WAR HORSE Post-Release Thread

Are we talking Best Picture here? There really aren't that many other contenders this year.

I am interested in seeing war horse out of curiosity. I had a friend who saw a press screening or something and called it the 'possibly the most effective piece of schmaltzy filmmaking ever'

If something can be that cravenly manipulative and effective at the same time, then it truly deserves my respect and monies

It's been awhile since I watched a Spielberg movie I thought was great from start to finish.  I guess Munich would be the closest to it.  But he's still the master of putting together individual sequences.  So, with the episodic nature of this film, maybe that will work in his favor.

Hearing lots of friends who are down on the schmaltz.  Curious about this one.

As a huge Spielberg fan (I dont even mind Hook) I thought this was a big chore to sit through.  I have no problem with the schmaltz or manipulation.  I just thought it was boring as all hell.

The first act is a big stumbler but once the Horse meets the War this movie is one incredible scene after another. The John Ford comparisons you keep reading are all completely accurate. Absolutely loved this.

Quelle surprise, myself (Spielberg lunatic) and the (hesitant) group I was with found it to be remarkably moving. The craft on display is textbook. Filmaking at its finest. If this were anyone other than Speilberg it would be getting ovations.

You're a spoiled lot.

There are an awful lot of horse closeups against moody sunsets. My takeaway from all this was, wow, that kid really loved that horse.

Otherwise, it feels a whole lot like Forrest Gump, because the horse doesn't really do much, he just survives. Also, he has a black best friend, and the kid is a real Meg Ryan.

This post is fueled by eggnog.

Gabe T, I know you've been depressed lately, and often seem to (arguably) be a contrarion for contrarion's sake, but Gump? Really?

Not all sentiment is equal.

I'm willing to chalk it up to me not liking horses. There were so many closeups and everyone was like, such a beautiful creature! Look at his eyes! And I was just like, it's a fucking horse. We ride it.

Joey finds a newfangled telegraph headset and hoofs in the coordinates of Wilhelm II's Christmas dinner.

The horse doesn't do much?!? That fuggin' horse might as well been Daniel Day-Lewis, it performed its tail off. If there was ever a year where a non-human creature deserved a nomination, it's this thoroughbred named Joey(or the possible seven horses that played him). The scene where it demanded to pull the tank in place of darkie alone was incredibly effective. And the climactic surge of jumping over trenches and tragic run through the barbs was so exhilarating I wanted to hug Spielberg for making it.

Schmaltz abounds. But as someone already said, it's for damn sure earned.

If it's earned how can it be schmaltz?

I think cynicism is precisley the key here, and has been in general in film criticism for some time. Applaud the cold, distant, calculatingly-pierced Dragon Tattoo's of the film world all you like -- gimme War Horse any fucking day of the week. This is how movies are made, and have been made, since the very idea of cinema.

There's nothing wrong with calculation. Every aspect of filmmaking is calculated to evoke emotion. Except War Horse is impeccably made while, underneath the gloss and flash, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is actually an incredibly shitty and illogical story.

I was kinda frustrated seeing such exceptional actors like Peter Mullan, David Thewlis and Emily Watson playing such rote "Types." Especially considering both Mullan and Thewlis are so, so, so great giving very complex performances this year in Tyrannosaur and Mr. Nice, respectively. It's not fair to compare those two movies to War Horse, but being reminded how much dimension Mullan and Thewlis can bring characters, and then being reduced to Spielberg chess pieces, was depressing.

I think it's cool that people can be wowed by the scope and earnestness of this movie, and they can find Spielberg gives the horse some sort of inner life. But the things you guys are saying about people who aren't fond of the picture are awfully aggressive. Though yes, I would rather watch this than experience the toxicity of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" any day. Of course, I'll pass on a second viewing of either, however.

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Originally Posted by Zollicoffer 

The horse doesn't do much?!? That fuggin' horse might as well been Daniel Day-Lewis, it performed its tail off. If there was ever a year where a non-human creature deserved a nomination, it's this thoroughbred named Joey(or the possible seven horses that played him). 

Also, come on. It's a fucking animal. It can't tell you how it feels. It can't gesture. It can open its eyes wider, and they can frame shots to make it look like the animal is doing something. But let's get serious. 

I just saw the results of the Indiewire critics' poll, and half of the Best Supporting Actors (some of them quite excellent, like Jeremy Irons in Margin Call) received less votes than the dog from "The Artist." IT"S A FUCKING DOG.

This "get this animal a SAG card!" movement is absurdly strange to me.

Voter idiosyncrasies shouldn't lessen the valuable work that animals (who, let's face it, are hardly volunteers) do in film.

But the horse isn't actually the focus. They aren't even trying to anthropomorphize him. He's just a vehicle to explore different human stories, and the various aspects of war, etc.

