The Last Samurai
<p>Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently.<br />
By &lsquo;surprisingly good&lsquo; I mean that they&#8217;re rather better<br />
than one might expect from their genre.  <cite>Loony Toons: Back In<br />
Action</cite>, for example, could have been a mere merchandising<br />
vehicle, a repetition of clich&eacute;s and tired sight gags. Instead<br />
it was a wickedly funny combination of Animaniac edginess with classic<br />
Warner Brothers wackiness.  It has a few moments of true brilliance<br />
&mdash; the sequence in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through<br />
Salvador Dali&#8217;s &#8220;The Persistence of Memory&#8221; (think of melting clocks)<br />
is jaw-droppingly wonderful, sublime art.</p>
<p><cite>Master &amp; Commander: The Far Side of the World</cite> was<br />
also a surprising treat.  I&#8217;ve read all 20 of the Aubrey/Maturin<br />
novels.  The movie doesn&#8217;t capture their texture and depth &mdash;<br />
that would be impossible, they are deeply literary works &mdash; but<br />
as an adventure movie that refers to the books without insulting the<br />
reader&#8217;s intelligence it works quite well.</p>
<p>The <cite>Lord of the Rings</cite> and <cite>Harry Potter</cite><br />
movies are so good that hard-core fans of their respective books are<br />
still pinching themselves, wondering when they&#8217;re going to wake up to<br />
the discovery that they&#8217;re actually watching the usual dumbed-down<br />
Hollywood crap.  (I say this as a Tolkien fan so hard-core that I was<br />
able to catch nuances of the spoken Elvish that weren&#8217;t in the<br />
subtitles.)</p>
<p>Of course there have been dreadful turkeys where we expected<br />
better, as well.  The third <cite>Matrix</cite> movie and <cite>Star<br />
Wars: Attack of the Clones</cite> leap to mind. But dreadful turkeys<br />
are part of the normal scene; what&#8217;s <em>abnormal</em> is that New<br />
Line gave Peter Jackson the money and freedom to make<br />
<cite>Rings</cite> movies that, while rushed and not without the<br />
occasional compromise, are almost achingly good.</p>
<p>Think about it.  When was the last time you saw a movie that (a) was<br />
a book adaptation faithful enough for the fans to cheer it, (b) got<br />
great reviews from movie critics, and (c) was boffo box office?  Just<br />
counting the Rings and Potter movies and <cite>Master &amp; Commander</cite>,<br />
we&#8217;ve now had five of these in relatively quick succession.  Something<br />
is going on here.  Can it be that Hollywood is having an attack of<br />
intelligence and taste?</p>
<p>(My wife Cathy suggests <cite>Saving Private Ryan</cite> as a<br />
precursor of the trend.)</p>
<p>The movie that pushed me to think about this as a pattern, rather<br />
than a series of isolated incidents, is <cite>The Last Samurai</cite>.<br />
I&#8217;d been wanting to see this one since the first trailers six months<br />
ago, but was braced for a disappointment on the scale of <cite>Pearl<br />
Harbor</cite>.  Hollywood&#8217;s record on wide-screen historicals is<br />
dreadful; they tend to be laughably ahistorical &mdash; either<br />
mindless spectacles or video sermonettes for whatever form of<br />
political correctness was in vogue the week they were made. Remarkably,<br />
<cite>The Last Samurai</cite> almost completely avoids these flaws.</p>
<p>I said &ldquo;almost completely&rdquo;. The movie is not without<br />
flaws.  But even the flaws are interesting.  They illustrate the ways<br />
in which Hollywood&#8217;s metric for a good (or at least successful) movie<br />
is changing.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s start with the bad stuff.  First, way too much camera time<br />
that could have been better employed gets spent on emotive closeups of<br />
the lead&#8217;s phiz (a misfeature <cite>The Last Samurai</cite> shares with the first two Ring<br />
movies and I am thus beginning to think of as &lsquo;the Frodo<br />
flaw&rsquo;).  But this is Hollywood and it&#8217;s Tom Cruise and one<br />
supposes such excess is inevitable.</p>
<p>Secondly, the movie is seriously anti-historical in one respect; we<br />
