Movie Vault: The Last Samurai and Jacob’s Ladder

Another old movie review I wrote and am dredging up from the archives and posting - for whatever reason, I’m not sure. I had a habit of tacking onto the main review a mini-review of even older movies that I thought formed an interesting contrast. Curious how the mind works when surveying cultural artifacts and objects.

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The Last Samurai (2003)

Tom Cruise often stars in movies in which his robust cockiness, powered by his Julia Roberts of a smile (or is it she who has his smile?), dominates the screen and obliterates all approaches to whatever character he happens to be playing, save one: take it or leave it, boys and girls, take it or leave it. And very often, people choose just as well to leave it; there are probably still a fair number of moviegoers who, even today, cannot abide seeing him onscreen, or hearing him described as a serious actor. This is perhaps not confined to members of the audience. I remember the look of disdain that marked Val Kilmer’s face in virtually every scene in “Top Gun,” and wasn’t entirely sure that the animus limited to his character. Cruise had a way of making sure his characters were inflected with aspects of his own persona: young, beautiful, confident, and determined to make his way to the top.

However, as Cruise has aged he has occasionally stepped out of the lumbering action-heroic mode to take on more daring dramatic roles. In these films there are moments when his smile wavers and his eyes darken ominously, and he allows the creep of anxiety and self-doubt and, in certain instances, monstrous self-hatred to enter into his face. It’s as if he found the façade of unwavering self-confidence suddenly too great to maintain, and he’s at a loss as to what to do. I find these moments strangely powerful and affecting—as if all certainties were coming undone (Cruise’s performances in “Magnolia” and “Eyes Wide Shut” come to mind, even though I didn’t think either film very successful). Think of other movie stars of his rank, and perhaps only Harrison Ford is able to project a similar sense of uncertainty; but Ford has made it his trademark to inject a strain of vulnerability into his characters, and we therefore expect it of him, whereas we do not with Cruise.

The question is whether or not Cruise can combine his action-heroic with his dramatic-vulnerable modes, and his latest picture “The Last Samurai” is a sincere and earnest attempt in that direction. His performance is determined, skillful, and even extraordinarily moving in touches. Unfortunately, it’s in the service of an unsuccessful film: “The Last Samurai” has been described as a historical epic, but it’s really an allegory about the loss of honor and the redemption of the soul, and so on; and its portentousness renders it conventional and unsurprising. In brief: it’s well-acted, beautifully shot, meticulously made, and utterly without humor or wit.

Why is this the case? It is 1876; Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a Union Army captain, Civil War hero, and a full-time drunk. His reddened eyes brim with self-hatred; he has been reduced to this state because he cannot escape the memory of his participation in a massacre of an Indian village, in retaliation for Little Big Horn—even though he knows the members of the village who are chosen to suffer this fate had nothing to do with the slaughter of Custer and his troops. Despite his obvious instability, he is hired by the Meiji Government of Japan to train the newly-formed Imperial Army. The Army has been given the task of unifying the country—until then a collection of essentially independent fiefdoms kept in uneasy balance by the center—under a strong central government; and its first task is to put down a samurai rebellion led by the noble Lord Katsumoto (a regal Ken Watanabe). Unfortunately, Algren is ordered to the battlefield with green and ill-prepared troops, who naturally botch the job. He is captured but spared by Katsumoto, and removed to a remote village for a long winter in captivity. But his captivity turns out to be his salvation. Forced to give up the drink, Algren recovers his sobriety and his self-respect; the nightmares recede and he learns to laugh again, and is reminded of the virtues of the martial lifestyle: discipline, dignity, and loyalty above all. In the end, he is won over by his samurai captors and goes over to their cause, joining them in their final doomed battle with a now much-improved Imperial Army.

Fertile stuff for a rousing action/epic, and Zwick does a good job in the battle scnees, which have some of the panoramic grandeur that we just saw in the last two “Lord of the Rings” films. (This has something to do, perhaps, with the fact that much of “Samurai,” like the Ring trilogy, was filmed in New Zealand: it would not have shocked me to see Gandalf riding onto the field on his white horse, rallying the troops.) But Zwick is also something of a square, and in some of the more closely-constructed scenes he resorts to devices that astonished me in their lack of subtlety. For instance, the film opens with a shot of Katsumoto in deep meditation; a vision of a white tiger in a forest, surrounded but lashing out at his soldiers; later, he observes Algren’s capture, and Algren, like the tiger, is surrounded, and manages to take down a number of his men. Honestly! In a later scene, Algren uses his new-found skills with the sword to dispatch a group of assassins who have been sent to stop him from seeing Katsumoto, who has been placed under arrest; Zwick gives us the full fight not once but twice, once in real time and another in slow-motion, as Algren considers the dead bodies in front of him and what he has become. One theatre-goer, getting the rather broad hint, yelled out facetiously, “So, he’s THE MAN now?”