It's disingenuous to pretend these animals have human feelings or can "act" in a scene though. In fact animal welfare folks often point to this fallacy as a big problem in animal rights. The original trainer of FLIPPER says that the dolphin's natural features which can resemble a smile are its greatest weakness, since it always looks happy even when it's in a theme park

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jacob Singer 

I think cynicism is precisley the key here, and has been in general in film criticism for some time. Applaud the cold, distant, calculatingly-pierced Dragon Tattoo's of the film world all you like -- gimme War Horse any fucking day of the week.

I love you for that.  Dragon Tattoo was a beautifully made chore.  War Horse may be schmaltz, but I'll be goddamned if it doesn't earn every tear it wrings from you.  Some of the sequences are (with no hyperbole) awe-inspiring.

I think we found the pull quote for the blu-ray cover.

In all seriousness though, am looking forward to seeing this.

Since I have yet to see it, this is not about War Horse; but regarding schmaltz vs. earned emotion, I think what's interesting is that some people think if a movie has done sufficiently well establishing character and incident over the first couple acts, it has a sort of license to be sentimental towards the end.  For me personally, just because a film has been good, that doesn't mean it should indulge in gratuitous shows of emotion any more than a bad film should.  If a film's emotional content comes naturally to it, it can be as over the top as it wants, whenever it wants (e.g. Magnolia), but no matter how good the preceding film has been, audiences can detect when the director is gilding the lily (as in Schindler's List.)

I think those rules are too stringent. As the great Darryl Dawkins once said, "You can't fake the funk on a nasty dunk."

I'd say it's 33% tone, 33% characterization and 33% audience engagement. First you have to have a story that feels like it can accomodate that heightened sentiment, then you need characters that are engaging enough to stir these feelings in the audience. One of Spielberg's strengths has always been crafting characters with life, and he's always been able to inject his performers with heaps of energy adn make them fun to watch. That encourages the audience to be actively interested in them.

This leads to the last third, which is the viewer being engaged and willing to involve themselves emotionally. IMO this is a very subjective thing which involves a lot of factors on the viewer's part: Are they naturally emotional? Do the characters/story resonate with them on a personal level? Are there things in their personality/history that give them this sense of resonance? Sentimentality is just as tricky as comedy to pull off because of this subjectivity, and these percentages above probably change from audience member to audience member. Just like a great comedian, Spielberg just knows how to push those buttons in a way that's irresistible 95% of the time.

It's certainly subjective.  I'm just saying I think sometimes people having a conversation about a film "earning emotion" are talking about two different things.

You see, I don't think it really is two different things. When people say 'earn', they mean if the characters, tone etc have been sufficiently crafted for that emotional content to come naturally. We just notice that craft less when it works.

Using numbers and percentages is a little odd, though. Movies are not math equations.

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Originally Posted by Gabe T 

Using numbers and percentages is a little odd, though. Movies are not math equations.

They were really meant more as a figure of speech than anything specific; In fact, looking back, I didn't really need to put it like that at all. It was more to illustrate the principle.

Spielberg is already torn apart by culture critics like Slavoj Zizek and his ilk, but it still blows my mind how obliviously inviting he has become to basically every Freudian reading you want to level at his movies. War Horse seems like the absolute culmination of all that, what with Freud's various theories about the symbolism of horses he goes into in some of his writings. I adore Spielberg, but sometimes that kind of unexamined earnestness and emotional honesty has drawbacks when you're in such an incredibly public position, and this seems like the most unfortunate instance of "awkward art" I've seen in a while.

Although it is exactly that kind of unexamined ability to go for the uncensored emotional response that makes Spielberg a unique artist, and that's why he's one of the best directors out there today while people like Fincher or Soderbergh feel the need to set up layers of self-conscious irony and artifice in order to distance the audience (and themselves) from the actual story.

I have to disagree that his "earnestness" has been "unexamined". If anything, it's been the single most over-examined aspect of what is otherwise a spectacularly brilliant career. The man is an American Master of film. If sentiment is that big a problem for you (not aimed at anyone in particular), perhaps drama is not what you're looking for.

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Originally Posted by Richard Dickson 

Show this in black and white and slap John Ford or Frank Capra on the director credit, and people would be falling all over themselves calling it a classic.

Amen.
 

I think the old-fashionedness is very intentional, and self-aware. If you told me that last sequence of the boy and his horse coming home was an undiscovered ending of a 1930's MGM epic recently found and digitally colorized, I would've believed you (apart from the recognizable actors, of course). Spielberg is just too confident in the form to ever once wink at the audience. 

