Spielberg's Horse Tale

"War Horse" is the first Steven Spielberg film to be edited digitally. He was the final holdout who manually cut actual film on a flatbed editing board. This move to the modern seems odd since everything else about the production feels like it comes from a earlier time. Handsomely mounted and utterly sappy, "War Horse" is the director's least successful picture since "The Terminal"; it has its moments, but they are undercut by a complete lack of faith in the audience not trusting them to find the emotiona beats but being lead to them by John Williams' bombastic score.

The film is based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, which also inspired the current Broadway play. It is the story of Joey, the war horse of the title, and Albert (Jeremy Irvine), the boy who raises him, trains him, and loves him. The film takes its time getting the horse to war; the first quarter or so of the film concerns the horse's formative time, as Albert attempts to make Joey into a plow horse, and thus save his family farm. In these village and farm scenes, nestled in lush, rolling hills, Spielberg is clearly aping John Ford's "The Quiet Man", but the lovely visuals are constantly undercut by Williams' musical swells.

As the parents, the venerable character actors Emily Watson and Peter Mullan give their stereotypical roles some weight. Dear old Dad drinks too much and allows his pride cloud his judgement. Mum is wise and steadfast. Due to various calamities the family is forced to sell Joey to the British army at the outset of World War I. We then follow Joey on his travels: from the British army to the Germans, to a French farmhouse, back to the Germans, and, well, you can probably guess the finale. It's one of those international movies where the German soldiers and the French peasants all speak English, rendering a line complimenting a German soldier's grasp of the language into a bit of a head-scratcher.

The film is visually gorgeous, every frame is a pretty picture; we'd expect nothing less of Spielberg and his regular cinematographer, the great Janusz Kaminski. They fill the film with elegant compositions (the shot with the windmill blades is masterful) and infectious warmth. But they're also altogether too reliant on the crutches of Spielberg's style: the hero angle and big, slow, low-shot zooms--there are probably as many of both.

The battle scenes are brilliantly staged, though once Spielberg gets to the trench warfare, he appears to be repeating cues from "Saving Private Ryan" over a dozen years ago but none of the sequences carry the weight of the earlier film. In addition, the stakes are far lower--the film is so conventional that we're fairly certain how it's going to turn out so there's not much suspense. There, and elsewhere in the third act, the film only shines in the pauses.

One of those pauses is the picture's best single scene, which finds a British and German soldier coming together in no mans land. This is a small, human, funny, and rather remarkable encounter, and it's so well observed and believable that it only draws our attention to how phony the rest of the film is. Some of that's the writing; some of it is the director's too-presentational staging. But much of that is Williams's overstuffed and nonstop music, which can take even the most finely-tuned encounter and slather it in so much string-assisted artificiality as to render it all into Hollywood pap.

There are moments, here and there; the way the Frenchman protects his granddaughter, the horse's climactic run and the real emotion worked up in the third act. "War Horse"offers many pretty pictures, some excellent scenes but falls short.