Dances with Geishas.
The Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai, about a burned-out veteran of the Civil and the Indian wars who rediscovers his idealism while teaching Japanese soldiers how to use guns, is a sensitive, exquisitely detailed historical drama. It's also a crock. To figure out exactly what kind of crock, I had to think about the career of its director, Ed Zwick, and about Hollywood war pictures as a species.
Cruise's character, Nathan Algren, is a classic archetype: the stoic warrior whose dormant soul must be reawakened by commitment to a cause. The cause doesn't present itself right away. The film's first act has Algren agreeing to travel to Japan on a mercenary mission to teach soldiers in the nation's first conscripted national army how to use rifles and pistols and other modern weapons. For 200 years prior to the Meiji Restoration, the period depicted in The Last Samurai, Japan shut itself off from the rest of the world and continued to live as if the age of swords and shields had never ended.
When Algren arrives, Japan is split between rival influences, embodied by the young emperor (Shichinosuke Nakamura), who wants to unite and modernize Japan, and the followers of the more isolationist Shogunate, whose ranks include the samurai. Algren, a dour tough guy who's haunted by atrocities he witnessed as an Indian fighter, is frustrated and disappointed by his new job. The conscripts, being conscripts, are unskilled, and they lack a warrior's enthusiasm; they fight because they have to, not because they want to. Algren is a true warrior who loves a good fight and feels most alive on the battlefield. He's a hard man, perhaps emotionally numb. But he's not cynical, unlike his boss in Japan, Col. Bagley (Tony Goldwyn), whose conduct as Algren's superior officer during the Indian wars was sadistic and craven. (The Last Samurai cheats in protecting the image of its hero, Algren. In flashbacks to the Washita Creek Massacre, Bagley is shown firing at, and hitting, Native American civilians?including children?but when Algren takes aim at similar targets, the movie cuts away the instant he pulls the trigger.)
Algren's American capitalist bosses, including Bagley, pressure him to lead the conscripts into combat against a troublesome samurai, Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). Algren insists they're not ready, but his warnings are disregarded. His side gets routed, and after bravely holding off several enemy soldiers, he is taken captive by Katsumoto, who subtly breaks, retrains and converts the American. The re-education process is helped by Algren's chaste flirtation with his lovely host, a single mom named Taka (Koyuki) who just happens to be the widow of a warrior Algren killed. Algren's conversion to all things Japanese occupies much of the film's second act. Despite the eastern trappings, it bears less resemblance to the typical samurai adventure than to Dances with Wolves, another epic about a soul-dead Caucasian Civil War vet who is reawakened by contact with nonwhites and ends up defending his adopted culture against his birth culture.
Cowritten by Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz and John Logan (Gladiator), The Last Samurai is a restrained, intelligent, handsome movie. Here, as in Far and Away, Cruise is unconvincing as a 19th-century man?when he purges himself of 20th- and 21st-century mannerisms, he just seems peevish?but he's credible on horseback and in the swordfight sequences. And his matter-of-fact relentlessness seems very military. Cinematographer John Toll, production designer Lilly Kilvert and costumer Ngila Dickson create images that are alternately informative and dreamily potent. (The first sight of Katsumoto's heavily armored horsemen materializing from a foggy forest may remind movie buffs of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Welles' Macbeth.) There's no crudeness or sadism, and while the movie embraces certain stock elements (the hero haunted by atrocities, the remorseless and amoral superior officer, the shy and lovely war widow), it rarely develops those elements in a predictable way.
Algren's friendship with Katsumoto is unsentimental, born of mutual wariness and curiosity; surprisingly, it ends not with the men respecting each other as "equals," but with the white hero becoming the Asian man's loyal warrior servant?a samurai to the samurai. The hero's relationship with Taka is also classy, like something out of an old movie. Modern Hollywood convention primes us for a soft-focus sex scene that never arrives; this movie's equivalent is an elegant, nearly wordless montage in which Taka helps Algren don her late husband's armor before going into battle.
Despite its aura of sensitivity and intelligence, why does The Last Samurai feel so fake? The problem lies in the filmmaker's view of war itself. It's a phony, romanticized view, bathed in the rosy, self-flattering glow of military mythology. In The Last Samurai, as in Zwick's other historical films, there's a disjunction between the means and the end. The end is war; the means is violence. Zwick depicts violence as sudden, nasty and punishing?think of the moment in Glory where a man's head is obliterated by a cannonball?but treats war itself as a morally neutral activity (like football or surfing) or as a gigantic event that's beyond anyone's control (like an earthquake or a tidal wave). Zwick's gory details suggest a skeptical modern view of war, an attitude that is actually so corny and retrograde to be nearly Spartan. To watch Zwick's war pictures, you'd think he'd never read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, or even pondered the irony implicit in its title.
Zwick?a smart and decent fellow whom I've had the good fortune to interview?strikes me as the ultimate example of a problematic type of American. He's a liberal Baby Boomer who has lived through several controversial American wars and knows full well that war physically destroys and morally damages both individuals and whole societies. Yet he still embraces a myth that persists despite getting debunked every decade or so: that war is an abstract challenge, an event that builds (or rebuilds) character. (That military officers and policy-makers adore Zwick's war films should tell you all you need to know; no working professional approves of a movie unless it makes his job seem heroic, or at least defensible.)
Compounding the problem, The Last Samurai repeats the old lie that war was once more noble and fair than it is today?more of a meritocracy. It flatters itself by thinking it captures a period when combat stopped being personal and became impersonal. The movie seems to think there was a time when training, skill and valor made a difference on the battlefield, and that sometime around the Civil War (perhaps with the development of the machinegun), warfare became more about technology and luck than talent and willpower.
Watching the mournful third act of The Last Samurai, in which warriors armed with swords and bows are pulverized by Gatling guns and cannons, I tried to remember which serious movie about mass violence made a similar point. Then I remembered: pretty much all of them. The short list includes All's Quiet on the Western Front, The Wild Bunch, Saving Private Ryan, Little Big Man, Zulu, Barry Lyndon and Zwick's own Glory and Legends of the Fall. (Let's not forget Kurosawa's Yojimbo, in which Toshiro Mifune's swordsman character must neutralize a cold-blooded young foe who "cheats" by using a pistol.)
I've read many articles since the Afghanistan invasion suggesting that the deployment of remote-controlled robot warplanes foretells the end of human judgment in war, and war will become literally inhuman?just our machines against theirs. This is an old lament. Apparently, war changes into something appalling, immoral and unrecognizable whenever there's a new one. Cavalrymen who fought against mechanized infantry and biplanes during World War I probably felt they were the last real warriors. The first foot soldiers who faced archers or catapults might have felt the same mix of pride and helplessness that Katsumoto's men feel when facing the emperor's artillery and machineguns. I bet the first cavemen who faced a rival tribe armed with slings thought they were seeing the last moment when a single bold individual could make a difference on the battlefield.
I wonder if filmmakers will ever let go of this cherished illusion and see war for what it is: an activity that is sometimes unavoidable, perhaps even politically necessary, but never moral or noble or defensible; a whirlpool of gore that swallows abstract notions of valor, integrity or individual will; a thing that happens, and that individuals are lucky to survive.