There are extraordinary and beautiful things in “War Horse,” enough of them to make the movie a pleasure and a worthwhile experience, though not enough to trick the eye or get you believing this movie hangs together. As messy as it is inspired, it jumps from episode to episode, lurching unexpectedly to life — more entertaining than it seemingly should be and, all the while, making you feel things, whether you want to or not.
Yes, this is a Steven Spielberg picture. He directed it and, like Blondie in the old song, he’s gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, one way or another. If you have a grudge against Spielberg, you will find everything about him that you don’t like in “War Horse,” such as sentimentality and grandly obvious effects, like “Gone With the Wind” sky lighting and blatantly heroic compositions. But pay attention also to how quickly Spielberg establishes character and to the truth he gets from his actors. Notice also the dazzling brilliance of his action sequences and how alive his camera is to the subtleties of human feeling.
“War Horse” is adapted from a London stage play, in which the full grown horses were operated by several clearly visible puppeteers. It seemed easy — like an obvious opportunity to make it all better, bigger and more real — to transfer that vision to celluloid. But transplants are dangerous. The delicate meshing of elements that made the stage play effective, such as aspects of tone and emphasis, and degrees of harshness and unreality, becomes unsettled in the movie. Something magical is lost, and the relentless specifics of the battle scenes often undercut the play’s sad fairy tale quality.
By far, the most unexpected loss, from stage to screen, is narrative cohesion. In essence, the movie is about everything that happens to a horse named Joey, who starts out on a farm and then is sold into service during World War I. Like the play, the movie is episodic, lingering here and there to explore the lives of the various people that Joey meets. But in the play, Joey was always on stage, if only in the background, so it always felt like his story. In a film, we can’t always see the horse, and so the story feels more start-and-stop. There was no way around this. It’s just something that can happen when you adapt something from one medium into another, then look up and realize, “uh-oh.”
Too smart not to have seen the problem early in the process, Spielberg concentrates on what he can fix, doing everything he can to make each episode rich, fraught and full. Life on the farm is a soft-focus nightmare, in which a stupid drunken farmer (Peter Mullan) turns a racehorse into a plow horse, and the teenage son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine) strives to protect the horse from abuse. Later, we get the vivid horror of the old warfare meeting the new, when the horse takes part in a gallant cavalry charge ... right into machine-gun fire.
A particular highlight is the brief idyll in which Joey comes into the possession of a French farm girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup). Entire movies have been crafted of less emotional material: the beautiful countryside, the threatening war and the sound of guns, the sickly girl with a big spirit, the old man determined to protect her at all costs. This is entirely lovely and yet probably constitutes 15 minutes of screen time at most. Spielberg just tosses this off.
“War Horse” is a strange concoction, and yet every so often the poetic and the terrible meet in ideal symbiosis. The horse’s terrified night charge across the battlefield, over the front lines and through the trenches, in itself justifies the movie. It constitutes one of Spielberg’s finest sequences, difficult to bring off and perfectly realized in its grandeur, realism and pain.
A subsequent interlude, in which enemy soldiers meet in no man’s land, has humor, suspense and uplift. It’s like watching this filmmaker’s philosophy, embodied in a single sequence.
“War Horse” is not Spielberg’s best movie, nor is it even close. But it’s no small thing that it contains some of his best stuff.
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Movie review
“War Horse”
Grade: B
Opens Sunday at metro theaters.
Starring Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup and Peter Mullan. Directed by Steven Spielberg.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of war violence. 2 hours, 27 minutes.
Bottom line: A sentimental ride.
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