The film has sparked something of a debate as to whether it depicts accurately the history and heritage of the Japanese. I suppose one should expect obvious simplifications in a movie of this sort; complex historical and social forces are represented by persons contending for the Emperor’s ear, for instance. Anyone with a passing acquaintance of Japanese history or custom will not have a hard time of making a hash of many of the film’s notions, such as the closing sequence in which Algren, ludicrously, surprises the Emperor with a visit, bearing the sword of the now-dead and defeated Katsumoto. For my part, however, I cannot get too exercised about the film’s inaccuracies. Zwick has done a good job of casting credible, well-known Japanese actors who pay attention to certain fundamentals in their speech and bearing, and I suppose that is sufficient. But the more important reason is that there is nothing about Japan per se which is essential to this film; it is simply the setting where Algren’s soul, having reached its depths, learns that it has resources nevertheless and begins its path to recovery.

That may be too harsh a judgment; after all, during its long middle stretches the film has Algren spending his captivity taking long, observant walks through the village in which he is being held. Algren is apparently something of an anthropologist, a fact that we learn with Katsumoto, who takes his prisoner’s journals and examines with fascination its copious sketches and accounts of life among the Indian tribes. But with respect to the samurai, Algren’s remarks are confined to marveling at their discipline and dignified bearing. If Japan were truly essential to this story, he would have also asked: what is to become of this life in an age of guns and modernized weaponry? What, exactly, is Katsumoto fighting for?

I wish more had been made of this; there was the opportunity for something more anthropologically incisive, a chance to observe a way of life on the cusp of its disappearance. The film chooses, instead, to take as its main problematic Algren’s recovery of his sense of honor—Algren is given a sword, and starts to practice the technique of the samurai, and so on. And all of this is nicely done. In the early scenes, especially, Cruise does an effective job of giving us the picture of a man who is at his edge, but has enough in him to at least know that being a true soldier demands a measure of integrity, no matter how bedeviled one may be. He fights with the troops he has led into battle, knowing that his presence is the only thing that will give them a chance; they are cut down nevertheless, but he continues to fight as if it were own. Katsumoto, who we are meant to regard as a man of the most virtuous nature, recognizes this quality to exist in Algren as well, and he sets it as his task to draw out the dignity from the almost unrecoverable ruin that Algren has become. And it is drawn out—Algren, initially revulsed by the samurai code, comes to take it as his own (to an extent at least—he does not choose to join Katsumoto in ritual suicide when, at the end, they lie on the battlefield in defeat, their forces obliterated by the gun).

All good and well, but it would seem from this film that Katsumoto fighting against his own emperor—whom he clearly worships—for the right to fight with swords in the traditional samurai fashion, rather than guns. In my understanding, early Meiji Japan was riven by all sorts of divisions, but nothing so retrograde and foolhardy. By 1876, even the samurai knew they were well on their way out; they were an impoverished, politically depleted class, and even then there was not much handwringing over their passing into the dustbin of history. Yet the film chooses to leave ambiguous and unclear the social and political stakes underlying Katsumoto’s rebellion. To be sure, there is an implicit critique of capitalism; Katsumoto’s opponent is a venal oligarch who, under the guise of modernization, is interested only in his own personal profit. Still, it’s hard to avoid the thought that Katsumoto was fighting for a way of life that was not only on the verge of but already in the dustbin of history; what then, was he fighting for but a romantic notion of a life long past its due date? We never hear him articulate a viable alternative, although the Emperor himself, at the end of the film, suggests the way: a strong unified country, powerful, capable of defending itself, that also remembers the ways of its ancestors. The ways of its ancestors, however, did not mean giving up the gun and returning to the sword: it would come to mean something much more radical, namely imperial power in the name of the Emperor as a living god. Is this what we want to root for?

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In “Jacob’s Ladder,” a film from the mid-1980s, Tim Robbins played a Vietnam veteran and New York City postman haunted by recurrent dreams of his dead child (an angelic MacCauley Culkin, on the cusp of “Home Alone” fame). In the waking world he has an even bigger problem – ghosts and demons who seem intent on chasing him down alleyways and subway tunnels and the like. He searches, desperately, for the answers to the riddle of his quite literal demons, and he manages to find out that they are the ghosts of his Vietnam comrades who turned on one another, brutally, as the result of an Army experiment in chemically enhanced warfare that went deeply awry. Upon learning this, we proceed rapidly to the end of the film: at the end of the movie, the secret happenings of Vietnam made clear, we recede to black only to fade to a sight of Tim Robbins dying in a tent, on a medic’s cot. All, apparently, has been a dream – or rather a heroic act of Jacob’s mind, which willed for him an existence stretching into the future to give him the time to find an answer to his death.

Ridiculous? We should have been so lucky for such an ending to “The Last Samurai.”