EVALUATING THE BEST PICTURE CANDIDATES
WAR HORSE
First of all, I’m going to put aside the fact that I am not an animal person. I guess I am a dog person, because I enjoy their company. But generally, animals are stupid lesser creatures. A horse can be beautiful, but that’s it. Most of the time, it’s running around thinking, WHERE’S THE CARROT I LIKE CARROTS.
Of course, Spielberg seems to know this. He’s no idiot. Which is why he tries to stack the deck with the horse in this movie. Since 25% of the film are horse close-ups (such soulful eyes!), he’s trying to manufacture some equine drama. But he also makes the gamble of surrounding his horsey with a bunch of one-dimensional ciphers.
Who is Joey? Joey lives on a farm. He loves horses. He REALLY loves this horse. He’s AW SHUCKS and JIMINY WHILLIKERS. And… what else? A reaction shot, I guess. I spent the movie thinking, “Oh. I guess he really loves that horse.” It killed me to see the early scenes of this film feature Peter Mullan and David Thewlis in such thankless roles as “drunken stupor dad” and “mustache-twirling bastard.” Mullan was so good, so recently, in the tough British film “Tyrannosaur,” while Thewlis was a riot stealing the otherwise low-key drug drama “Mr. Nice.”
And then what else happened? I remember the horse pretty much running his way blindly through the war much like “Forrest Gump” (he even gets a black best friend!). I remember some wartime hijinks with a bunch of indistinguishable soldiers, including that one cookie-sounding motherfucker Kennedish Bumberdash or something from that BBC show.
But otherwise, nothing. I mentioned a quarter of the film was horse closeups. Another quarter had to be sunset vistas. And the rest? I saw this with a really good-looking girl, and while we were both paying attention and watching the movie, and she was wonderfully pleasant company, she was the only way I could confirm I actually saw this movie. I was awake and everything, I swear. I do vaguely recall a typical Spielberg ending, which was five minutes of material stretched out to twenty. Beyond that, this was some square-ass forgettable shit.
Replace it with: “Tyrannosaur.” It’s sort of got an animal in the title. And the aforementioned Peter Mullan is terrifying in it, getting superb support from a kindly, mesmerizing Olivia Colman, and a ferocious, spittle-flinging turn from “War Horse” co-star (so says IMDb; I don’t remember) Eddie Marsan.
