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'Windtalkers' misses complexities of war
Nicolas Cage stars in 'Windtalkers'
MGM
It's interesting to see him earthbound for a change. The Marines in "Windtalkers" engage in hand-to-hand combat and ground fire, and they dodge artillery.
But whatever merits it might or might not have had on paper, the screenplay by John Rice and Joe Batteer reduces nearly everyone to a stereotype and nearly every situation to a blueprint.
The focus is so narrow and obvious that every outcome is telegraphed. And the picture takes two hours and 15 minutes to catch up with the audience. Lacking the ability to breath or surprise, it can't work up any verisimilitude.
How can such a picture do so little in so much time when "From Here to Eternity" delivered a microcosm of all human nature in two hours flat, complete with the bombing of Pearl Harbor?
While recuperating from his unit's massacre and nursing a punctured eardrum, Cpl. Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) receives his sergeant stripes and a modified assignment.
He's to shepherd one of the Navajo recruits assigned as code talkers. Using a Navajo language code, the new platoon members are to transmit military positions on the island of Saipan, occupied by 30,000 Japanese soldiers and an overwhelmed Marine force in 1944.
The code is considered so valuable that Joe is to kill one or both of the Navajos if either is on the brink of being captured.
His own charge is Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), a husband, father and loyal, good-natured symbol of under-valued minority Americans. The other is the equally estimable Charlie Whitehorse (Roger Willie).
"Windtalkers" might have approached productively Joe's gradual understanding of Navajo culture in a non-Navajo environment. Or perhaps concentrated on their attempts to assimilate — a major effort at the time.
Instead, we get standard-issue military types such as supportive WAVE nurse Rita (Frances O'Connor), a couple of swells named Pappas (Mark Ruffalo) and Ox (Christian Slater) and the antagonistic bigot Chick (Noah Emmerich).
You know the film has a contemporary agenda because it suggests the Navajos realize right away that the loss of Saipan by the Japanese would be like the loss of North American land by Indian ancestors.
The only two soldiers defined by religion are Catholics, both of them lapsed.
Really? In 1944? The only two?
It's part of the early 21st century ignorance of 1940s sentiments, including a suspiciously modern disregard for authority and contempt for the callousness of the military (portrayed in a single light). And except for Joe, the Marines seem rudderless.
There's no news of the bigger WWII picture, as though no one cared if the war were being won on other fronts.
Woo has difficulty setting meaningful sites in battle scenes. He's a pyrotechnician rather than a humanist. "Windtalkers" exposes his attempt to reconcile the two.
Loss of life is abstract and unmoving, even in a couple of instances when he intends it to be otherwise. He's a director who likes things to go "Boom!" It slows him to consider the consequences of a single life lost. He handles it so bluntly, the impact is dissipated.
"Windtalkers" is overblown and myopic at once, with threadbare character definition even though Cage just about implodes trying to suggest internal conflict.
Jeffrey Kimball's cinematography of Monument Valley is gorgeous in a couple of bookend sequences, and James Horner's music is typically beautiful.
Most of the rest is disconcerting. It may be impossible — it probably is — for any screenwriter to grasp the nature of men in combat without the experience of it, which is why recent war films have a hollow cant. What's missing can't be learned at the University of Southern California Film School.
| 'Windtalkers' |
Director: John Woo
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Noah Emmerich
MPAA Rating: R, for pervasive graphic war violence and for language
