Review
Review Date: 14-December-03
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK
The Last Samurai (2003)
A few weeks back, I wrote that I rarely enjoy westerns like "The Wild Bunch" because they suggest that honor died soon after America was born. The notion that modernity spelled the end of traditional virtue has of course been examined in samurai movies as well as westerns (and in samurai-westerns like "The Magnificent Seven"), and now it has reappeared in "The Last Samurai," a heavily nostalgic epic from Hollywood icon Tom Cruise and wannabe mass market mythmaker Edward Zwick. Although I appreciate this film more than Zwick's other lugubrious fare ("Courage Under Fire," "Legends of the Fall"), "The Last Samurai" put me off like most westerns do --- only not because it laments the lost promise of America, but because it tells an essentially anti-American story in excessively American fashion. To put it metaphorically, "The Last Samurai" feels like getting sashimi from a Wendy's drive-thru.
The movie opens briskly with an American military captain named Nathan Algren (Cruise) sailing to Japan to help bring the emperor's fledgling army up to the modern, western standards of the 1870s. Still reeling from the butchery of Indians in which he played a part, Algren is a bitter, drunken mercenary with a sizable death wish, which helps to explain why he stays in the front line when his unprepared troops go head-to-head with a band of samurai whom they have been ordered to annihilate (at the questionable instigation of the young emperor's money-grubbing advisors). Emerging memorably from a mist made more of time than atmosphere, these samurai are quickly identified as the film's heroes, men of unparalleled martial skill and an unshakable code of behavior. (Algren's hateful commander and Japanese employers sneer that they reject firearms for bow and sword, but of course we know that makes them six thousand times cooler than everybody else.) After his victory, the leader of the samurai, Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), decides to take the wounded Algren home, sensing both an educational opportunity and a glimmer of the man behind the wreck.
It goes without saying that during his convalescence among the ancient tribe, Algren finds healing for his soul as well as his body. (And also that he develops smushy feelings for a gorgeous Japanese woman with perfectly disheveled hair, played by model Koyuki.) Although the battle scenes are the movie's selling point (nicely staged, though too heavy on the slo-mo), the quiet central part of the picture is where the story should really take shape, where the audience should become attached to the purity of the well ordered samurai lifestyle and discover what makes Algren a person worthy of its remedial power. Unfortunately, it is here that the major problem with "The Last Samurai" becomes most apparent, in the marquee gaze and newly straightened teeth of Tom Cruise. Not only does he look altogether too polished even when the script contrives to flatten him in the mud (think Samurai Ken), but he delivers a wooden performance that completely belies his talent, consisting of a constipated grimace/glare combo that doesn't change even when he pitches timorous woo.
The responsibility for giving the movie a pulse falls to Watanabe, who comes through with a deft mix of intelligence, grandeur, and sex appeal and the help of a solid supporting cast (notably Aoi Minato as the little boy who adopts Algren as his father). Although Katsumoto's story can have only one end, he demands attention as he shepherds his people, tries to enlighten the gonad-deficient emperor to whom he still swears allegiance, and looks his impending destiny square in the face. But, alas, the movie does not have the guts to fulfill his destiny --- or Algren's, or its own --- as it should. Its seemingly ardent devotion to tribal cultures and the lost ways of the faultless samurai demands that the curtain fall on a scene of ritual beheading and hari-kari; instead, the white guy absorbs all the honor and glory of his Asian mentor but none of his barbarity or obsolescence. The last ten minutes, utterly superfluous, are but a concession to the power of market research and Tom Cruise's teeth, cementing the niggling feeling I felt throughout "The Last Samurai" that it isn't really a movie about the superior nobility of extinct Japanese warriors, but a sop for modern Americans with no spirituality or culture who must therefore take someone else's redeeming history and make it their own.
Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
