War Horse

A master can take anything and make a masterpiece. 

Picasso and his canvas, Willie Nelson in a studio or on a stage, Mamet preparing a play or Stephen King with a new story in mind. 

Or Steven Spielberg making a movie. 

After The Fabelman’s came out I looked through the Spielberg catalogue and wondered what I had missed. Most of what he’s done, good, bad or indifferent, I saw when it came out or shortly after.

And some of it I wasn’t alive for but I’m mostly caught up.

But War Horse looked hoky and so I let it pass by. I caught it this weekend as I moved through the list. 

The first thing that struck me as it the end credits rolled was how much of this movie felt like classic Hollywood. That’s usually Speilberg’s thing but this was especially old school.

I’m not sure any other filmmaker has the taste or the options that are available to Spielberg. At this stage of his career he can do pretty much whatever he wants. And it seems like what he wants to is to shoot for classics. 

If you had told me War Horse was a lost movie from the 1950s the only thing that might have give me pause would be the digital color palette. 

Spielberg, or at least the Spielberg of the last 20 years or so, tends to make movies that live in the legacy of the classic, classy filmmakers of his youth. 

After War Horse he made Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The BFG, The Post, Ready Player One, and a remake of West Side Story.

I think Lincoln is one of the great movies in American Cinema and I think the rest are all good to great. (I’ve not seen the BFG or Ready Player One). 

But I also think that Spielberg has clearly made a choice to make movies for everyone. 

This is maybe the only war movie made in the last 40 years in which there is absolutely no blood. 

That doesn’t mean it’s not good. They made classics for decades under the Hays Code. 

But even as the director and the camera found another unique way to hide the violence I couldn’t help but be struck by just how good Spielberg is at this. 

There is a shot where he uses a windmill to shield us from a shooting. And another where the audience learns the fate of a group of rides just by seeing the horses ride past a group a machine guns. The horse run free, their riders dead in the field behind them. 

War Horse is, essentially, a series of vignettes about the war. We see life in the shire (kidding — it’s a farming community in England) before the war. 

Then the movie moves through the lives of England’s mounted cavalry, German soldiers, a French farm and finally into the the horrors of trench warfare. 

At several points I was amused by what can be done when you have, essentially, unlimited funds and massive manpower. 

You can, essentially, send an army into No Man’s Land and have everything look absolutely realistic. 

I don’t want you to think that I was wrong when I assumed this was a hoky movie 11 years ago and ignored it. 

It is a hoky movie. And a hoky horse movie at that. 

But Spielberg is still a master and watching this — seeing the warm heart and directors expertise at work — I couldn’t help but be swept along. 

With fifty years of filmmaking behind him War Horse may not even make it into Spielberg’s top 10. 

But it’s a fine work done by a master. It’s got his signature on it from the opening shot till the curtains come down.