There have been many great love stories in the history of cinema. Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Rhett and Scarlet in Gone with the Wind, Yuri and Lyra in Doctor Zhivago. Well, this week saw the addition of another great screen romance added to this swooning pantheon, a story of two lovers whose mutual desire and affection transcends the fear and horror of wartime. This love is of course between the heavily-accented country bumpkin Albert and his horse Joey in Spielberg’s latest film War Horse. This isn’t the first time a sweet bestial romance has attained the kind of colossal momentousness afforded to mere human couples. Indeed, some could read the history of cinema as a sweeping chronicle of man’s growing affection for fitties of the animal kingdom. Oscar favourite The Artist is acutely aware of this fact, portraying as it does the unfaltering romance between a movie star and his dog in the form of a silent film, harking back to the early days of cinema when such affairs were more commonplace and less frowned upon by the law. Where is Valentin’s lady-friend Peppy when his house is burning down with him lying unconscious in it? That’s right; she’s hoarding all his belongings in a mansion paid for with the money accumulated from a career he kick-started for her. Typical gold-digger. The dog is left to save his life. And if it seems unlikely that any man would prefer the amorous affections of a dog to the gorgeous Berenice Bejo, consider that the man in question here is French. Enough said.
Dogs and other small animals have always been man’s best friend though (apart from deer, which if Disney is to be believed are much more likely to be shot), so cinema has always reflected this closeness, for example the heartfelt, childhood-scarring moment when Old Yeller is shot in the face. This is not merely the loss of a friend, but of a true loved one. Kids have got to learn it all from somewhere after all. In any case, it wasn’t long before men and women were hankering for beasts of a somewhat larger nature. Take King Kong for instance. It is still a common misconception that Fay Wray is screaming in terror when a big, strong ape squeezes her tightly in his hairy fist. They are clearly screams of ecstasy, and later on screams of sheer delight at the bravery of her partner in defending her honour from the lecherous advances of creepy crawlies and dinosaurs. Peter Jackson took this even further, and to his credit realised the whole love story with a touch more romance and tenderness than the original. After all, what girl wouldn’t go weak at the knees at the prospect of a private ice-skate around the frozen pool of central park? Kong might be a savage murderer, but that’s no excuse for interrupting his date with a frankly excessive amount of army trucks and rocket launchers. Girls in the thirties just weren’t cut out for that kind of excitement.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that War Horse takes a leaf out of the Airplane! book of horse-loving, but with slightly less off-hand callousness. Albert wouldn’t take off for an emergency in the middle of the night without planting a sensual good-night kiss on Joey’s nose, especially knowing what we do about a horse’s natural anatomical advantages over humans. When angry they can be dangerous lovers, and my mate once watched a really dodgy video proving it.It is odd that such a breath-taking film should come from the likes of Steven Spielberg. Not only is the closest he’s come to pure screen romance between a young child and a clearly diseased long-necked alien, but for my money he hasn’t made anything worthy of his talents for nearly twenty years. In 1993, you see, he released both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. The former was always going to be a triumph, being precisely the kind of escapist rollicking adventure he had at that point specialised in since the early seventies. The latter was a much more unlikely success, but lightning truly struck and Spielberg, against all the odds, created to this day the most emotively powerful and sensitive, not to mention artful, fictional cinematic Holocaust piece. This in turn caused Spielberg to miss the boat: he stopped making fantastical adventures and started making worthy serious films, and in the process forgot how to do the former genre well (witness as testament to this the abysmal fourth Indiana Jones film). Instead of making really fun films every agreed were brilliant, we instead got the saccharine A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the terminally dull Munich, and the over-long and more importantly over-rated Saving Private Ryan (the first half an hour is admittedly gruelling and ground-breaking, but the film’s three hours long and most of that is about saving Matt Damon from certain death. Just let him die for god’s sake!)
However, whilst the woeful dead-behind-the-eyes The Adventures of Tintin forbids me from hailing War Horse as a return to form for Spielberg just yet, it is nonetheless an impressively moving and beautiful film. The problems with the often plodding episodic plot are issues with the novel and not with the film, but at their best these narrative tangents effectively illustrate the futility and poignancy of World War One, for example when a British and German soldier combine forces and friendly banter to cut Joey free from barbed wire. Janus Kaminski’s photography is utterly gorgeous, leading to some sublime image-making, from the soldiers mounting their steeds in a wheat-field to the dusky-red return of Joey to Dorset which recalls the close of Gone with the Wind. John Williams’ music is similarly superb, sacrificing memorable leit motifs for a score which complements the emotional dynamic of each scene of the film. Most importantly, it’s really well directed. Spielberg’s staging is uniformly excellent, with some scenes leaving an indelible impression, such as the execution obscured by the rotors of a windmill, and an evocation of trench warfare that is as intense, though not as brutal, as the celebrated D-Day landings battle in the aforementioned WW2 snore-fest.
Oh, and the horse is pretty good too.
Adam Hollingworth
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