For all the lumps this has (and will continue to) take for it's "earnestness" and sentimentality and the characters' simplicity, I feel like if you took Spielberg's name off it and put, say, Todd Haynes's name instead, those same people would be praising it for it's daring. This is a polarizing and downright risky movie, and I loved it for that, and loved it for what it is. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard Dickson 

Spielberg also avoids taking sides in the war.  This isn't "Yay England, Boo Germany!"  Both sides have their good souls and their jerks, and Spielberg seems to paint the war itself as the enemy, not the participants.

Well that was the irony of WW1. It was literally the most confusing clusterfuck in all of history. A bunch of people going to war for infathomable reasons led by people with no clue what they're doing (british commanders forced canadian soldiers to do a 19th century style combat line and got themselves machine gunned to death) or even a good reason as to why they're fighting. No one hated each other, hell nobody even mildly disliked each other. We just killed because we were ordered to under fear of penalty. The war itself truly was the enemy, some bubbling darkness of human nature which escaped for possibly the least feasable reasons and we were trapped in that miasma of anger, resentment and confusion for decades afterwards.

I'm just glad Spielberg didn't american this up for the film. Unlike WW2, The US involvement was largely secondary to the whole of the war effort and not a decisive factor in victory. Most of the horror and the tragedy was really experienced by the british, french, commonwealth, and germans (thats why all quiet on the western front is such an excellent novel despite being from the enemy's perspective).

While paths of glory is a great film and required viewing, I recommend watching the Canadian film Passchendale. It is largely a somewhat turgid romantic war drama (i swear the director/writer Paul Gross saw the name of the Battlefield and went 'Paschendale.... PASSIONDALE' yes its that stupid at times, but not Pear Harbor level of insultingly stupid). I recommend skipping through it to the Battle sequences which has the most historically accurate recreation of a battlefield ever committed to film (probably as well as the dirtiest)

And Gabe T, the obsession with readers on the horse is that we tend to associate and project ourselves and our fears and desires onto animals and it becomes an open conduit for inserting ourselves into the movie without having to work through a personality in the case of the actors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard Dickson 

Spielberg also avoids taking sides in the war.  This isn't "Yay England, Boo Germany!"  Both sides have their good souls and their jerks, and Spielberg seems to paint the war itself as the enemy, not the participants.

Yeah, but isn't this the safest and least interesting approach?

I would actually say one of the bright spots in this film are the sides he DOES take. It's defiantly pro-soldier, and antimilitary. Which yields some decent performances (particularly from the always-classy Tom Hiddleston) but, I dunno, such a safe thing to argue. Did "Munich" terrify him that much?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard Dickson 

Show this in black and white and slap John Ford or Frank Capra on the director credit, and people would be falling all over themselves calling it a classic.

Isn't this not really a great thing? Contemporary filmmaking is a different beast. To make something so distinctly old-fashioned feels like a strategy made in a creative bubble. Spielberg has shown he can change with the times, which reduces this film to a stylistic experiment not very different from what people like Soderbergh or Haynes have done, with the exception that they use these devices to inform contemporary culture (one could also throw Grindhouse into this bin).

There's something to be said about the artistic failures of being square.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jacob Singer 

I have to disagree that his "earnestness" has been "unexamined". If anything, it's been the single most over-examined aspect of what is otherwise a spectacularly brilliant career. The man is an American Master of film. If sentiment is that big a problem for you (not aimed at anyone in particular), perhaps drama is not what you're looking for.

I meant they're unexamined by Spielberg himself. Obviously other people have very thoroughly examined the ways in which Spielberg is very earnest -- I mentioned Zizek, for instance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard Dickson 

In a time when we're all too ready to demonize the other side as a monstrous barbaric enemy and to insist that our cause is infallibly right, I'd say it's not a safe choice to say that there's humanity on both sides of any conflict.

I'm not arguing against the approach of humanity vs. non-humanity, but rather Spielberg's overly optimistic, hard-to-swallow duality. I think it's an argument for contemporary times - is there ever a moment that you are watching War Horse and believe these people are real, that their human moments were genuine, that the questionable decisions of the hissable villains were motivated by anything other than moving the plot along? That they're behaving in a real manner, and not in an old-timey movie manner? 

Obviously we can't evaluate the Ford movies like that because we weren't alive in those times, but Spielberg's working under a whole other level of artifice with his approach to "not taking sides" in this movie. I didn't ever once start to think about what these characters were doing when they were not at war, not within the narrative. I don't think he humanized them as much as "made a movie about some ok guys and some not ok guys who were all movie characters."

Who in the world would try to look smart by saying a film was completely boring and that they don't like horses? Why be so belligerent over people who thought this thing was a snore?

I don't really think one could be over-analytical about the most prominent filmmaker of his era. Nor do I think I'm even scratching the surface. I didn't buy it at all. Saying that isn't an audition for Cahiers du Cinema.