Dances With Swords : 'The Last Samurai' Rides Lamely Into the
Sunrise
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2003; Page C01
The great fabulist Jorge Luis Borges has a story called "Pierre Menard,
Author of 'Don Quixote.' " It's about a French critic who so loves the
great Spanish novel that he wants to write it. Not copy it, not rewrite it;
no, to make an empathetic connection with Cervantes to such a degree that he
is actually writing anew a novel that was written 400 years earlier.
Borges, ever so niftily, is getting at a basic but often unacknowledged circumstance
of creation: Younger artists are so taken with a certain established work that
they have to, in some fashion, make it their own. This seems to be the mechanism
that underlies the Tom Cruise film "The Last Samurai," in which the
director Edward Zwick, of "Glory" glory and "Legends of the Fall"
legend, desperately aspires to become, by some weird transformative process
of yearning and hoping, Akira Kurosawa, and to make a great Kurosawa movie.
And that explains also why, under its beauty, its lush production values and
its superficial spell of enchantment, the basic product feels lame and thin,
wan and stale. It's wannabe-ism on a multimillion-dollar scale, with an icon
of Japanese culture somehow crudely penetrated by an interloper and turned inside
out. Movies set in Japanese history should not be about handsome white people.
It just feels wrong and, in the end, leaves in your mouth the taste of desecration.
If you're not a fan of the great director Kurosawa and don't care a whisker
for Japanese film, you most likely won't give a damn. What's up there is, at
least at that immediate level, engrossing. Endless yen have been spent on swords
and armor and horses and costumes -- Zwick adores the flag-helmets so beloved
by Kurosawa -- and New Zealand, which has made a pretty good Middle Earth, turns
out to make a pretty good 1870s Japan, all shire and hill for battleground.
Those battles are reasonably well staged, and lots of people die. There's some
cool sword-fighting. But still, it's junk.
Basically what Zwick has done is to take Kevin Costner's "Dances With
Wolves" and insert it into the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, with a samurai
clan in the role of an Indian tribe. Hmmm, I don't think so. Costner evoked
all of Native American culture; the survival of a whole people was at peril.
It was a culture war, not a class war. But the samurai, after all, were but
a small part of Japan; they represented, by the 19th century, obstructivist,
regressive values. They really can't, or shouldn't, be sentimentalized.
That doesn't stop Zwick. Nothing stops Zwick. He's like General MacArthur
returning. He marches through everything, immune to subtlety, nuance, sense
of appropriateness. So he's got Tom Cruise, as earnest and hopeless as the day
is long, as both Toshiro Mifune and Kevin Costner. And to make this travesty
worse, you can feel the handsome little guy "acting" with every fiber
of his being. It's kind of unsettling. He resembles Sean Penn in "I Am
Sam," except he seems to be shouting "I am Samurai." His face
is a perpetual mask of scorn, his body a knot of anxiety, his eyes cranked down
to laser glare. He's a poster boy for the concept of "trying too hard."
He's not a hero, he's the guy at the party who's so intense you want him to
stay away.
Cruise plays an American cavalry officer named Capt. Nathan Algren, a hero
of both the Civil and Indian wars. But we find him sunk in bitterness, soaked
in alcoholism. He's shilling for a gun company at some kind of industrial exposition,
and haunted by guilt over a Wounded Knee-style massacre in which he was forced
to participate. Pay no attention to this anachronistic conceit: No professional
military officer of the era could have conceived of war against Native Americans
as unjust or genocidal; there wasn't even a vocabulary by which, given mass
cultural commitments to manifest destiny, such a thought could be expressed.
After a showy tantrum onstage to dramatize his discontent, Algren gets an
offer from a Japanese industrialist to come to that country and use his vaunted
skills to train an army for deployment in a campaign against samurai who are
violently resisting the industrialization, and by implication the Americanization,
of Japan. Algren accepts: It's the only war he's got.
Almost instantly you can see the agenda. First, Zwick insists on stale stereotyping
that all but destroys the film. He expresses Algren's moral contamination by
associating him with a hated modern institution, a gun company. But at the time,
Connecticut's gun valley was something like today's Silicon Valley, part of
that holy dream of manifest destiny. The opprobrium that visited the gun business
didn't arrive until well into the next century.
