Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

December 5 , 2003

Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai, being a lustrous, designed-within-a-millimeter-of-its-sprockets $125 million or so movie that recreates a century past, puts the concerns of the Bushido - such as compassion, courage, honor, duty, loyalty, justice and honesty - in the hands of a star. Stars are stars, but do they embody those characteristics, truly?

Tom Cruise does fine work as Captain Nathan Algren, a flustered, blustery drunk who's fixed on his atrocities during the Indian Campaigns. Cruise, a small sturdy man, hides behind hair and beard, hunched into the raiment of this guilt-shaken soldier, a coiled, broken soul, our modern-day identification figure, our supposed warrior of touchy-kill-y empathy. (It's also amusing to hear Cruise's character refer to someone else as "a man of small stature.")

It's 1876, and advisors to Japan's Emperor covet Algren's knowledge. The script, credited to John Logan and Zwick, with his writing-producing partner Marshall Herskovitz, hits plot points dutifully. I didn't care for a minute. For reasons unclear to me, as Algren had once vanquished the Native Americans, the Japanese ruling elite want to vanquish the samurai. Offered enough money, despite hatred for the soldiers he has known for decades, Algren takes the job.

The pursuit of knowledge is a wondrous thing. After a deadly battle, a ritual act of seppuku and a beheading he does not understand, Algren is taken to a distant village to recover. His teacher, curious and watchful, is the Samurai Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe, grave, handsome, alert, gorgeous). Over the course of a picturesque season, Algren learns how little he knows of his adversary. But how can Algren, this busted-down, piss-pot drunk, in just a few short months, become the moral equivalent of samurai warriors? Are his few years of screwing up truly the moral equivalent of a thousand years of Japanese history? It's lovely how much Japanese is spoken, with subtitles, yet the story tiresomely becomes yet one more tale of the white-man's-burden transposed upon the inscrutable beast: the Other, the foreigner, the noble, mysterious, dispensable East. Intermittently, Algren is presented as a Bruce Chatwin-like dilettante, scrawling and doodling in a series of notebooks, a diarist, or perhaps just a production designer before his time. "I believe that a man does what he can until his true destiny is revealed," he says at one point.

That destiny has conflicts. Algren is nursed by the widow of the man he has killed. "I killed her husband?" he exclaims. Katsumoto delivers the expected response with perfect measure, not grave, not precious: "It was a good death."

All the physical details are right. The shiny parts are shiny, indeed. But what lies beneath the curatorial surface, the Pottery Barn filmmaking? What story is being told, what should we care, what does it say about the larger culture, what messages are communicated beyond the understanding of the filmmakers? Attitudes and postures are struck, but I don't have a clue about what the subtext suggests. Jim Hoberman's review in the Village Voice, "The Robe Warrior," is suitably cutting, comparing it to Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (which it itself was memorably scorned by Pauline Kael as "Plays With Camera"). Hoberman writes: "The Last Samurai has a resonance-albeit a wacky one. The defeat of Saigo's samurai army paved the way for Japan's war with Russia and invasion of China while Saigo himself lived on in Japanese history as a hero of right-wing ultra-nationalists from the Black Dragon Society to Yukio Mishima. There's no reason to acknowledge that here - this is a spectacle without ideology. That's why it's a minor kick to see the Americans cast as amoral arms dealers, the local Westernizers shown as bad guys, and a Hollywood star instructing a Japanese emperor in the Way of the Samurai."

John Toll, he of sunset and vista, makes nice pictures. Hans Zimmer's music partakes of the sort of bombast used as moral grout, with a few strokes of Japanese instrumentation (given several paragraphs in the press kit.) Lilly Kilvert's production design is relentlessly epic. But nothing feels lived or lived in, beyond Cruise's seething eyes, Watanabe's suggestive gravity. The narrative, straining for majesty and grandeur, seems to move through dollhouses, filled with bright plastic flowers, perfume candled in from yet another boutique. There is a glimpse of the post-Civil War San Francisco with a picturesque quantity of cable cars going up hill and down, the flock-of-birds software from Gladiator and other movies let for the shot's duration. Extras on the several sets seems directed to act in the "natural" style of fourth-rate extras.

