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Last Samurai (2003)
A film review by Rik
Director: Edward Zwick
Ken Watanabe .... Katsumoto
Tom Cruise .... Nathan Algren
Billy Connolly .... Zebulon Gant
Tony Goldwyn .... Colonel Bagley
Masato Harada .... Omura
Koyuki…Taka
Shichinosuke Nakamura .... Emperor Meiji
The Last Samurai is a great action film in the Kurosawa
tradition, bar the Hollywood love angle and the unconvincing 'alternative
ending'. The sword fights are brilliantly staged and filmed, and
you want to cheer as the Samurai equivalent of the '7th Cavalry'
gallop of the horizon.
Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is an American soldier hired to train
the late Nineteenth Century Japanese army in the use of modern firearms
to overcome internal resistance to the 'modernisation process'.
Circumstances and governmental over-confidence oblige him to accompany
the army into action before it is fully trained. He is captured
by the rebels but allowed to live out of respect for his courage
and fighting prowess, and because the rebel leader, Katsumoto (brilliantly
played by Ken Watanabe), wants to 'know' his enemy. But Algren has
more to learn from the Japanese than vice versa. Spending the winter
season with his captors, he is entranced by their sense of duty,
honour, and politeness. A people with deep feelings mediated by
social restraint, they devote their lives to a rigorous pursuit
of artistic perfection and martial arts. Minimalist home furnishings,
calligrapy, the appreciation of cherry blossom and the odd contemplation
in the snow illustrate an existence infused by the asceticism of
Zen Buddhism. We don't see Algren arranging flowers or playing Go
(two other traditional attributes of the Samurai) but he naturally
becomes involved in martial arts and develops the Zen capacity for
relaxing into a sort of subconscious autopilot or "going with
the force" as they would say in Star Wars.
But there is a subtext. Algren is haunted by private demons: memories
of the massacre of innocent Red Indian women and children, and a
parallel emerges between the fate of the Amerindian 'Savages' and
the suppression of these Japanese traditionalists. As the Whiteman
learns to despise his own people and go native, one is reminded
of Dancing With Wolves. Another comparison could be made
with Clavell's Shogun (novel and TV adaption) which is
also based on a true story of a Whiteman going native, but at the
beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate some two hundred years before.
Now Algren addresses these issues emotionally, not ideologically,
but the ideological aspects of this clash between a traditionalist
society and the new forces of modernism, Capitalism and nationalism
are very apparent. This is not just some knee-jerk egalitarian sympathy
for the Third World, because Samurai society was - and is portrayed
in the film - as an aristocratic society, and more or less faceless
peasants kow-tow to the mounted Samurai warriors as they ride through
their Feudal domains. This is about the resistance of an heroic,
traditionally-orientated warrior society to a modernisation whose
technical superiority masks a spiritual shallowness. While the film
does not hide or care about the social inequality on which feudalism
was based, it does specifically poke fun at the social inequality,
ugliness and cowardice of liberal-capitalism. And this film is not
just about Japan in the late Nineteenth Century but about us now
- about our self-perceived shallowness. The values of the heroic
warrior culture fascinate us despite the fact that we have so completely
rejected them in favour of safety, consumerism and political correctness.
And there is yet another dimension. Unspoken, perhaps even unthought,
and, for Americans, unthinkable, but I am struck by the parallel
to be drawn with Islamic society, another hard if backward and ill-armed
culture, and the last remnant of organised resistance to the planetary
supremacy of la vie Americaine. A more postmodernist reading
would suggest that even the critique of the culture we have and
the society we have become is just another commodity to be produced,
marketed and sold to us – in this case by Warner Bros. When
the only visible opposition to the consumer society is itself commodified
and absorbed by, perhaps even a projection of, our predicament,
our absolute hopelessness becomes apparent.
Rik - 23 March 2004
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