Few living things on this planet are more majestic than a horse. Creatures of graceful beauty and tremendous strength, almost as closely bonded with mankind as the dog, yet as a civilized species we’ve put the horse through so much over our centuries old relationship with the gentle giants.
WAR HORSE, directed by Steven Spielberg, offers a glimpse into the life of just one of these fine creatures. The story is told from the perspective of one horse named Joey, raised from a freshly born colt by an Irish farm boy named Albert (played by Jeremy Irvine) who immediately forms a strong friendship, only to be devastated when World War I hits home and the horse is sold into the cavalry by Albert’s father Ted (played by Peter Mullan).
What follows is the emotional journey of Joey through the trials and tribulations of war. Joey trades hands multiple times, his possession transferred from the British cavalry to German soldiers and to a frail young country girl and her pacifist grandfather. The film’s journey has no central human character, but several roles filling a segmented timeline. This creates a sort of anthology effect, allowing the viewer to more easily experience how this one horse could bring people together as it does.
WAR HORSE has two specific strong points; the performance – if you will allow me the liberty to call it such – of the horse playing Joey, and the gorgeous cinematography from Janusz Kaminski, a regular collaborator of Spielberg’s. The soft, glowing warmth of the scenes away from war and the colder, gray tinged scenes during and surrounding the war, compliment each other, but also often coincide and crossover to meld the two realities into one inseparable truth of the time and place of the film.
No one performance truly stands out amongst the human actors, except maybe that of Neils Arestrup’s as the frail girl Emilie’s Grandfather, the most endearing and convincingly unique performance. Otherwise, the entire cast performed wonderfully in their respective roles, never reaching beyond the scope of their purpose. The cast of many youthful and a few veteran names include Emily Watson as Albert’s mother, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, David Thewlis and Eddie Marsan.
The original score for WAR HORSE is composed by the legendary John Williams – you know… the guy who helped immortalize Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones and Superman in our collective aural memory. Surprisingly, the music in this film does not display that characteristically dominating presence of Williams’ most recognizable work, instead slipping into the background to near subliminal effect. I personally didn’t even realize I was listening to John Williams until reaching the end credits, when for the first time, his music became vividly apparent.
WAR HORSE is just as much about the tough times as it is about the horse’s journey. One thing I relished in observing during this film was the attention given to details and lesser known facts about World War I. There is one very powerful scene in the third act that takes place in no man’s land between the British and German trenches. The grounds are obliterated, bodies mangled and tossed about the tangled chaos of the barbed wire. This is not a violent scene, but rather an incredibly poignant and uplifting scene depicting an example of occurrences that actually took place during the war. While WWI and WWII may share very similar names and scopes of conflict, they were in fact two very different wars with two very different pairs of warring sides.
In the end, WAR HORSE delivers on the type of ending most audiences will expect and want, which is fine because it’s warranted in this film. Expect a journey that lasts just barely more than two hours, but doesn’t feel exceedingly long, a journey that will touch the animal lover within and remind us that wars are waged by governments, but fought be regular Joes, and Joeys.
