Honor is the first and last word in the latest Tom Cruise blockbuster, The Last Samurai, a grandly proportioned opus about a man who finds himself by losing himself in another culture. We first hear the word uttered not 60 seconds into the movie, and it's bandied about thereafter like a name brand desperate for some heavy product placement.
"Honor," purrs the narrator's voice-over, explaining in the most dulcet tones about the ancient Japanese warriors who gladly gave up their lives for the H-word. And in The Last Samurai, honor isn't just about doing the right thing and paying props; it's code for that other, heavily weighted H-word — history — and, by extension, for the never-ending battle between the old and the new.
Cruise plays a character whom not only embodies these conflicts but also is practically consumed by them. His Captain Nathan Algren is a decorated American soldier who's done some very bad things in the name of honor, and now, he tells us, is "beset by the ironies of my own life." (Bear in mind that we're talking 1876 here, when it was still permissible to use a word like "beset" in a sentence.) Algren's full of barely suppressed anger at the world and (mostly) at himself, a bearded, brooding boozer who made his rep by massacring Native Americans, and now finds himself shilling rifles for Winchester. Reduced to a sideshow song-and-dance man trading on his war hero status, he's living proof that history was fodder for hucksters long before the age of reality TV and Oliver Stone.
Cruise's deeply conflicted man-of-war is essentially a paid mercenary, so when he's offered an obscene amount of money to travel to Japan to train that country's army, he haggles for a few dollars more, then gets on the boat. It seems that there's a charismatic leader over there who's assembling a legion of local samurai warriors to actively resist encroaching modernity (read: Western influence) in Japan. Algren's job is to squash the rebellion, even though it's clear from the outset that his admiration lies more with his brave-hearted adversaries than with his fat-cat employers.
There's little doubt that The Last Samurai will be touted primarily as an adventure movie, and as a historical epic as well — all of which it is — but what's really going on here is pure love story. Even before Algren is captured by the samurai rebels, it's clear he's like one of the bickering leads in a romantic comedy, just waiting for the yelling to stop so he can tumble into bed with his antagonist.
Algren's hostility melts away as he comes to understand bushido (the samurai way of life) and develops a bond with his captors, most notably with the rebel leader Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) and his beautiful sister Taka (Koyuki). The movie does a good job making Algren's love affair with Japan palpable, doting on exquisitely rendered and personalized images of samurai nobility, skill, spirituality and pursuit of perfection in everything from sword fighting to the serving of tea.
It's all very beautifully realized and quite effective, although not particularly subtle. Those endless scenes of Cruise walking through the samurai village, watching the warriors in training, have something of the gauzy, airbrushed look of a soft-core skin flick, albeit a very expensive and well-crafted one. And if you still haven't gotten the point, there's Hans Zimmer's accompanying music, a warm, gooey mass that makes the theme from Love Story sound positively restrained, and practically demands your heart immediately leap out of your throat.
The movie falls into a pattern of sorts, with quieter sequences involving Cruise's character's personal transformation followed by a succession of big, juicy battle scenes. These battle scenes pop up roughly every 20 minutes, so even if all the sensitive stuff is putting you to sleep, you won't have long to wait for the next energetically edited sequence of heads being lopped off, swords piercing flesh, and screaming men on horses galloping in all directions. For the film buffs, there are even a few nods to classic Japanese cinema, the best being the first, Seven Samurai-like image of fully armored samurai riders emerging from the mists like vengeful wraiths.
The battles are dynamic and passionately staged — one even features samurai warriors mixing it up with ninjas! — and then they're over, and it's back to more of that Love Story music and shots of the cherry blossoms in bloom. The Last Samurai is somewhat predictable in its basic Dances With Wolves in Japan narrative, but, all in all, it's an easy movie to like. Despite the film's workmanlike tendencies, it manages to engage us with excellent production values, big emotions, historical accuracy aplenty, and a star who is one of the few actors around capable of carrying 150 minutes worth of movie.
Beyond all of its virtues, though, the movie offers a curiously lame read on the phenomenon of culture clash — which, after all, is supposed to be what this film is about. For all the attention it lavishes on Japan, The Last Samurai feels like a puff piece, and one that doesn't seem particularly interested in the nuances and points of frisson that are bound to occur when East meets West. Instead, we get a soul-stirring but ultimately shallow scenario with honor and history on one side and, on the other, some vague notion of "The West" — code for everything that's greedy, superficial and lacking of values in the modern world.
That's the real culture clash in The Last Samurai, and it's a pretty simplistic one. The conflict the movie so sympathetically portrays is basically an internal struggle in which Cruise and his samurai pals strive to relocate themselves in some sort of romantically idealized past. Never mind that that past isn't particularly well-defined, or that Cruise's character — a westerner who, like all westerners, apparently lacks a proper past of his own — has to borrow someone else's history and culture in order to relocate himself.
There's an implicit tragedy in this story that the movie fails to address — the tragedy of characters who are not just too highly principled for their own good, but too rigid as well, and maybe even a little too stupid. By making martyrs of people who categorize everything the modern world offers as wicked, The Last Samurai begins to feel a little too close to a particularly repugnant brand of propaganda that's going around these days.
Before someone starts calling in the Homeland Security goon squads, I'm not saying that the movie has a secret agenda, or that director Edward Zwick (Glory) is sending out covert messages advertising American self-loathing to those insurgents in Iraq or any other medievalist thugs hell-bent on jihad. In any event, with big blockbusters like The Last Samurai, there's nothing that spices up things quite so nicely as a whiff of the reactionary.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at lgoldenb@tapabay.rr.com, or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2003.
