Turning Japanese, Tom?
The new Tom Cruise vehicle, The Last Samurai, promised much in its trailers. Immense battle scenes, the jingoistic, arrogant central figure converted to a nobler way of life, and Billy Connoly, with the brilliantly absurd name of Zubulah Grant.
I was initially disappointed as Billy gets skewered like a butterfly specimen early in the film, but after this I noticed there was a more unsettling flaw. The society into which Cruise’s character, Nathan Algren, is immersed appears somewhat too noble. This is, after all a Samurai culture that was doubtlessly honorable, but nonetheless brutal when it reached its peak and dominated Japan. Instead of presenting this ancient code of conduct as having its own faults within the movie, we see the common Hollywood practice of rooting for the little guy in desperate times. The Samurai in this film are thus not the remnants of a complex, dying culture, but the minority who are resisting an oppressive emperor.
Having reduced the plot into these simple definitions, we are confronted with what are highly impressive and very well choreographed battle scenes and fight sequences. Horses charge, ninjas ambush, very sharp swords part the air and stop inches away from Cruise’s neck and perfect hair, all in order for us to be sufficiently thrilled. However, the film, even at its most bloody, still presents a Japan that has been hopelessly idealised, or to quote the voiceover ‘made by the sword’. Captain Algren falls in love with the wife of samurai he has slain, he learns Japanese from endearing children in a idyllic little village, and he realises the way to fight effectively is to stop trying to impress or overawe and fight with his soul. I was surprised he was not also advised to use the force.
This slight mysticism surrounding what is nebulously called ‘honour’ belies what was a society that had strong connotations of nationalism, xenophobia and military rule that finally emerged in Japan early in the twentieth century. Admittedly, a film like The Last Samurai was never intended to be a history lesson, but if it aspires to present an American soldier truly learning another culture, it should have made more of an effort to show the darker aspects of samurai life. What we do see is just a fight between the forces of good and evil again. We are meant to know that Captain Algren fights on the side of the good due to his own moral substance, having descended into a state of drunken depression and anxiety after serving under the tyrannical Custer. From this, his gradual indoctrination into the samurai way of life is made to appear like moral convalescence: the image of the noble samurai is established, and we can all watch the evil emperor annihilate the lot of them with modern weapons.
Yes, this film bemoans the loss of an ancient way of life under the weight of modern war and society, yet its simple moral definitions glorifiy a culture that would have better been portrayed warts and all- simply because the portrait of the samurai would have been more convincing, and their loss more tragic.
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