‘War Horse’

By Bob Garver

For the past few months I’ve jok­ingly referred to Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” as “Oscar, Please”. I’ve had this men­tal pic­ture of Spiel­berg sub­mit­ting a can­is­ter of film to a low-level Acad­emy employee and then arro­gantly out­stretch­ing his hand expect­ing to receive an award.

The rea­son I think this way is that the film incor­po­rates a lot of ele­ments that typ­i­cally lead to a good show­ing in Oscar vot­ing. The film has shots of Eng­lish coun­try­side, har­row­ing war scenes, tales of tri­umph, Euro­pean accents, a swelling score by John Williams, lovely evening light­ing in the final scene, and of course a horse that you can’t help but love. Spiel­berg com­bines all of these ele­ments mar­velously, but the sheer quan­tity of the ele­ments makes it seem like he’s pan­der­ing to Acad­emy mem­bers. That said, Acad­emy mem­bers have good taste and if you have good taste you’ll prob­a­bly find a lot to like about “War Horse”.

The horse is pur­chased early in the film by a drunken but good-natured farmer (Peter Mul­lan) who risks his family’s farm buy­ing a beau­ti­ful horse instead of a prac­ti­cal one that can pull a plow. His son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) has an imme­di­ate rap­port with the horse, who he names Joey. I couldn’t be sure, but I think there might be some­thing off about Albert as far as his men­tal fac­ul­ties. That’s another one of those awards-bait ele­ments right there. With rent due and the landlord’s patience run­ning out, Albert must get Joey to plow a key field. Against all odds the team suc­ceeds and they become insep­a­ra­ble. But then they’re sep­a­rated. The father needs more money after all and the British army needs horses for World War I. Joey is sold and goes to war.

Joey sees the war from both sides as he’s passed around from one owner to another. He starts out with a hot­shot British cap­tain (Tom Hid­dle­ston), then is cap­tured by Ger­mans and put in the care of two teenagers who try to desert, then is found and by a girl and her grand­fa­ther on a farm in France, then is taken by Ger­mans to pull artillery, then escapes and becomes trapped in the mid­dle of a bat­tle­field dur­ing a tense stand­off between armies. Joey is very lucky in all his adven­tures as it seems there’s always some horse-lover nearby to stick up for him just as he’s about to be shot. Albert mean­while joins the army hop­ing to track Joey down and goes through some wartime adven­tures of his own.

The bat­tle scenes are very well done, cap­tur­ing the hor­rors of war while not mak­ing the film inap­pro­pri­ate for a PG-13 audi­ence. And the plow scene at the begin­ning is an inspi­ra­tion to us all. But the film’s best scene is the one where poor Joey is trapped in the mid­dle of the bat­tle­field as sol­diers from both sides empathize with his strug­gle. The char­ac­ters’ actions in this scene are very low-key, but the ten­sions are very high. The scene proves that Spiel­berg is a great film­maker even when he’s not han­dling a flashy blockbuster.

“War Horse” is Steven Spielberg’s best film in a while. I like him more when he does seri­ous films like this one. I believe 2005’s “Munich” was his last great one. He’s been drop­ping the ball lately on his “fun adven­ture” movies like the alien-heavy fourth “Indi­ana Jones” install­ment and the dull big screen adap­ta­tion of “Tintin”. I was afraid that “War Horse” would be a beau­ti­ful but uncom­pelling film, and I’m glad that it turned out those fears were unfounded.

Three and a Half Stars out of Five.

“War Horse” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of war vio­lence. Its run­ning time is 146 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jan 9 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.