The Adventures Of Tintin was the first comic book, excuse me, graphic novel, series that I fell in love with, discovering it way back in grade school. Belgian creator Herge was so skilled at crafting the easily read, globe-trotting, pocket mysteries, brimming with imagination, and populated with a wild, and occasionally hilarious cast of characters, with Tintin at the center, a young, open-minded and intelligent British journalist who never fails to get embroiled in the endlessly fantastic narratives. Tintin is a perfect foil, and audience surrogate, a role model for intellectually curious, globally-minded youngsters, and to this day very few artists have been able to trump Herge's elegant clarity of vision through such economic and humble line drawings and ink dot facial expressions. I hunted every issue down and purchased them all, bagged them, and stuck them in the attic, out of sight and out of mind until now. Though I will admit trepidation at the notion of Spielberg assuming the reins of such a treasured series, it makes perfect sense actually, even discounting Herge's supposed personal belief that Spielberg was the only director who could do Tintin effectively, watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark it's nearly impossible not to see the character of Indiana Jones as basically only one career and one body of water removed from Tintin. And watching The Adventures Of Tintin, it's hard not to agree with Herge, as Spielberg pulls it off for the most part. Despite a few missteps, The Adventures Of Tintin is a rousing return to this particular form for the director, and an adequate introduction for a whole new generation to one of fiction's greatest characters.
The film is adapted from three Tintin books, The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret Of The Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure, but previous familiarity with those installments is not necessary. Screenwriters Edgar Wright (Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz), Steven Moffat (Doctor Who), and Joe Cornish (Attack The Block) do an adequate job of weaving the three plots into a cohesive narrative; a feature length adaptation of any single book would involve considerable extrapolation and invention on the part of any writer. The story concerns news reporter Tintin, who purchases a model ship at a flea market which conceals part of a treasure map within its mast. His apartment later ransacked, and the map ultimately stolen from his possession, Tintin is soon propelled into an international adventure over land and sea in a quest for the treasure. Forever accompanied by his dog Snowy, his impromptu adventure soon teams him up with series regular, Captain Haddock, a crusty, alcoholic old salt, so in love with drink, there is barely a sobering scene to speak of, a characteristic belabored in the books to a degree that more than likely caused many a restless night with modern producers hoping for a PG rating. The three of them, along with the Thompson Twins, a bungling detective duo from Scotland Yard responsible for most of the books's comic relief, comprise the entirety of the "good guys," and everyone else, from henchmen to pickpockets to criminal masterminds is out to get them at every turn, just like in the old serials, exemplified in Spielberg's Indiana Jones films.
The film is non-stop action, which can be, and in this case is, a double-edged sword. True, the nature of the source material doesn’t really allow for strenuous exposition, or character motivations beyond one level below the surface, and the screenwriters respond in kind with nearly continuous scenes of swashbuckling excitement, but films like this require moments of downtime, benchmarks upon which to hang the last set piece and prepare for the next, opportunities for the audience to catch up emotionally and sort out where everyone stands in relation to everything that has been going on. The Indiana Jones films know the importance of these scenes, the ones that usually appear before the bee-line dot connecting on an atlas that help develop character, or establish sexual tension, while presenting necessary information; they are basically the scenes that people who have previously seen the films use as opportunities to run out for bathroom breaks. Tintin has only two types of scenes, those that convey plot information, and those that are packed with action, but neither of them really succeeds at breathing life into the characters. Alas, no sexual tension between Tintin and the Captain. Perhaps aware of the holes this leaves, Spielberg directs these scenes with gusto, maximizing the potential of motion-capture, of which this film has made me a fan, with incredibly choreographed, elaborate showdowns, and a constant eye for the cinematic, connecting many scenes with rather inventive graphic-match editing. For example, in one scene Spielberg pulls back from a boat lost at sea to show it floating in the center of a puddle, which almost immediately turns to ripples as a pedestrian steps in it, splashing the water out. These kinds of things are acceptable in Tintin for their own sake because entertainment is the sole purpose of the film, and Spielberg does not neglect a moment to keep his audience in amazement. My biggest complaint about motion capture has always been in not understanding why filmmakers who choose to use it don’t just do live action, but after watching The Adventures Of Tintin, it becomes clear this film would have cost several hundred million dollars to do as live action, and since it barely cleared one hundred million at the box office, from a production standpoint it had to be motion capture or no film at all. Hearing whispers of a trilogy, with a second installment to be directed by none other than Peter Jackson, bodes very well for Tintin’s future, and based on what I remember about the other tales in the series, people haven’t seen anything yet.