are supposed to believe that traditionalist Samurai would disdain the<br />
use of firearms.  In fact, traditional samurai <em>loved</em> firearms<br />
and found them a natural extension of their traditional role as horse<br />
archers.  Samurai invented rolling volley fire three decades before<br />
Gustavus Adolphus, and improved the musket designs they imported from<br />
the Portuguese so effectively that for most of the 1600s they were<br />
actually making better guns than European armorers could produce.</p>
<p>But, of course, today&#8217;s Hollywood left thinks firearms are<br />
intrinsically eeeevil (especially firearms in the hands of anyone<br />
other than police and soldiers) so the virtuous rebel samurai had<br />
to eschew them.  Besides being politically correct, this choice<br />
thickened the atmosphere of romantic doom around our heroes.</p>
<p>Another minor clanger in the depiction of samurai fighting: We are<br />
given scenes of samurai training to fight empty-hand and unarmored<br />
using modern martial-arts moves.  In fact, in 1877 it is about a<br />
generation too early for this.  Unarmed combat did not become a<br />
separate discipline with its own forms and schools until the very end<br />
of the nineteenth century.  And when it did, it was based not on<br />
samurai disciplines but on peasant fighting methods from Okinawa and<br />
elsewhere that were used <em>against</em> samurai (this is why most<br />
exotic martial-arts weapons are actually agricultural tools).</p>
<p>In 1877, most samurai still would have thought unarmed-combat<br />
training a distraction from learning how to use the swords, muskets<br />
and bows that were their primary weapons systems.  Only after the<br />
swords they preferred for close combat were finally banned did this<br />
attitude really change.  But, hey, most moviegoers are unaware of<br />
these subtleties, so there had to be some chop-socky in the script to<br />
meet their expectations.</p>
<p>One other rewriting of martial history: we see samurai<br />
ceremoniously stabbing fallen opponents to death with a two-hand<br />
sword-thrust.  In fact, this is not how it was done; <em>real</em><br />
samurai delvered the coup de grace by decapitating their<br />
opponents, and then taking the head as a trophy.</p>
<p>No joke.  Head-taking was such an important practice that there was<br />
a special term in Japanese for the art of properly dressing the hair on<br />
a severed head so that the little paper tag showing the deceased&#8217;s name<br />
and rank would be displayed to best advantage.</p>
<p>While the filmmakers were willing to show samurai killing the<br />
wounded, in other important respects they softened and Westernized the<br />
behavior of these people somewhat. Algren learned, correctly, that<br />
&lsquo;samurai&rsquo; derives from a verb meaning &ldquo;to<br />
serve&rdquo;, but we are misled when the rebel leader speaks of<br />
&ldquo;protecting the people&rdquo;.  In fact, noblesse oblige was not<br />
part of the Japanese worldview; samurai served not &lsquo;the<br />
people&rsquo; but a particular daimyo, and the daimyo served the<br />
Emperor in theory and nobody but themselves in normal practice.</p>
<p>Now for some of the good stuff.  It begins with an amazingly strong<br />
performance by Ken Watanabe as the rebel daimyo Katsumoto. From the<br />
first moment that you see him, you believe him; there are no moments<br />
of hey-I&#8217;m-<em>Tom-Cruise</em> to mar his immersion in the character, for<br />
which excellent reason he actually upstages Cruise at several key points.</p>
<p>Through Katsumoto and the other Japanese characters, we are made to<br />
see the intertwined quests for perfection of both technique and self<br />
that was so central to the samurai warrior-mystic.  Indeed, there are<br />
points at which the filmmakers have some subtle fun with the fact that<br />
Americans of our day, having successfully naturalized Japanese martial<br />
arts into our own culture, have learned to understand that path rather<br />
better than Cruise&#8217;s Captain Algren does.  I&#8217;m thinking especially of<br />
the point at which a bystander watching Algren lose at sword practice<br />
