Jeremy Irvine is shown in a scene from “War Horse.” (AP)
It’s not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history’s finest maker of children’s movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children’s story “War Horse” is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.
In early 20th-century Devon, England, we witness the birth of a brown thoroughbred with a diamond-shape white mark on his forehead. Spielberg is confident enough, and skilled enough, to allow pictures and music to tell the story here and in many other lyrical passages after a reckless alcoholic dad (Peter Mullan, who slightly overplays the wretchedness) overpays for the horse at auction, risking his entire farm and the wrath of his sensible wife (Emily Watson).
The old man is gimpy, but his teen boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine) hopes to save the day by teaching this race horse to plow a turnip field. Demands of the landlord (David Thewlis) threaten the entire farm even as larger events threaten the world: It’s the summer of 1914.
A kindly British officer (played with great sensitivity by Tom Hiddleston) buys the horse, called Joey, with a promise to return him if he can. Soon the lads are dashing off to what they imagine will be a great sporting cavalry charge in France.
If anything, Spielberg underplays the frivolity with which great nations began World War I and believed they could quickly end it by Christmas, but in one of many heartbreaking scenes, the master illustrates how Rudyard Kipling ideals were laid waste by ruthless technology. As with many other evocative moments, Spielberg tells this chapter with no words, though John Williams’ typically yearning score does plenty to bring home the gravity of what’s happening. There is a devastating image of Joey galloping without a rider, terrified but somehow determined.
Joey (and a friendly rival, a black horse, whose life Joey repeatedly saves) is first captured by Germans who intend to put him to work, then taken for a pet by a French farmer (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter Emilie (Celine Buckens). Each of these episodes is a small, tidy reminder of the millions of good people on all sides who got caught in the inescapable meat grinder of the Great War.
“The war has taken everything from everyone,” is a refrain heard more than once, and it was never truer than in the 1914-1918 conflict, which combined senseless underlying causes with previously unimagined ruthlessness. This was more a march of folly than a crusade against evil, and Spielberg’s film is a poignant plea to recognize one another’s humanity — through the eyes of the utterly innocent horse, whose hard-working spirit, endurance and willingness to sacrifice earn it repeated cruel punishment.
In its culminating moment — one of the few scenes that contain much dialogue in an elegantly lean script by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis — the horse flees madly through the night and gets tangled in barbed wire that amounts to a rough equivalent of Christ’s crown of thorns.
When British and German grunts work together to save Joey, the scene cleverly recalls the famous Christmas truce of 1914, in which hundreds of soldiers — who hours before and hours later would try to kill one another — crept out of their trenches and played soccer. Above ground and face to face, the critical dehumanization of the enemy momentarily became impossible, and peace lay dangerously near. Officers put a stop to the cease-fire, correctly realizing that their men were one step away from shooting them and going home.
Spielberg’s film steers scrupulously clear of politics (and will hence be equally marketable in France and Germany). Is he putting sales above story? I don’t think so: The horse, like a child (or the Christlike donkey in the French film “Au Hasard, Balthazar”), is so guileless that it allows us to experience the war on a purely sensory and emotional level. The big, brutal battle scene here, while not as explicit as “Saving Private Ryan,” stands with the one in “Paths of Glory” as the most visceral re- enactment of trench warfare in cinematic history. (Spielberg also delivers a shot straight out of “Gone With the Wind.” You can’t say he lacks ambition, or taste.) The climax in the snow delivers a sense that after the unbearable has been borne, there still might be some goodness left.
Spielberg is less effective when he tries to tangle with issues. Emotions, not words, are his medium — but this is the highest a filmmaker can reach. It’s why “Rocky” is better than “All the President’s Men.” Consider the Coen brothers, who after 20 years of irony finally dared reach for the heartstrings last year in the climactic odyssey across the night in “True Grit.” It was their finest moment. “War Horse” has several equally virtuoso sequences, and together with the painterly cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg caps the movie with the most haunting and beautiful images of all, a sequence that is as stunning as the finale of “Shane” or “The Searchers.” Those who say they don’t make ’em like they used to must now fall silent.