War Horse feels like a movie that couldn’t have been made by anyone other than Steven Spielberg. It also, confusingly, feels like it wasn’t made by him at all, as if he had handed the job off to one of his protégés and let Ron Howard or Robert Zemeckis take the reins (so to speak). In a technical sense, this is one of the most beautiful films of the year: no expense has been spared, no costume shop left unmolested, no extra told to stay in the dressing room, in Spielberg’s attempt to recreate the Europe that existed in the years of World War I. It is a film that can only be called grand, but it’s a grandeur of a sort that works against the ability of an audience to make any kind of connection with it.
Based on a 1982 children’s book by way of a 2007 stage adaptation, War Horse tells the story of Joey, the latest in the “strong-willed but noble and physically unmatched” archetype of screen horses which you’ll recognize from Secretariat and Seabiscuit. He’s a stubborn horse, wild and thought to be untameable, which makes it all the less likely that the Narracott family will get much out of him; they need a draft animal to plow the fields, but Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), head of the household, drunkenly spends three times as much as he can afford on a thoroughbred instead. His son, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), is infatuated with the animal, teaching him tricks like a dog, and seems to be the only human the horse will respond to. Irvine seems to have been asked by Spielberg to look at everything with such wide-eyed, tearful innocence that one eventually wonders if something is not actually wrong with his face.
Adventures ensue, of the fable-like sort that you might expect from a film based on what was originally a children’s book. Albert attaches a regimental flag of his father’s to Joey before he’s sold off to an officer who intends to use him as a cavalry mount in the early stages of World War I. From there, Joey and the flag transfer ownership through multiple hands as the war drags on, from a pair of brothers in the German army, to a young French girl, to a horse-loving artillery officer, and so on. Destiny and pluck seems to propel him through dangerous situations, although he is often at the mercy of his human minders, a good number of whom have less than desirable fates in store for them.
Most of these small vignettes last around 20 minutes of screen time, but by and large they fail to connect with any kind of emotional impact. It is a film that is uniformly well-acted (not least by the fourteen horses that portray Joey), but we spend so little time with each set of characters that their stories barely begin to resonate before we’re whisked off to another season and another set of owners, usually as the result of some tragedy (the more violent of which are often obscured or cut away from, this being a PG-13 film). These are moments that, in a longer work, might’ve been capable of real pathos or emotion, but here are simply experienced and moved past before they really have a chance to register.
There are exceptions, of course. Early on, we see cavalry charging towards machineguns obscured in a forest, and then the camera cuts to riderless horses galloping past those guns, their officers not being able to complete the trip. It's a beautiful moment, straight from the Spielberg playbook. Best, though, is an encounter between an Allied soldier and a German soldier in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. “You speak good English,” says the Brit to the German. The German thinks for a second, and replies, “I speak English well.”
It’s a charming moment, and one of the few instances of humor in the film that really seem to stick. Most of that humor, such as an ornery duck that - get this! - quacks a lot at people on the Narracott farm, seems a bit broad, and the first half-hour of the film overwhelms with whimsy, perhaps to counterbalance the darker moments ahead. The humor might fit within the confines of a film based on a children’s book, but there’s enough war in this movie to make this something that you definitely shouldn’t bring a child to. Horses are put down, kindly farmowners see their fields ransacked, and men go over the top in scenes of trench warfare that are, if slightly less intense than Saving Private Ryan, of comparable scale. Worst of all is a scene in which a terrified horse finds itself charging through a field laced with barbed wire; it’s wince-inducing for grown-ups, and likely to induce nightmares in younger viewers.
We’re left with a film that is probably inappropriate for the youngest possible audience members, but a bit too slick and mythological for adults to find anything real in. There’s practically zero historical context given here: a viewer unfamiliar with why World War I was fought will leave as mystified as when they walked in. We’re asked to connect with the characters, but are given little time to form any of those connections. The most time is given to the relationship between Albert and Joey at the beginning of the film, which is affecting in the generic way that any young-boy-and-first-pet story is liable to be in the hands of a competent filmmaker, but still falls somewhat short of any real emotional punch. Horse-lovers may find it easier to latch onto Joey as a central character, but he’s often placed in the background of the drama that sweeps up the humans who care for him.
Spielberg and his longtime collaborators, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and composer John Williams, seem to have taken War Horse as their opportunity to overwhelm an audience with what can only be called “movie magic.” It isn’t insincere, precisely, and definitely doesn’t feel as mercenary as it might have if Robert Zemeckis really had directed it, but it also lacks that spark that animated previous films of the trio, such as Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List. It is a simpler and safer story than those films, intended for younger audiences, but has replaced their reality with a kind of ersatz emotionalism. In the nuts-and-bolts world of photography and costuming and stage decoration, it is undeniably a triumph. In the realm of feeling, though, War Horse is more sentimental than real.
