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Back With The Wind
Congratulations to my Editor and good buddy John Shea and his wife Tinna, on the birth of their first child Colin. I'm still dissapointed he didn't pick Jean-François for the child's name. Today, we've got Hollyfeld's take on Windtalkers and I'll add later a little tid-bit on a comeback actress. Have a nice weekend!
Windtalkers Review
"Hollyfeld, here. A critic knows a movie is in trouble when they find themselves spending half of its running time making up quips about its name to use in their review. 'This Wind blows', for example, or, 'A Bad Script Breaks Wind.' The problem, if you can call it that, is that the other half of Windtalkers is easily Woo’s best work since coming to Hollywood. The result is a film that is not mediocre by nature, but one that averages out that way. A ½ star first half, a 4 star second half, and a 1½ star ending: You do the math.
Nicolas Cage stars as Enders, a Marine Sergeant who at the beginning of the film loses all the men under his command trying to defend a piece of swampland from the Japanese during World War II. Enders survives, but is damaged goods - apart from the typical psychological trauma he is also completely deaf in one ear, and has to exploit a moon-eyed Nurse (an underutilized Frances O’Connor) to fake a positive hearing test in order to return to the field. Ender’s new assignment is to protect a new code being used in the Pacific based upon the Navajo language. More specifically, he is to protect codetalker Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) from the Japanese, or, if Yahzee is captured, to kill him immediately. Being 'a good fucking marine', he makes it a point not to befriend Yahzee in case that time comes, but the Navajo private is a smart, brave and charismatic man. Will Enders be able to go through with his orders when the inevitable happens?
A solid concept, so how does it fuck up? Cliché after cliché after cliché. The redneck white boy who has a problem fighting alongside redskins. The young white boy who only wants to go home to his wife. The traumatized, hardened white boy soldier who has heavy-handed flashbacks to harder times. Campfire monologues about each soldier’s childhood. All of the war movie stereotypes are present here, and each one is drawn with such broad strokes you’d think the script was written with a paint roller. Some actors are able to create something out of nothing/very little, like Beach, or Christian Slater as a Sergeant with orders the same as Cage. Mark Ruffalo again proves himself as a character actor to be reckoned with, turning an under-written supporting character into one of the most memorable in the film.
The breakout character, however, is obviously Roger Willie as Charlie Whitehorse, the other 'windtalker' in the unit. Whitehorse is the kind of character most writers dream of crafting... a complicated man of principles and beliefs, both fully ingrained in his own culture and completely capable of fighting the white man’s fight as well. Willie brings such casual but charismatic charm to his performance that it actually reflects ill upon Nicolas Cage, whose character, though more prominent, never really works the way he should. He has a bum ear, but this rather important handicap never once adversely affects him throughout the entire film. He has ridiculously uninspired flashback sequences, which seem to indicate a regret that he follows orders to the letter, but we never find out why he does that in the first place. What happened to him to make him follow the system, instead of remaining the young punk he once was? Nicolas Cage is, more recent additions to his oeuvre not withstanding, an accomplished actor, and on an occasional occasion brings surprising depth to Enders, but only at times where the manner of his performance seems unimportant. Sure, he can brilliantly deliver a line like, 'he’s over there...' But he can’t sell an important 'no one is going to die here today' speech, and this is a huge problem.
A more unusual problem is the action scenes, which any filmgoer worth their salt would tell you are director John Woo’s specialty. His action work in The Killer, A Better Tomorrow or even Face/Off is among the most accomplished in the history of cinema, but the battle sequences in the first half of Windtalkers totally blow. They range from incomprehensible (who is that, didn’t that guy just die, where are they running from, why are they here at all?) to brutally uninspired. The initial battle sequence at Saipan comes across as nothing more than a bunch of guys in greenish-brown fighting a bunch of other guys in brownish-green, because we have no reason to care that any of them live or die, and no real sense of where the danger lies until a sweeping, insulting to the audience’s intelligence-style score signals the appearance of an enemy tank. 'Oh crap, the horn section! Run!!!'
And then, miraculously and mercifully, the movie switches from being worse than Mission Impossible: 2 to being some of the best work of Woo’s American career. It’s hard to pin down exactly when it happens, but somewhere towards the middle of the film all the clichés start to wind down and characters begin to actually communicate with each other. Enders and Yahzee develop a begrudged friendship, while Slater’s Sergeant and Whitehorse genuinely bond, and shortly thereafter every action sequence begins to have the kind of gravitas belonging to Woo’s best work. The reason Chow Yun Fat’s battle in The Killer worked so well is because he was fighting for something, and that kind of emotional investment is of infinite importance to action filmmaking and war movies in particular. The opening battle sequences have no emotional depth - no one seems to be fighting for any reason other than, hey, it’s World War II. In the second half of Windtalkers they are fighting for their friends, their family, even their enemies at times, and this leads to heart-rending scenes of military carnage that almost makes up for the hour of crappiness one has to sit through in order to get there.
But the emotional strength and maturity of the second half is unfortunately capped with an overly melodramatic conclusion that contains the kind of obvious 'war movie' dialogue that would have made even Private Ryan blush. The most moving subplot of the entire film is dropped completely without ceremony, and we are treated to a series of shots of Cage running with someone on his back, and if you listen closely, you can hear him panting underneath his fallen comrade: '...if... pant... this... pant... doesn’t get me another Oscar, then... pant... then NOTHING will... pant...' And for some reason, the closing captions, relating the importance of the Navajo code in the Pacific during World War II, are super-imposed over uberwhiteguy Nicolas Cage running in slow motion. Earlier in Windtalkers, Enders receives a medal for the accomplishments of his Navajo friend - it would seem whoever was responsible for the closing shots missed a crucial point somewhere.
Watching Windtalkers is an exercise in mixed emotions - on one hand, the brilliance of the second half is a giddy thrill after the cinematic squalor of the first. But did we really need to wade through the muck in order to get there? And after the ensuing excellence, should we really have to be made to settle for the easy-answer Hollywood schlock provided for us? The patchwork quality of Windtalkers is a mixed blessing - so much good, but so much bad, from a director who has brought us action classics and, sadly, Mission: Impossible 2. It’s so hard to worship and criticize John Woo at the same time. If only he would decide to just make good or bad films, because this mix and match approach makes Windtalkers the most annoying, though not the worst, addition to his filmography yet."
(Review submitted by Hollyfeld.)
Stay tuned...
That's all folks...
Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)
Questions, comments, praise etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org
Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. He also writes a monthly column in Screenwriters Monthly entitled 'The Last Word.' Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.
