“The Last Samurai” spends a fair amount of time surveying the samurai’s rules of life and combat, which Katsumoto, and later Algren, sees as threatened by progress. In a strange confrontation with the consequences of his actions, Algren comes to live with the family of a samurai he killed in battle. The widow’s tolerance of Algren is explained by her words “he did his duty, and you did yours.” It is not the heat of battle that is noble, but the nobility of the cause behind the battle, and a samurai’s devotion to his master. The samurai are not at war with the Emperor, as Katsumoto reminds Algren again and again, but feel as if they are protecting the Emperor’s interests by staving off Western modernization. After an attempt on his life, Katsumoto knows his attackers are not the Emperor’s men because “if the Emperor wanted my life, he would need only to ask.” One of Algren’s samurai teachers trains him to actually think less during battle, and not about every single man and every single sword. A more perfect summary of the need for the way of the samurai in the intellectually cluttered world we have become I can’t devise.
Cruise plays Algren first as a drunk who will kill for pay because he’s good at nothing else. He wishes he could somehow balance the bad karma he acquired in his experiences with the Indians. Still, he is a fighter to the end; when a defeated samurai would have hung his head in shame and gutted himself, Algren is still fighting, from the ground, from the mud, blinded, and regardless of how much blood is pouring out of him. This, to say the least, impresses the warriors.
A cultural exchange occurs and Katsumoto adopts Algren’s to-the-bitter-end attitude. The two viewpoints form an uneasy truce, between the Buddhist samurai who is willing to hand things over to God, call the game over, and spill his guts, and the fighter from the industrialized nation, who scrambles and fights in the muck. Ken Watanabe—one of the one-and-a-half nominees for Golden Globes who isn’t white, the other half being Ben Kingsley—gives a performance as Katsumoto that practically eclipses Cruise’s. He is fearsome in battle and comfortable with power, yet wise in asking questions. Katsumoto is sensitive, especially to all the God-Zen-bushido stuff going on in his blossoming garden, yet this sensitivity is portrayed as integral to his martial prowess, and not as a revisionist attempt to girlify him. “The Last Samurai” marks the American arrival of an actor who could become a major talent, and who’d better not just end up as the exotic heavy in the next “Rush Hour” knock-off.
At a multiplex overrun with swordplay, director Edward Zwick’s (“Glory”) choreography is among the finest. I found the battles in “The Last Samurai” more gripping and more inclined to make my eyes water than all the bloodless bloodletting in “The Lord of the Rings,” and not just because of the R rating. It was all the screaming, of those striking and those being struck, and the wide, terrified eyes in the midst of it all. Lives actually feel at stake. The remorseless wholesale slaughter of “LOTR” is here replaced with drafted foot soldiers that are not cowards but frightened men, worthy of our sympathy. Yet the first appearance of the samurai tests our compassion for both sides, by showing them on horseback, in glorious armor and horned helmets that can only be described as beautiful and terrible. And when the finally “modernized” (circa 1877) Japanese troops arrive, there is beauty, too, in their blue uniforms, shining bayonets, and the discipline of their rank and file. (If that’s still not enough beauty, the movie is shot by John Toll, who photographed the drop-dead stunning “The Thin Red Line” and won the Oscar for “Braveheart.”)
I have no idea if “The Last Samurai” is historically accurate, a precise representation of Japanese culture, or creates a believable relationship between Cruise and any of his captors, especially the wife of a man he killed. The movie is sometimes heavy-handed when beating its point home, it cuts more often than it should, it sometimes has too much music, it uses a different shutter speed for flashbacks, and it writes dates and locations at the bottom of the screen, which really aren’t necessary. Like the samurai, its reach exceeds its grasp. But about two men who decide to live by honor, and about how merciless the betterment of mankind can often be, the movie is prescient. Even if the mechanics and weapons of the samurai have become obsolete, their discipline and philosophy should not be. In the end, they have come by the sword, and by the sword they shall depart. But it will be a good death.
And I can’t think of anything cooler than riding with a bunch of samurai.
To read my thoughts on the end of “The Last Samurai,” click here (WARNING: SPOILERS).
Finished January 10th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of “The Last Samurai.” Back to home.