War Horse

Steven Spielberg's new live action offering is a mixed bag. More syrupy than an IHOP breakfast, War Horse has enough striking scenes to make it worth watching.

Devon farmer Ted Narracut (Peter Mullan) buys thoroughbred horse Joey at an auction. His son Albie (Jeremy Irvine) bonds with the horse and gets him to plow the family fields, foiling the dastardly schemes of landowner Lyons (David Thewlis). When World War I breaks out, Ted sells Joey to the British army, and the horse goes through a nightmarish odyssey. Joey serves successively as a British cavalry horse, an ambulance driver, the pet of a French girl (Celine Buckens) and her doting grandfather (Niels Arestrup), and a German artillery horse, somehow managing to survive each encounter. At the Second Battle of the Somme he escapes captivity and reunites with Albie, now serving in the British army. But will the badly injured horse survive?

Steven Spielberg has never shied away from sentimentality, but War Horse takes it to an almost-unbearable extreme. The first half-hour is an assembly of obnoxious cliches: precocious kid, broken-down father, long-suffering wife, underdog horse, a mustache-twirling landowner demanding rent and an impossible goal to save the farm. No emotional scene is unaccompanied by ennobling lighting and pompous John Williams music, least of all the Gone With the Wind-inspired finale. John Ford and Frank Capra would blanch at this emotive excess.

Once this preliminary nonsense is disposed of, War Horse gets a lot more interesting. Writers Richard Curtis and Lee Hall provide an episodic structure, allowing Joey (and the audience) to meet a cross-section of vividly-rendered personages. Spielberg takes the war content seriously, showing the Western Front as a repository of suffering and waste. Civilians are displaced from their homes, families separated, soldiers killed at random. Animals like Joey are cruelly worked to death, even more disposable than their human counterparts. Even his miraculous escape from No Man's Land might not save him.

Spielberg's direction is handsome, contrasting idyllic shots of the Devon countryside with the ugliness of war-torn Europe. If he goes overboard in spots, he shows a more sensitive touch in other scenes, especially the extended sequences with the French girl, and a scene where British and German soldiers team up to free Joey from barbed wire. The quiet human scenes are more effective than the overwrought "arty" bits.

The battle scenes are shot in approved Hayes Code fashion, with the gory details tastefully obscured. My favorite bit is a cavalry charge gone disastrously wrong, with a beautiful shot of riderless horses hurtling through the German lines. The large-scale Somme battle is less inspired, with a tracking shot blatantly stolen from Paths of Glory.

Newcomer Jeremy Irvine is boringly guileless and weepy, allowing Joey to steal their every scene. The supporting cast is better. Emily Watson and Pete Mullan shine as Albie's hard-luck parents: screw the kid, these two deserve a movie of their own. The best characters come in the war scenes: Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch as British cavalrymen with anachronistic views of warfare, Leonard Carrow and David Kross (The Reader) as a pair of ill-fated German soldiers, and best of all, Celine Buckens (surprisingly uncutesy) and Niels Arestrup.

Whether War Horse is appealing depends on one's temprament. It's grandly cliched and sugary enough to kill a diabetic, but these qualities make it comfortable viewing. The "old-fashioned" label certainly applies; I leave it to the viewer whether that's good or bad.