Tired old nag of a film (1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 January

Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)

Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.

So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.

Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.

After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.

So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!


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