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Film
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Windtalkers
In an attempt to make a more serious picture, John Woo brings his high octane, action movie style to a World War II story based on true events.
Friday, June 14, 2002
By Todd Gilchrist
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Windtalkers is John Woo's follow-up to the smash success Tom Cruise
vehicle Mission: Impossible 2, and the director's success has evidently
borne that most feared impulse in a director's repertoire: the "serious"
picture. In most cases, what that means is that the director abandons his or
her chosen genre (in this case, high-octane, nihilistic action pictures) for
a work that reflects emerging, or perhaps untapped maturity, to demonstrate
that there is substance behind all of the flash. Woo, like many before him,
fails, though sadly, not in so great a departure from his usual subject matter
that we as an audience are able to distance ourselves from the fact that he
is a spectacular director of action sequences, logic be damned. With Windtalkers,
however, the glaring refutations of time, space and reality impress upon viewers
the simple fact that Woo is at his best when he isn't attempting anything more
significant than the most emptily satisfying explosion you're likely to enjoy
- a scathing contradiction to the depth and reverence needed to tell a story
of redemption in a true-life setting.
The film's credits are but a brief detour before we're thrown headlong into
the first of many action sequences: Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage), a newly-promoted
soldier, can do little but watch as his comrades are knocked off in a cacophonous
firefight which, like those that follow it, seem to have little regard for procedural
accuracy. Joe, conflicted by his "duty" to follow orders, and haunted
by the ghosts of his friends, anxiously attempts to return to the front lines
where he can execute with extreme prejudice any and all Japanese adversaries
in one continuous, cathartic act. The brass, however, has other plans for the
decorated hero: he is to protect a young Navajo named Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach),
a code talker whose ability to translate coordinates through a virtually indecipherable
Native American language may prove the edge the Allies need to emerge victorious.
The two form an uneasy alliance, and find they must rely on one another more
than either imagined.
Joe and Ben are mirrored by Ox and Charlie (Christian Slater and Roger Willie,
respectively), and the juxtaposition of the two pairs suggests deeper layers
of truth beneath this story of male camaraderie and redemption. Where Joe resists
Ben's determined charm and welcoming spirit, Ox quickly befriends Charlie and
the two, quite literally make beautiful music together. The two white men's
orders, however, are clear: they musty protect the code at all costs, even if
that means taking out their new best friends, and the Windtalkers demonstrates
how time, and the circumstances of war, make friends of enemies, and how the
kind of friendship that emerges becomes a necessity to survive the rigors of
being a witness (much less a party) to death on a daily basis.
Woo's trademark themes are all working double-time in the war epic - male bonding,
the blurred lines between good and bad, birds as some yet-unexplained redemptive
creature, lots (and LOTS) of shooting. And so too are his weaknesses as a filmmaker,
notably his lack of storytelling ability, an uncomfortable distance from plausibility,
his (more and more frequently -) hyperactive camerawork. From Windtalkers'
first scene, Woo seems to forego the idea that soldiers receive and deliver
orders with any degree of formality, and this nonchalance towards historical
accuracy undermines the dramatic effectiveness of the battle scenes. Japanese
soldiers appear from any - and everywhere at once, without an ounce of strategy,
and the Americans respond in kind, shooting in all directions at once, at anything,
and in true action hero fashion, the good guys all too frequently hit their
random targets while the bad guys miss. Perhaps Lethal Weapon's Martin
Riggs was a consultant.
While these criticisms could easily be lobbied at Woo's earlier films, his
distance from a storyline one could believe were possible, or at least his ignorance
of one, elevates works like Face/Off and The Killer to some level
of unholy creative union between the beautiful and the horrible, creating action
scenes as artistic set-pieces. Windtalkers' "based on true events"
tagline plants it squarely in a context which we are expecting to show nothing
less than abject carnage, and yet something that might redeem the ideals upon
which a free society is founded; Woo's action scenes here are at best gratuitous.
The actors are saddled with intermittently evocative dialogue, but the principals
are all caricatures we've seen in countless action films: Cage's slack-jawed
Joe is a case study in self-loathing antihero; Beach's Ben is the well-meaning
newbie who learns about the meaning of life (and who develops the acumen and
resources at just the right moment to save the day); Noah Emmerich's Texan Chick
is an empty-headed bigot; Ruffalo's "Greek" Pappas is an ethnic version
of Saving Private Ryan's Jeremy Davies, a scaredycat who finds his cojones
just when the script needs him to. Only Peter Stormare's Hjelmstad is a conundrum:
his implacable accent and consistently unlikeable screen presence causes one
to give pause why he seems to work so frequently in past years.
Windtalkers is no doubt being heralded by its cast and crew as a tribute
to the soldiers lost in WWII, and yet, its characters never seem more lifelike
than the digital characters in George Lucas' epics - thinly drawn, artificially
created vessels for pathos in an equally artificial reality. The film's delay
in release from the end of last year at the time seemed a product of hyper-sensitivity
to the tragic events of last September; this is perhaps the first film which
deserves a bit of the backlash against Hollywood's willingness to oversimplify,
and pour the melodrama into a real-life conflict just to pack a few movie houses.
Woo's general disregard for the story and/or character elements that made "horrors
of war" movies like Black Hawk Down, The Thin Red Line and Saving
Private Ryan masterpieces of the genre impedes his own blind hurtling toward
the "classic" status which these films have all easily been awarded.
Windtalkers is too celebratory of Woo's good guy-versus-bad guy, buddy-buddy
ethos of action movies to rise above the limitations of the genre, and too obsessed
with its' own seriousness to be a truly "serious" film.
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