(Director’s Expanded Edition)
Entire movie: *** (out of ****)
Last 20 minutes: **** (out of ****)
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Russell Means, Ed Schweig, Wes Studi, Steven Waddington, and Jodhi May
Directed by Michael Mann & written by Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe, from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper
1992
117 min R
Michael Mann’s (“Heat,” “Collateral,” “The Insider,” “Manhunter,” “Miami Vice”) most commercially-oriented film is a fine entertainment throughout, but its last 20 minutes are when the movie really kicks into overdrive. The third act is highlighted by an almost wordless, running battle on a mountain path. Men tear through the woods, weapons in both hands, shooting and stabbing each other along the way. Water sprinkles from a creek above, bodies sail to the ravine below, figures cut dramatic poses against the huge scenery, and the same folk dance pumps on the soundtrack.
It’s a remarkable piece of cinema, worthy of a better movie than actually comes before it, and is almost certainly when Mann is the freest with Fenimore Cooper’s novel. One doubts readers in the late 1700s would be interested in compound out-the-elbow fractures or women jumping off cliffs. (It’s also worth noting that “Last of the Mohicans” is one of the few movies in which someone other than the hero fights the final one-on-one battle.)
But, as I said, the rest of “The Last of the Mohicans” is a fine film, full of color and effects, and delights in showing sleek men with long hair and muskets charging headlong through the underbrush. The score is by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman, and the cinematographer is Dante Spinotti, who has photographed not only most of Mann’s films but also the large canvas noir “L.A. Confidential” and the “Manhunter” remake “Red Dragon.” “Mohicans” lacks the high-and-mighty judgmental attitude of some of the more recent films involving Native Americans, like “Dances with Wolves” or “Little Big Man.” It accepts within its first couple minutes what it took “Dances with Wolves” 3 hours to shakily prove—that reds and whites are equally human, flawed, and capable of nobility—and charges on from there. Mann uses the French and Indian War of the 1750s to show how convoluted and tragic relations between settlers, colonial powers, and American Indians were.
The movie is like a criss-crossing network of overlapping revenge, and at the center of it all is Hawkeye (Irishman Daniel Day-Lewis of “Gangs of New York”), a white man whose family was killed by one tribe when he was a baby and who was raised by another. By simply not carrying this hurt with him for his whole life, he stands quietly as the film’s moral center. He is not interested in “finding those who killed my parents,” even if everyone around him has that kind of one-track mind. The plot is chiefly powered by the treacherous Huron Mogua’s (the magnificently visaged Wes Studi) vendetta against a British colonel and his family.
Hawkeye, his adopted father (Russell Means of “Natural Born Killers”), and adopted brother (Ed Schweig) stumble across this vendetta in one of those ridiculous contrivances popularized by Fenimore Cooper and since enshrined in all good pulp: the chance rescue. Yes, in all the wide forests in New England, Hawkeye just happens to be close enough to rescue the colonel’s daughters from Mogua’s first murder attempt. One of the daughters (Madeleine Stowe) instantly has the hots for Hawkeye. What ensues is a game of cat-and-mouse across the frontier, through French and British trenches and forts, down rivers, under waterfalls, and so on, all breathtakingly photographed.
What Mann has always been good at—besides staging brilliant and moving scenes of violence—is “I love you but I must kill you.” “The Last of the Mohicans” begins with Hawkeye popping a cap in a deer, at which point he and his family thank the deer for its life, apologize for slaying it, and say that it did itself honor by running so nobly. The episode is repeated later in the film when the British colonel negotiates with the French marquis for a British fort. The Frenchman has nothing but good things to say about the Brits and argues for a course that will spare the British soldiers.
“I love you so I must marry you” is not, however, Mann’s strongpoint. If Euro-Native relations in “Mohicans” are rendered with greater complexity than most films, it can also be said that the love triangle is not. The wild, free spirit (Hawkeye) vs. the buttoned down snob (the man the colonel wants for his daughter, a major played by Steve Widdington) for the love of the flared-nostril girl (Stowe) is executed well but not exactly given new life or depth. It certainly lacks the complex desires of “The New World.” In fact, by the end of the film, when Hawkeye has proven himself superior to basically every single challenge, while the major has accepted his fate and shown his true nobility, I kind of felt she had picked the wrong guy. (Events do, however, lead to another great “I love you but I must kill you” moment.)
The “Director’s Expanded Edition” that I watched on DVD has about 5 extra minutes that do little for the film. There is, however, a quiet, sad little moment in which it is clear that the daughter whom the major does not love would be more than happy to be with him. Still, everyone does his or her type well, Day-Lewis especially being better than the character actually written for him.
So, if you want to get all ripped, start running through the forest with a musket.
Finished Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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