It would be tough to doubt Zwick and Herskovitz's sincerity and earnestness - I still shudder at memories of the potent and crushing self-regard of thirtysomething - yet beyond the two central roles, attitudes are struck rather than evoking the sort of plangent melancholy the movie seems to have been produced for. There are lovely, terse movie-movie moments: audience-pleasing, bad literature, worse psychology, such as "I don't give a damn about the samurai! I want to know my enemy!"

Beneath Cruise and Watanabe, the casting is mostly curious. Billy Connelly is brought on for dyspeptic relief as a mentor of sorts, and you pray he'll be the traditional first act sacrificial lamb. Timothy Spall, a pear-shaped, one-man Greek chorus as a photographer and connoisseur of all things Nipponese, is reduced to spinning out a morass of expository dialog.

In the battle scenes, Zwick and Toll have done an expert study in Akira Kurosawa's movies from The Seven Samurai to Ran, crafting sturdy battle scenes that resemble nothing more than an expert study in Kurosawa. Backlight, fog, the rain of arrows from the sky, the kinetic power of lateral movements of men and horses moving left against backdrops of pickets or forest. It's all very proficient yet somehow ungainly, distant. (More domestic interludes are often prefaced by a series of three still lifes, like the "triads" that precede scenes in films by Yasujiro Ozu.)

There are several endings, none of which satisfy. But there is an image at a moment I took as the true ending, and it is against a vista of pale pink cherry blossoms, perfect, tumbling like a memory of cotton, evoking landscapes and customs past like no other flickering frames in The Last Samurai.

The weight of heaviosity

Working again with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who also shot 8 Mile and 25th Hour) and screenwriter Guillermo Arriago, the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu's second feature is literally timeless, shifting from scene to scene through past and present. As in Amores Perros, a terrible car accident twines several lives together. In an American every-city-actually Memphis-a truck driven by an alcoholic who's turned to Jesus (Benicio del Toro, furiously fretful) kills a man and a child, leaving behind a fragile widow (Naomi Watts, luminous, extraordinary) who returns to drugs, and a dying mathematics teacher (Sean Penn, being Sean Penn) whose life is saved by the dead man's heart. Passions flare. Revenge is in the offing. Beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order: González Iñárritu takes melodramatic, hyperemotional material and shuffles it like a bad dream.

"I would say that this structure, this way to tell a story, is suggested by the story itself," the 40-year-old filmmaker tells me at this year's Toronto International Film Festival in his furiously intense manner. "We could not relate this story in a chronological order. It would be like three short films, just crossing at some point, but it would not be interesting. I find that one of the responsibilities of the storyteller is to find the best way to tell the story. The most wonderful of fables have always heightened the truth. To get the audience to feel those spaces [in the] information and make the audience alive, not passive, boring, dead," he says, his rich accent as forceful as his eyes and wild head of dark hair.

Is this a knack of editing or writing, I wonder? "Let me tell you that I finished shooting the film in March and here I am with the film [in early September]. With Amores Perros, I edited the film in seven months. This one? I was really amazed that I finished in almost four months. Why? We spent three years with the script, editing. I was editing in the script, even the sounds. It's not completely faithful. I took out about twenty scenes, about forty minutes, and I would love to take out twenty more [scenes]."

21 Grams may have the most intensely constructed sound design of the year, working in domestic scenes rather than, say, the crashing of seas in Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. "I spend a lot of time on sound. I love the clash of sounds. Not only the clash of images. It's more suggestive than an image," González Iñárritu says, demonstrating transitions from the film: making sounds with his mouth, a car engine, water rushing, a plane screaming. "It's a musical thing. The ear is more powerful than the eye. I have an extraordinary ear!" he says, laughing. "I have an amazing memory in my ears. Strange thing. I am very bad with my eyes, I don't remember a lot of faces, but my ear can remember a tune I heard when I was four years old."

