Big Screen Peter: War Horse

“War Horse” is the second movie by director Steven Spielberg to hit this holiday season. This picaresque equine adventure tells the tale of Joey, a part thoroughbred colt purchased at auction by Ted Narracott, an alcoholic farmer.

Narracott, a veteran of the Boer Wars, was at the auction in search of a plow horse, but was overawed by the plucky colt. The purchase of the horse imperils his family and his status as a tenant farmer in Devonshire, England. To save their stake, Ted’s son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) takes it upon himself to train Joey, eventually teaching the thoroughbred horse to plow.

With World War I breaking out in Europe, Joey is sold to a young British officer and sent to front lines in France. From there, Joey is cast about the theater of war in western Europe — surviving on a mixture of luck and intelligence.

The movie comes from a children’s novel of the same name by Michael Morpugo and its subsequent stage adaptation. Unlike other works of a similar stock, “War Horse” offers little to adult audiences beyond cheap tears. It’s overly melodramatic, pointedly playing off the innate attachment people have to animals. With their inability to directly communicate, emotions and thoughts are attributed to them.

From that emptiness, a narrative is born. This path is an easy one. The majority of the movie is utterly boring, a sappy and bloated romp that offers scant redemption beyond the catharsis of those cheap tears.

Granted, the movie (and the source material) is geared toward kids. But there is little honesty in the cinematic portrayal of the Great War. The depravity we see is only that which directly affects the horses. Even that is quickly balanced with spoonfuls of sugary humor. It’s a sickening exercise with sorely insufficient rewards. Like little Emily, a French child that comes to “own” Joey for a short period, children need honesty just as much as we “adults” do.

It’s sad to see such a master as Spielberg resorting to such empty tactics. And even sadder to be taken in by the melodrama (yes, it’s practically impossible to avoid tears while watching War Horse). An argument could even be made that this sort of cheap sentimentality is exactly what we need as a beset and divided nation. Where though does that sort of pliable route lead? No greatness is ever achieved without obstacles. Those ancient habitues of Rome knew whom fortune favored. And though the plight of Joey is an exercise in illuminating this proverb, the movie creators seem blissfully unaware.

It’s an unfortunate turn, for the movie is stocked to the brim with talent. Instead, War Horse plods forward, not unlike those large plow horses Ted Narracott’s needed at the outset. The result is a solipsistic deification of nature that favors neither horse nor human.

• War Horse is playing at the Carmike 14 and the Malco Cinema 16 in Fort Smith, and the Malco Van Buren Cinema. Link here for time and ticket info.
movies.yahoo.com/showtimes-tickets/?location=72901

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