War Horse

We really are just gonna follow the horse, aren’t we? For a Steven Spielberg war film, it’s not exactly Schindler’s List.

You know it’s December, right? The time of year when big films come out to play, strutting their stuff, flexing their muscles, kicking sand in the faces of mock Oscar films starring Sean Penn and driving audiences to overflowing rivers of tears, right? And here’s an entry by a fellow who knows Oscar so well, when they go out drinking together, he holds Oscar’s head while the other vomits. And yet, his entry is small. So small. It looks big: Gotcher World War I, gotcher European battlefields, gotcher tragedy, gotcher romance, and yet I feel like this is the poor man’s PG version of Inglorious Basterds.

Don’t let me sell you aluminum siding; War Horse is not without its charms. There is elation and pain and angst in this tale. My thesis is the elation, pain and angst fails to mirror a backdrop which claimed five million lives. We start out in rural England where a boy named Albert (Jeremy Irvine) develops what I’d consider an unhealthy relationship with his pet steed. Horse lovers may think otherwise. War Horse or “Joey” as young not-so-fat Albert names him, grows up on the farm having very small scale adventures, but hey, we all gotta leave the nest at some point. So Joey then travels abroad, making the most of Europe in the 1910s. Unfortunately, most of Europe in the 1910s is at war. A lot and everywhere. Somewhere over the next four years then, Joey becomes “War Horse”. I guess they can’t exactly award him a purple heart instead.

There is one fantastic scene in which War Horse, helplessly tangled in barbed wire between opposing battle trenches, is aided by exactly one Englishman and one German. This is the kind of thing Steven Spielberg does as well as anybody in the biz – convey endearing emotion to an absurd situation. “Sure, in ten minutes we’re going to attack each other with bayonets, but let’s cut the horse free together like we own neighboring farms.”

The biggest problem with War Horse is War Horse. Joey loses his boy and several other groups of people over the course of the film and we follow the animal, not any given human. Hence, lacking for another tether, we as audience are forced to react to Joey’s new environment each time – his adjustment to farm life, to the military, to friendship, to war, to a princess, to entrapment, to slavery, to injury. War Horse does his own acting here; he’s not played by two guys in a horse suit. Awwwww. And if you read horse emotion, this might just be your favorite favourite film ever.

I don’t.

Rated PG-13, 146 Minutes
D: Steven Spielberg
W: Lee Hall & Richard Curtis
Genre: Big backdrop, small action
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Animal lovers
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Human lovers