So why didn't he become a musician? "A very dis-fortunate destiny," he laughs, "finding myself not going into music. I scored for Mexican films, very bad ones. I made some jingles, I had a band, played drums." He smiles a killer smile, shrugs a little. "Not a first-rate musician."

Is it guilt that destroys the characters, particularly del Toro's? "The problem with guilt is, at least in the Catholic Church where I was raised, you are told that you have to forgive. But no one tells you how to forgive yourself! Which is the most difficult thing. That's what's the burden of [del Toro]. It's like the Book of Job. He's got this big enemy, called God, which is impossible to escape because it lives in your perception. He cannot forgive himself [for the pain]."

González Iñárritu gets even more intense as he recalls a story a psychoanalyst friend told him about a patient who felt guilt after an abortion. Her mother and the priest say, 'No, no it was the circumstances.'" She was depressed enough to try to kill herself twice, he tells me. "Finally, my friend saw her and he said to her, 'Y'know, yeah. You killed your son. You're a killer. You're a murderer. And you did it.' She started to cry. That's how she was cured. Just to accept that. To confront that."

How does that fit the fate of del Toro's character? "It's not a magical thing. It's just a long process trying to recover. To not be a victim to religion, which is another kind of addiction, sensorial attachments. It colors his emotions. That is what drugs and alcohol do, block your emotions."

I'm an admirer of González Iñárritu's contribution to September 11, the omnibus of short films made by international filmmakers. Its simplicity and horror is devastating, and I venture that he seems intrigued by how fiction filmmakers might somehow capture the intensity of real-life events. He slightly misunderstands what I'm asking, but offers a strong defense of the piece, which was despised by some reviewers, like Village Voice film editor Dennis Lim, who wrote that "it's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive-and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone."

"I think the images are in the brain of every audience who sees that black screen, with frames, the eleven seconds of frames," González Iñárritu says of that film's intent minimalism "That was made entirely with sounds, which is more powerful than any image. We were so overexposed by the media. Pornographically. Then I said, 'Why would I put more images [out there] than what I already have in here?'" He indicates his temple. "Everybody can trigger their own emotional experiences through those images and exorcise and cure themselves [from] how stupidly, horrible the media acted, showing so many times those people dying there. Just showing the worst part. I used that guy, falling, as a metaphor, because all human beings were falling that day. It's funny you comment on that as images. It's the fragmentation that works."

The title, at first, makes the film sound like it'll be a thriller about drugs. "I read it in a novel ten years ago, a French novel I don't remember, I've been trying to remember, and I'm ashamed!" he says. "I want to give credit to the author, but I don't remember. Anyone, big guys, little guys, when we die, lose twenty-one grams. Anyone of us can make [our own] meaning."

But for you? "It's just the weight. The ones who leave us? They don't go. They stay here. That's the amount of weight that I feel stays with us. Then, those twenty-one grams inside of us? That's a lot. It could be the inhale-exhale we are doing now." He reaches out, demonstrates deep breathing. "That represents life. When I did some meditation, the guy told me you have to concentrate on that, that breath, that is precisely life. If you don't get that... That's life, that's literal-- if we don't do that? We die."

Swag the dog

Two clay flower pots up on the counter: one for Big Fish, with a flowering bulb my cat's already dug out, chewed up and spit out, and a smaller size for Disney's Calendar Girls, with flower seeds ready to be kneaded into the convenient packets of potting soil.

Focus Features finished their teaser promo for 21 Grams: yes, the stuffed hummingbird arrived today, but I haven't taken the time to weigh it for accuracy.

Coming for Valentine's Day: the Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore amnesia comedy, 50 First Dates. Arriving this week: the VHS trailer in a large carton from FedEx, along with an entire fresh pineapple. A counter worker at Atomix, the cafe in my building that accepts packages for me, was happy to take the prickly thing off my hands. Now to swig the Theraflu and watch the trailer. I have about that much consciousness tonight.

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