‘Last Samurai’: A regurgitation of ‘The Seven Samurai’
December 5, 2003
The Last Samurai is a wannabe from the get-go. It’s a sometimes likable pretender to Braveheart in a kimono rather than a kilt. The story line boldfaces its cross-cultural intentions by setting the story in Japan’s Meiji period, when the country began opening its ports to foreigners and modernity, and stresses the similarities between two old-school warriors. At least it wears its outsider status on its sleeve.
But The Last Samurai is also a bit like that eager beaver kid in math class who just discovered algebra and wants to try out a dozen theorems on you. Samurai’s cute and amusing, and you feel like a jerk because, after all, who are you to put down this kid. He just discovered algebra — read: samurai movies. But you’ve seen all of Akira Kurosawa’s work and then some long ago. You grew up watching samurai serials on Japanese-language TV. And the film seems a bit old hat. The Last Samurai is a little like that. It’s less clever and more deeply conservative than Kill Bill. It’s even occasionally likable and enjoyable — the action scenes can be thrilling, the respect given to the Bushido code of the samurai is fitting, and even the transformation of Capt. Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), a white U.S. Civil War and Indian Campaigns officer, into an exemplary samurai is fairly respectable. But it’s still wannabe.
It follows too that The Last Samurai also sees a scowling Cruise attempting to hop into the oversized footsteps of Kurosawa star Toshiro Mifune. Trying for intensity with all his might, the Mission: Impossible star ends up simply demonstrating that he’s barely capable of touching Mifune’s garment. And because he’s shoehorned so forcibly into this role — superimposing himself so effortfully into the widescreen samurai epic format — that you can’t help but wonder: when was the last time Cruise played a villain? And isn’t it about time that he did? Do his characters always need to grow and evolve heroically? Can’t he just wallow in squalor for a change like Mickey Rourke in Barfly? That I’d pay for.
And why does this movie even exist when perfectly adequate films by Kurosawa exist — and even Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Land of Demons — still in circulation? It’s a disturbing trend: like The Missing, Ron Howard’s reworking of John Ford’s classic The Searchers, The Last Samurai represents another move towards less innovation and more regurgitation in the movie industry. The old saw is that Hollywood is a dream factory — and here Cruise and director Edward Zwick indulge their Japanophile dreams of remaking Kurosawa and specifically The Seven Samurai, just because, well, it’s a dream. Maybe once you get to a certain point in life — be it megastar Cruise or Zwick, whose Shakespeare in Love won a Best Picture Oscar — those fantasies must be indulged.
Indulged like Algren. The Last Samurai opens on a meditating samurai’s dream, the image of armored Japanese warriors battling a white tiger, lashing out senselessly at them. It’s obvious what that tiger represents. Algren has been in the Civil War and in the Indian Wars and now in the San Francisco of 1876, he’s a shell of his once potent self, reduced to a drunken freak show, and paraded out by his sponsor, Winchester Rifles. He’s busy wrecking havoc only on himself, having flashbacks and obsessing over the atrocities he was ordered to commit against defenseless Native American women and children.
Breaking the spell is his former comrade soldier Zebulon Gant (Billy Connolly) who enlists him in some consulting work: helping the Japanese government build a modern army to fend off the rebellious efforts of a wayward samurai Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). Algren is obviously still conflicted about his wartime experiences — he gets sloppy drunk at the meeting with the Japanese representative Omura (Masato Harada), but against their better judgment — and chalking it up to cultural differences — the businessmen hire him anyway.
Algren boards a ship to Japan — which seems to consist of orange and pink sunsets, fern-cluttered forests and rolling green hills, kind of a Maxfield Parrish vision of New Zealand, where movie exteriors were shot. After meeting the young, naÔve emperor, the captain tries to get the Japanese army into shape, alongside his old Civil War cohort Col. Bagley (Tony Goldwyn). It’s tough: the untried farmers in the force can barely hit a target. Still, when Katsumoto attacks the railroad, the American military consultants are forced to send their troops into battle. One disaster leads to another and Algren ends up a captive of the more-mystical-than-you’d-imagine Katsumoto, who keeps the American alive because of that pesky white tiger dream. The samurai wants to learn more about his fellow warrior’s ways. Algren, of course, ends up discovering just as much, if not more, from his captors.
Attractions of the Bushido code aside, can you say “Stockholm Syndrome”? Algren may be the ultimate heroic Asia-phile — from a long line of aficionados — but he resembles Richard Chamberlain of Shogun more than, oh, Robert Mitchum of The Yakuza. It seems like even more of a fantasy when Katsumoto’s sister Taka (Koyuki) quietly and efficiently tends to Algren’s needs, in a wordless relationship that climaxes, submissively, with her dressing him.
And Zwick’s over-the-top direction doesn’t help matters: at one point, Algren manages to execute a slew of assassins in several smooth moves of double-fisted sword play but we can’t simply watch it once and be satisfied with it. It must be milked with an instant replay, in Algren’s obsessive mind and on screen, like a particularly cool move on the football field.
The cruel irony of The Last Samurai is that in the end, Cruise and Zwick claim to revere Japanese culture and swordsman films — much like Algren, who ends up identifying with the samurai. At the same time, they end up destroying the very tradition they love by recasting it, literally, in their image, and at its expense. In the end, death in resistance is valued over a passive dishonor, which is awfully convenient for those who survive to tell the tale. The Last Samurai masquerades as a cross-cultural fantasia, from its rolling idyllic pastures to the samurai’s fairytale hamlet, and maybe even spiritual-tinged meditation on how one country, or one individual, can recognize value in another. But at its root it’s deeply conservative, more interested in stasis than movement, stubbornly fixated on the past rather than the future, more enthralled by the death urge than life. If anything, it made me nostalgic for one thing: the ragtag crew that came before it, The Seven Samurai.
Comments
Got something to say?