At this point in his career, Steven Spielberg has become so famous and has developed into so much of an auteur that you pretty much know what to expect when you go into one of his movies. It’s going to be sappy and sentimental, it’s going to be one of the most beautifully shot things that you see all year, and everything is going to be heightened by a sweeping John Williams score. There’s always going to be enough craftsmanship on display that the latest Spielberg joint will earn your respect, but the variable is how much you’re going to actually like it when you’re leaving the theater. When you buy into what Spielberg is selling, you leave the theater soaring. When you’re not so into the story he’s telling, you’re generally going to walk out feeling like you’ve had your heartstrings yanked to the point of bleeding. For me, War Horse was one of those Spielberg stories I didn’t quite buy. Though I spent much of my time in the theater marveling at the Janusz Kaminski cinematography, I also spent an equal amount of time rolling my eyes at how cloying everything was.
One of the biggest problems was the John Williams score. Williams is a master, a legend, and many of his scores are the things we remember most about Spielberg’s movies. Just taking in a note or two instantly brings us back to the first time we watched E.T. soar over the moon, or Jaws pop out of the water. He takes material that might otherwise come off as schmaltzy and colors it with irresistible sentimentality. But not here. This is my least favorite Williams score. It’s overpowering and sappy throughout the whole film. Whenever it kicks in it’s too on the nose, too obviously manipulating what we’re supposed to be feeling. Instead of taking us by the hand and leading us into a scene, it grabs us by the wrist and yanks us toward whatever emotion Spielberg is trying to stir in us. Usually the Williams score is my favorite aspect of a Spielberg movie; here it was the final hole that sunk the boat.
But it didn’t help that the boat was pretty rickety to begin with. The biggest problem with this movie is that the main character is a horse, and a horse doesn’t make for a very effective protagonist. Joey the horse travels through World War I over the course of the film, being put to service by both sides of the fighting, meeting countless characters along the way; and because he’s an effing horse and not a person the whole thing plays like a series of vignettes rather than a complete story. Every time he moves to a different location he meets a different set of human characters, and every time we’re just getting to know who they are enough to actually care about them, suddenly Joey is once again on the move. Spielberg tries to humanize the horse, give him uncanny intelligence so that we can attach ourselves enough to him to accept him as a protagonist, but that backfires and just makes the movie seem more cartoony and ridiculous than it would have already.
This movie needed a human character that we could follow throughout, and the goofy, dorky kid who bookends the film by raising Joey and then reconnecting with him after the war (Jeremy Irvine) wasn’t it. He was my least favorite character by far. I was way more interested in a pair of young German soldiers trying to desert their company; but just as their story got going it was time for Joey to move on. I was much more charmed by a young French girl hiding Joey in her property’s windmill; but almost as soon as we’re introduced to her plight and start to connect with her Joey gets swept away to his next location. Any one of these stories might have worked well as a feature film on their own, and there’s even a sequence about a British and German soldier meeting one another in the no man’s land between trenches to help cut Joey out of barbed wire that I think could stand on its own as a great short film, but when you throw all of this stuff together into one epic tale, everything gets short shrift and nothing is able to develop enough to be truly satisfying. So the sentiment gets ramped up to try and make up for the small amount of screen time everyone gets and the whole thing falls apart.
The sheer number of characters that are all supposed to have a very close, very personal relationship with this horse by the time the end credits roll is astoundingly stupid. In trying to make every sequence of the film play as being as important as the last, Spielberg makes Joey into a version of Poochie the Rockin’ Dog, instantly charming everyone on screen to the point of repulsion for the audience. I was into the photography enough, wowed enough by a couple of the battle sequences, and I liked that one scene set in no man’s land enough to not hate this film overall; but I can’t say I really enjoyed it that much either. It stuck too close to the E.T. with Saving Private Ryan’s battle scenes format I was expecting, offered up too few surprises, and didn’t give us enough of a chance to connect with any of its human characters. I needed more war and less horse.
