War Horse
DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG
Employing a life-size, human-operated horse puppet to allegorically evoke the inhumanity, absurdity, and fundamental folly of war might well work brilliantly on stage. (The abundant praise for Nick Stafford’s theatrical adaptation of War Horse, Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel, suggests that this is indeed the case.) On screen, however, in the hands of Steven Spielberg, the result of a similar exercise is preposterous, unbearably sentimental melodrama. The removal of the the theatre’s attendant layer of abstraction renders War Horse the movie thuddingly heavy-handed, a sensation only exacerbated by John Williams’ ever-present, emotionally instructive score.
The film chronicles the journey of an equine protagonist named Joey, who bonds with a Devon farmhand before being sold to a British cavalry officer on the first day of the Great War, and who comes to serve a variety of human companions, on all sides of the conflict, until the the armistice in 1918. Joey’s various encounters are presented as a series of vignettes and serve to provide a sense of the enormous scope and scale of the hostilities, as well as to remind us that Joey, unlike his many masters, knows no allegiance. In the midst of the brutality, his solemn dignity captivates a succession of combatants, even as the arbitrary factor of their country of origin renders them largely incapable of demonstrating a similar compassion to their fellow human beings.
To be sure, as shot by regular Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kamiński, War Horse is routinely breathtaking, and, like The Adventures of Tintin amply demonstrates that Spielberg remains a master at staging big-budget spectacles. But the treacly, family-focused material also brings out the director’s less admirable inclinations towards outsized, overwrought emotion. His sentimentality can feel forced at the best of times and, here, as applied to a cast of thinly sketched characters and an impossibly noble horse, it becomes particularly laboured.