor­phic engage­ment with Joey, the epony­mous horse, the film’s real-life hors­es seem strange­ly dead-eyed by com­par­i­son. The feats of horse­man­ship are impres­sive but the lin­ger­ing shots of the horse – sup­posed to con­vey some inner emo­tion – remain cold.

This is exac­er­bat­ed by Spielberg’s trade­mark visu­al style, built on hand-held cam­eras and lib­er­al use of the close-up. Applied to War Horse this accen­tu­ates the stagy pro­duc­tion, expres­sive the­atri­cal act­ing, and adds lit­tle in the way of psy­cho­log­i­cal insight or dra­mat­ic tension.

Spiel­berg seems far more com­fort­able in his depic­tion of the war itself. The first bat­tle marks a wel­come, more con­fi­dent shift in the film’s tone. The depic­tion of the Somme is accom­plished, and one scene in par­tic­u­lar – where Joey runs into no man’s land – is breathtaking.

These scenes suc­ceed by depict­ing real events in a real­is­tic, if stylised, way. But oth­er­wise War Horse is at pains only to allude to the grue­some truth. The whole film – pre­sum­ably to secure fam­i­ly friend­ly cer­ti­fi­ca­tion – is bizarrely blood­less. Sol­diers get shot, blown up, exe­cut­ed, but not a drop of claret is shed. When a trench is mortared, the vic­tims form bal­let­ic shapes, mid-air. Bod­ies lit­ter­ing the bat­tle­field fall with the geo­met­ric pre­ci­sion of The Giant’s Causeway.

Despite hints of bril­liance, the effect is over-sen­ti­men­tal and unsat­is­fy­ing. Good char­ac­ters are good; bad ones are bad. Nuance and ambi­gu­i­ty are drowned out by rep­e­ti­tion, over-act­ing, cheesy dia­logue and a John Williams sound­track as thick as horse manure.

And so War Horse is a strange sort of hybrid, wound­ed by the inter­nal ten­sions between what it might be: bed­side sto­ry, seri­ous the­atre, hol­i­day movie. As a result it seems to under­es­ti­mate the intel­li­gence of its audi­ence – kids most of all.

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