“You’re not alone, are you? Because I’m here.”
For many of us Steven Spielberg is a name synonymous with cinematic adventures. From Jaws to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Jurassic Park he’s given us films that in their own right span numerous genres and at the very same time reside in the exact same one. In the last decade and a half, starting with Saving Private Ryan Spielberg has become a more and more sentimental kind of filmmaker. He continues to believe in adventure but at the same time with every film of his that he’s made, and with a good number of those that he’s produced, each seem to have this feeling to reach deep within his soul to try and say something about how he will idolize history in a way that we don’t see very often and also show even more how he as a person has grown from his features in the 70s and early 80s.
War of the Worlds (2005) was his foray into science fiction which reminded us of that weird idea that not all the plans of the “superior” beings are the greatest and more important to the story is how a regular man attempts to survive it all, as opposed to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) where the same themes are discussed but dealt with from a completely different perspective since we end up dealing with a much more self centered and driven protagonist who’s willing to abandon all for his own curiousity. A.I.:Artifical Intelligence (2001) was well documented as the film he made in celebration of his friend Stanley Kubrick who he worked on the story with and it shows how he’s able to tailor his own pseudo Kubrick style film in his absence.
Here in War Horse Spielberg reaches back into the history of film to find the pitch perfect tone and vision of cinema that is able to tell the tale of a time while masking it all through the life of a horse and the people he manages to touch along the way. We see this being done in films like The Lord of the Rings but those films tend to dilute the general idealized version of the setting by injecting uneeded action into the mix. War Horse doesn’t need that to succeed, instead it gives our characters something to display an unimaginable thing to be in awe at and let it let us believe that people can be better than their differences.
I’ve spoken this past year about the cynical nature of popular culture and how certain films, a lot of which managed to make it very high in my end of year best of list, managed to counteract that trend by being forthright about its intentions. War Horse is without a shadow of a doubt the best of those films. It doesn’t hide the fact that it is that movie that wants to make you cry and connect with a horse of all things. It wants you to believe that this horse can make the strangest of people stop and put their differences aside for even just a moment to collectively be in a state of wonderment, just as we are, and prove that there is good in the world and disregard anything to the contrary.
While the film touches a lot of characters it is clear that the main thought is the relationship between Joey and Albert (Jeremy Irvine). The relationship of Joey and Albert is akin to that of a boy and his beloved dog, to be a bit crude, but in a way that we adore even more than any dog fetishized film can do. Horses are a creature that unlike the dog, which is adored thanks to its cute loyal nature, is adored because it is majestic. It is the real world unicorn, and this movie doesn’t shy away from the majesty that comes with having a creature like Joey as our main protagonist that we continually empathize with from chapter to chapter of his journey from Albert in the countryside of England to the front lines of The Great War and back again.