tells him he has &#8220;too many minds&#8221;.  The viewer probably knows what<br />
he is driving at even if Algren does not.</p>
<p>Better: the movie is properly respectful of Japanese virtues<br />
without crossing the line into supine multiculturalism.  Captain<br />
Algren appreciates and accepts the best of an alien culture<br />
<em>without</em> renouncing his identity as a Westerner, an officer,<br />
and a gentleman. There is a telling scene after Algren has been<br />
accepted into the life of his Japanese hosts in which he takes a heavy<br />
load from Taka (the female lead), who protests that Japanese men never<br />
help with such things.</p>
<p>Algren replies that he is not a Japanese man.  In this and other<br />
ways he refutes an already-standard knock on the movie, which is to<br />
refer to it as &ldquo;Dances with Samurai&rdquo;.  But this movie,<br />
despite the flaws I&#8217;ve pointed out, is more honest and far less<br />
sentimental about the samurai than <cite>Dances With Wolves</cite> was<br />
about its Sioux.  This is progress of a sort.</p>
<p>Algren&#8217;s romance with Taka is also handled with a degree of<br />
restraint that is appropriate but surprising.  We get no sexual<br />
cheap thrills; instead, we get subtle but extremely powerful<br />
eroticism, notably in the scene where Taka dresses Algren in her<br />
dead husband&#8217;s armor just before the final battle.</p>
<p>The film is visually quite beautiful.  The details of costume,<br />
weapons, armor, and the simple artifacts of Japanese village life are<br />
meticulously and correctly rendered.  In fact there are a number of<br />
points at which the setting is stronger than the script and carries<br />
one through places where the plotting is a bit implausible.</p>
<p>This contrast is an illustration of the uneven way in which<br />
standards have risen.  <cite>The Last Samurai</cite>, the Rings<br />
movies, <cite>Master &amp; Commander</cite>, and the Harry Potter movies<br />
all have vastly better production values than (I think) they would<br />
have had even ten years ago &mdash; perhaps the huge advances in<br />
special-effects technology have created a sort of upward pressure on<br />
the quality of movies&#8217; depictions of reality.  On the other hand,<br />
downright silly plot twists are still acceptable and the conventions<br />
of the star-vehicle film remain firmly in place.</p>
<p>One gets ahistorical howlers and (in fiction) violations of the<br />
spirit of the original work, but fewer than formerly.  In all these<br />
movies, you can see where they were trimmed to fit Hollywood&#8217;s<br />
marketing needs, but the trimming is done with a lot more sensitivity<br />
and taste than it used to be.  Occasionally one even sees outright<br />
improvements &mdash; the moment in Peter Jackson&#8217;s version of<br />
Boromir&#8217;s death scene in which the fallen Gondorian hails Aragorn as<br />
his king, for example, achieves more power and poignancy than<br />
Tolkien&#8217;s original.</p>
<p>I like this trend a lot, but I&#8217;m not sure I understand it.  The<br />
Hollywood establishment is in business to make money, but the link<br />
between market demand and the quality of films has always been<br />
tenuous at best.  It would be nice to think that film audiences<br />
have required filmmakers to exhibit better taste by developing<br />
better taste themselves, but in the face of all the awful schlock<br />
that still gets churned out and makes money, this is a difficult<br />
case to sustain in general.</p>
<p>It feels to me more as though some balance of power within the<br />
system has shifted and, for whatever reason, creative artists<br />
have gained power at the expense of the marketeers.  Thus, for<br />
example, Rowling had more than somewhat to do with the casting<br />
of the Harry Potter movies, and Peter Jackson&#8217;s films display<br />
a nearly obsessive concern with getting the look of Middle-Earth<br />
right that could hardly be shared by a typical studio exec.</p>
<p>Whatever the reason, I&#8217;m glad of the trend.  I spend a lot more<br />
time in movie theaters than I use to &mdash; and that&#8217;s the<br />
message Hollywood wants to hear.</p>