Then there's that Japanese industrialist, very much the movie's bad guy. His
villainy is expressed in terms of his Americanization: He's a cigar-smoking,
derby- and waistcoat-wearing capitalist, and we're supposed to respond to him
as representing the morally wrong course for Japan to take, while the old ways
are without any rigor sentimentalized as superior.
What happens next is both inevitable and far-fetched, a series of improbabilities
out of old Hollywood dumbbell tradition. Cruise's Algren trains his soldiers
-- they are, of course, depicted as hopeless rural peasantry, unable to master
such implements as the musket -- and leads them in battle. He is overwhelmed
by the near-mythical samurai, who ride out of the fog as if from "The Seven
Samurai," and only Algren survives the battle. Because he matches exactly
a symbolic dream that we've seen in the head of the rebel samurai lord Katsumoto
(Ken Watanabe), that warlord decides not only to spare his life, but also to
move him in with his own widowed sister. (It was Algren who made the woman a
widow, but that, strangely, is not a factor in the drama.) Oh, and Katsumoto
happens to be the rare 19th-century Japanese warlord who somehow has picked
up English, so Algren doesn't even have to learn the language.
Katsumoto is clearly a movie version of the perplexing Japanese hero Saigo
Takamori, who led the Satsuma (clan) rebellion. The major difference here, of
course, is his sentimental indulgence of Capt. Algren, who would have, in the
real world, symbolized everything the warlord hated and waged war to destroy:
industrialization, Westernization, lack of respect for Japanese custom, the
democratization of force when common soldiers with muskets could bring down
the elegant armored, mounted and skillful samurai. By what twisted theory of
human personality would Zwick build a movie based on such a zealous professional
warrior's love for that which the record showed indisputably that he hated?
It simply makes no sense, but without it -- and Cruise's art-moderne profile
-- there's not a bankable movie.
What makes even less sense is Zwick's sentimentalization of Saigo -- through
the vessel of the fictional Katsumoto -- and the code of Bushido that animated
him. To Zwick, the way of the samurai is akin to the way of purity: It stands
for nobility, service, self-sacrifice, denial of ego, tradition. It did, of
course, but only for a small member of the elite who enjoyed its fruits; for
the general population, it was simply feudalism, in which a small band of hereditary
aristocrats controlled society by force and looted its profits to sustain themselves
in castles and enjoy blood sports.
It was a simple, brutal system of exploitation, in which the anonymous millions
lived and died to provide sustenance for a few. In the West, we call that "the
Dark Ages" and we invented something to end it, called a "government";
Zwick calls it paradise and has constructed a movie that asks us to endorse
it. It's the first, and I hope last, pro-warlord movie! This is something Kurosawa,
by the way, never did: He understood that the warlord's way was the way of chaos
and war and endless slaughter; his rogues and scalawags stood against that,
not for it.
In any event, after placing his tight little white guy at Katsumoto's right
hand, Zwick more or less sticks to chronology, with a few annoying flourishes.
One is an attack by ninjas upon Katsumoto's headquarters, in which Cruise figures
mightily, his flashing blade (Algren has learned the Japanese sword with stupefying
ease) slashing this way and that at buzz saw speed. The ninja thing just seemed
cheap and crummy to me, simply a way of letting Cruise show off his newly acquired
sword skills in a fanciful sequence that more or less violates the consistency
of tone of the rest of the film.
In the end, Katsumoto, with Algren by his side, faces a battle with newly
industrialized forces. This is set up to showcase the uniquely Japanese value
called "The Nobility of Failure," to quote the title of Ivan Morris's
book on the subject, evidently an inspiration to Zwick. In the last battle of
"The Last Samurai," Katsumoto, Algren and a few hundred others ride
into Gatling guns. We're supposed to feel, I don't know, sorry for them, because
their little con game is over, because Japan is achieving a central government
and a unification under national leadership, along with other little things
included in the bargain like education, medicine, and so forth.
This movie thinks that's terrible; it yearns for a medieval country to remain
medieval. What sane person could buy into such absurdity? "The Last Samurai"
stands for the Banality of Failure.
The Last Samurai (144 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for intense
battle sequences.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company