Ray Pride

Compassion, courage, honor, duty, loyalty, justice, honesty: concerns of Bushido, the Samurai "Way of the Warrior," but also a timeless roster for those who must wage battle.

Edward Zwick's "The Last Samurai," being a lustrous, designed-within-a-millimeter-of-its-sprockets $125 million or so movie that recreates a century past, must put those concerns in the hands of a star, in this case, Tom Cruise, who does fine work as Captain Nathan Algren, a flustered, blustery drunk who remembers too well his atrocities during the Indian Campaigns. Cruise, a small sturdy man, hides behind hair and beard, hunched into the raiment of this guilt-shaken soldier, a coiled, broken soul, our modern-day identification figure, our supposed warrior of touchy-kill-y empathy. (It's amusing to hear Cruise's character refer to someone else as "a man of small stature.")

It's 1876, and advisors to Japan's Emperor covet Algren's knowledge. As he vanquished the Native Americans, they want to vanquish the Samurai. Offered enough money, despite hatred for the soldiers he has known for decades, he takes the job.

The pursuit of knowledge is a wondrous thing. Over the course of a picturesque season, Algren learns how little he knows of his adversary, and after a deadly battle and a beheading he does not understand, is taken to a distant village to recover. His teacher, curious and watchful, is the Samurai Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe: grave, handsome, alert and gorgeous).

But how can Algren, this busted-down, piss-pot drunk, over the course of a season, become the moral equivalent of Samurai warriors? Are his few years of screwing up the moral equivalent of a thousand years of Japanese history? It's lovely how much Japanese is spoken, with subtitles, yet the story tiresomely becomes a white-man's-burden transposed upon the inscrutable beast: the other, the foreigner, the noble, mysterious, dispensable East. Intermittently, Algren is presented as a Bruce Chatwin-like dilettante, scrawling and doodling in a series of notebooks, a diarist, or perhaps just a production designer before his time. "I believe that a man does what he can until his true destiny is revealed," he says.

Algren is nursed by the widow of the man he has killed. "I killed her husband?" he exclaims. Katsumoto delivers the expected response with perfect measure, not grave, not precious: "It was a good death."

All the physical details are right. The shiny parts are shiny, indeed. But what lies beneath the curatorial surface, the Pottery Barn filmmaking? What story is being told, what should we care, what does it say about the larger culture, what messages are communicated beyond the understanding of the filmmakers? Attitudes and postures are struck, but I don't have a clue what the movie is supposed to be saying. John Toll, he of sunset and vista, makes nice pictures. Lilly Kilvert's production design is relentlessly epic. But nothing feels lived or lived in, beyond Cruise's seething eyes, Watanabe's suggestive gravity. The narrative, straining for majesty and grandeur, seems to move through dollhouses, filled with bright plastic flowers, perfume candled in from yet another boutique. There is a glimpse of the post-Civil War San Francisco with a picturesque quantity of cable cars going up hill and down, the flock-of-birds software from "Gladiator" and other movies let for the shot's duration. Extras on the several sets seem directed to act as "natural" as extras.

Hans Zimmer's music partakes of the sort of bombast used as moral grout. The script begun by John Logan and finished by Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, doesn't hold water, with its fetishy mix-and-match Orientalism. It would be tough to doubt Zwick and Herskovitz's sincerity and earnestness--I still shudder at memories of the potent and crushing self-regard of `thirtysomething'--yet beyond the two central roles, attitudes are struck rather than evoking the sort of plangent melancholy the movie seems to have been produced for. There are lovely, terse movie-movie moments: audience-pleasing, bad literature, worse psychology, such as "I don't give a damn about the Samurai! I want to know my enemy!"

As in other war movies by Zwick, including "Glory," "Courage Under Fire" and "The Siege," there is a glum foreboding, as if within time itself one might feel nostalgic for the passing moment. It's not history, or analysis, precisely, but a bruised and bruising gloom best washed down by great draughts of Hans Zimmer's music (if not Enya).

Beneath Cruise and Watanabe, the casting is mostly curious. Billy Connelly is brought on for dyspeptic relief as a mentor of sorts, and you pray he'll be the traditional first act sacrificial lamb. Timothy Spall, a pear-shaped, one-man Greek chorus as a photographer and connoisseur of all things Nipponese, is reduced to spinning out a morass of expository dialog.

In the battle scenes, Zwick and Toll have done an expert study in movies from "The Seven Samurai" to "Ran," crafting sturdy clashes that resemble nothing more than an expert study in Kurosawa. Backlight, fog, the rain of arrows from the sky, the kinetic power of lateral movements of men and horses moving left against backdrops of pickets or forest. It's all very proficient yet somehow ungainly, distant. (More domestic interludes are often prefaced by a series of three still lifes, like the "triads" that precede scenes in films by Yasujiro Ozu.)

There are several endings, none of which satisfy. But there is an image at a moment I took as the true ending, and it is against a vista of pale pink cherry blossoms, perfect, tumbling like a memory of cotton, evoking landscapes and customs past like no other flickering frames in "The Last Samurai."

"The Last Samurai" opens Friday.

(2003-12-02)

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