From its opening shot of a pastoral landscape in England, War Horse is a beautifully depicted tale of competition, determination, regret, and class –but it’s mostly a story of a boy and his horse. Or, more appropriately, a fairy tale about a boy and his horse, something that the film does not try to hide with its improbable events and fantastical coincidences.
One example might be when Joey (the horse) and Albert (Jeremy Irvine, his young owner) are tasked with plowing a rock-and-stone-filled field that will provide enough land to farm turnips so that Albert’s father, Ted (Peter Mullan), will be able to save the house and land that he’s on the brink of losing. The town gathers to watch this Sisyphusean task (the land runs uphill) that has become an us (the lower-middle class) against them (the wealthy landowner and his son), and as time passes, nary a rock is overturned, both Joey and Albert are becoming battered by the challenge, and ultimately they must stop, defeated. But, as laughter erupts from the crowd and Lyons (David Thewlis, the landowner) chirps that he’ll be by on Thursday to reclaim the land, the overcast sky opens up and releases a deluge of rain, so much so and in such a short period of time that the ground becomes completely saturated, allowing Albert and Joey to completely till the property, exposing nothing but luscious, nutrient-rich soil – and the horse shears a rather large rock in half merely, it seems, by will power.
Another example might by Joey’s epic sprint through the battlefield that contains French, British, and German soldiers. Populated with dying soldiers, broken bodies, exploded craters, and miles of barbed wire, this hostile territory is a veritable wasteland of those who keep trying to obliterate the opponent. Seemingly invincible, Joey navigates around tanks, through bunkers, in and out of fox holes, around artillery, and, ultimately, barrels through numerous strands of barbed wire that are all connected to heavy, wooden, make-shift posts. (It still amazes me that, despite the horse’s illustrated acumen and genius, he still never learned how to jump over obstacles – a repeated point of humor in the film, but I suppose this is to parallel the flaws in humanity as well, but it still seems a bit of a stretch.) However, as these wires coil around Joey’s body, he continues to move well beyond what one would presume to be the stopping point, until he finally collapses under the restraint. Certainly, this scene has a purpose: it pits a German and British soldier in momentary camaraderie as both free the horse from its entanglement, but it doesn’t dispel the overarching exercise of War Horse: spectacle.
To be fair, the entire film doesn’t run this way. There are some amazingly well-constructed scenes, most notably when a British battalion emerges from a wheat field next to an encampment of German soldiers. Swords drawn, they gallop through the camp, forcing the Germans into the woods. And, as the encampment flees, and the British charge, a wall of machine guns are exposed at the perimeter of the forest, setting up a surreal disappearance of riders as the camera cuts between a cavalry stampeding toward the woods and riderless horses leaping the German firing squad.
And, in this moment, coupled with the assertion that “the war will never be over” is where the fairy tale concedes to the numerous allegories held in abeyance as if bubbles trapped in the top layer of a semi-frozen pond. Joey himself is the primary agent for these allegories: he’s ripped from his mother at a young age, and she’s left to watch him get sold as a workhorse at auction (a lens on man’s inhumanity to man, particularly slavery). He’s also an impetus for class rivalry. Lyons initially wants the beautiful thoroughbred as a riding or show horse, but, on account of pride, the lower-class Ted refuses to concede the auction and buys Joey when he really needs to have purchased a horse capable of plowing a field. As personified as Joey is, he also represents the idealized potential of peace. He crosses national lines without being pilloried as a traitor or an enemy. His job is to serve the British army, so he does; his owner is killed, and Joey becomes a default German; upon release from his barbed wire shackles, Joey is won on a coin flip and goes back to the British side of the war, only to go back up to auction on Armistice Day. Essentially, Joey is the Forrest Gump of horses, interloping on different events – more as the result of someone else’s agency, not necessarily his own.
And, perhaps this comparison has more credence than it did when I jotted it down. Throughout the film, the most impressive accomplishment is the humanizing of Joey and the zoomorphizing of humanity. While this is often a common occurrence in slave and oppression narratives, WarHorse does not necessarily discriminate between oppressor and oppressed; rather, everyone is equally animalized (with the lone exception being Albert). With the exception of Emily Watson, there are few notable – or at least celebrated – names in the cast, and perhaps this is by design. The most emotional moments of the film are centered on Joey and his actions. In a sense, War Horse is reminiscent of 1950’s era family cinema like Old Yeller. There is death in this film, but no blood shed. The first waves of soldiers simply fall to the ground at the sound of gunfire as opposed to being eviscerated by bullets a la Saving Private Ryan. This is certainly not a criticism of the latter, but an observation of the additionally fantastical nature of this film.
In the end, War Horse is good. I think. But it’s not great, and I’m certain that it doesn’t deserve the lauding it’s receiving. While emotional and, at times, tear jerking, there is little ambiguity in the metaphors and symbols. Tertiary characters lament “the beasts we have become” and this is overly evident throughout the film’s mostly campy narrative. In one sense, it is uplifting and touching; in another, it’s amazingly underwhelming and forgettable.
