My goodness--Sir Walter Scott is alive and well and writing scripts for Hollywood! As all of the film critics have been pointing out, The Last Samurai deploys the standard themes of classical historical romance: feudal culture meets modernity, gets destroyed by same; alienated wanderer finds redemption through his encounter with a more "primitive" culture; rural nature and moral superiority go hand-in-hand (didn't Sherlock Holmes have something to say about that?); etc. I sometimes wondered if I was watching a Japanese Waverley. The film represents Japanese modernization as a shift from "force" to "fraud"*: an older social hierarchy maintained by the combined weight of physical might and an honor-based values system gives way to a flexible, fluid system maintained by the flow of capital. We also get a rather heavy dose of gender politics along the way. The West may be taking over, but it effeminates (if you'll excuse the verb) the Japanese: the Westernized Emperor is an ineffectual weakling and the capitalist Mr. Omura is a coward. By contrast, the samurai carry the weight of the film's masculinity. In particular, the film suggests that the craft of swordsmanship and archery has greater "authenticity"--it's more manly--than any gunfighting, in large part because the gun depersonalizes battle. In the conclusion to the samurai's last stand (explicitly represented as an inversion of Custer's Last Stand), the gunners simply mow down the oncoming samurai without, it seems, even bothering to aim. The samurai practice a less mediated form of battle, that is, than do the modernized forces.
If, at the end, the Emperor rejects Omura's slash-and-burn policies in favor of building the new on the fabric of the old, he does so only after the samurai have been eradicated. Having safely destroyed an entire way of life, in other words, the modern world can now nostalgically invoke it--as, I'm tempted to say, an invented tradition of sorts. The film's frame narrative is itself an odd amalgamation of history and romance: as we discover at the end, what we have seen is really the book written by translator and photographer Simon Graham (Timothy Spall). Graham preserves Nathan Algren's (Tom Cruise) diaries, photographs the samurai as they prepare to fight and witnesses the climactic battle. Algren's return to the village, in fine pastoral form, may or may not be Graham's own romantic conclusion (although I suspect that I'm granting the film too much ambiguity here). Graham is in some ways closer to Scott's Waverley, since he is almost entirely passive and a failure to boot. But he functions as the "objective" yet elegiac witness, celebrating the demise of one culture with the very modern tools of another.
As far as the film itself goes...well, it isn't Kurosawa. (Compare Ran, for example, which invests the Japanese landscape with an ominous depth completely missing here.) Cruise is too flat, while Spall and Billy Connolly are pretty much wasted; the only interesting performance qua performance here is that of Ken Watanabe as the samurai leader. The battle scenes themselves are surprisingly unimpressive; some of the hand-on-hand moments even elicited giggles from other movie-goers. There are some decent tear-jerking moments, but you'll know that the tears are being jerked. For a $4.50 matinee ticket, it was OK.
*Popular terminology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. IIRC, Scott himself describes modernization that way.
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