War Horse, on the other hand, fails for some of the same reasons Tintin succeeds. The plot takes place around the time of World War I in England. A farmer, behind on his mortgage, goes into town to bid on a plough horse and ends up spending an exorbitant amount of money on a horse unfit for the plough. The horse just catches his eye because he has that certain something that seems all too often to take the place of actual story development in Hollywood screenplays. Ashamed of himself, and in the midst of a drunken bender, he runs into the stable one day to kill the horse after an initial failed show at the plough. His son is there and stops him, himself determined to train the horse to do what their family so desperately needs. It is in this scene that Spielberg overdoes it, showing an extreme close-up of the horse's eye, on which can be seen a reflection of the father's impending assault, calling attention to itself with an extreme formalism when the film should be subtly resonating with its audience. This moment took me out of the film, and I was never able to get back into it. Not even when the horse ploughs the field. Not even when the father sells the horse. Not even when the horse falls under the care of an English soldier during the beginning of World War I. Not even when a French man and his granddaughter find the horse and it becomes the one thing she wants more than anything in the world. Not even when the horse is stolen by the Germans. And not even when the horse is used as a metaphor for the horrific wages of war itself, though not too horrific so as to cost the film its PG-13 rating.
War Horse is a film that is very episodic in nature, more so than any other Best Picture nominee I can recall. Its main character is the horse, and the film follows him throughout World War I, showing his various owners and caretakers over the years. Human characters come and go for different reasons, and never stick around long enough to generate any actual human interest. The problem with this approach is that every fifteen to twenty minutes the story resets itself, with new main human characters, who have different desires and motivations that need to be conveyed, and the screenplay is unable to spend any significant amount of time on them to develop them beyond simple cliches. Emotions are always broad, and come off as cloying, which when coupled with Spielberg's heavy-handed, overly visual directing style, the whole thing just becomes one huge manipulative bore. The only thing the audience is able to care about is the horse. But it's a horse. It can't talk. It can't act. And yes, Spielberg does go there. The director who cannot seem to avoid injecting human qualities into everything he touches (even between the boy and his robot in last year's lackluster Real Steel, which he executive produced) just cannot avoid a scene where the horse saves another horse's life by volunteering skills he learned earlier as a plough horse. Falling back on his own cliches here is ironic, considering the fact that in the Tintin books the dog snowy actually talks, to himself, and Spielberg completely abandons that detail in the film.
Watching War Horse, I was constantly reminded of Richard Linklater's Slacker and Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump. Released in 1991, Slacker followed one character for a little while, and then would switch to another character when their paths crossed, and then another character, and so on, through the entire film. While also episodic in nature, the film is so consistent in theme and tone that each piece becomes part of a whole. There is no such consistency in War Horse, its collection of vignettes completely arbitrary, and disconnected from each other, save for an assumed common purpose of making the audience cry. It's cliche enough that the film is a boy and his horse movie, the fact that it tries to be five different people and their horse movies is just too much. And the horse is not an effective substitute for a human being. Forrest Gump, released in 1994, is also episodic, following one man through just about every major event in the 1960's, but at least Forrest Gump was a person, and not just any person, but Tom Hanks. And despite its rather naive, conservative streamlining of the most potent and vital events of recent American history, something War Horse desperately tries to covet, at least Gump was somebody worth rooting for. The fact that Spielberg presupposes that a horse could have the same effect on an audience connection to the material should quite frankly be offensive to even the most casual moviegoers.
There is one scene in War Horse that could justify sitting through the whole thing, and could very well be an entire film unto itself. Our horse just cannot stand the violence and horrors of war anymore (sigh) and takes off through the field separating English and German soldiers, getting tangled up in barbed wire in the process. Each side, both England and Germany, sends one soldier out to investigate and the two of them bond while mutually assisting in freeing the horse. They make idle chatter, toss a coin to decide who keeps the horse, and then return to their bunkers so the war can resume, and through all this Spielberg makes his most effective and pointed criticism of war. I kept thinking of how Kubrick, or Bergman, or Clouzot would handle the scene, and how they could have blown it up to feature length, squeezing out every last drop of irony instead of just settling on the jovial banter of what Spielberg was forced to work with. But after already having seen four different beginnings, middles, and ends, and with several more to come, ten minutes out of one-hundred-and-forty is all War Horse can spare, even when it is showing the audience something they haven't seen before.
There is no doubt that Steven Spielberg is one of America's greatest directors. There is however an unfortunate duality that he is rarely able to avoid which creeps into nearly every one of his films, especially over the last few decades, that finds him either wallowing in melodrama, or over-directing. Occasionally this has the effect of threatening the credibility of his better films, such as when Liam Neeson breaks down at the end of Schindler's List, sobbing about how he could have saved more, or crafting moments of tension certain screenplays have no right to, remember the ingenious cracking glass scene in the otherwise atrocious Lost World? Spielberg is a filmmaker of tremendous visual prowess, heavily influenced by the French New Wave, and Francois Truffaut specifically, and in the beginning of his career he was successfully able to marry subtle formalism with emotionally resonant storytelling, like in his masterpiece Jaws, where deep focus photography and intellectual montage helped create a singular experience. We don't need a close-up of Quint's eye reflecting the shark to make the film more effective, all we need is Robert Shaw and a rocking boat. If Spielberg plans on continuing this haphazard unevenness in his films, I would much rather he stay in the tone of The Adventures Of Tintin, rather than just give more of the same as he does in War Horse, the cinematic equivalent of a major refusal.
The Adventures of Tintin: **** out of *****
War Horse ** out of *****
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