Kurosawa communes with Shakespeare, again . . .

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2005)

. . . with somewhat less scintillating results than the first time, *Throne of Blood* from the late Fifties. Of course, some of this has to do with the obvious fact that "Macbeth" is just more amenable to cinema than "King Lear": the former play is much briefer, more to the point, and has more visual possibilities. "Lear" also contains reams of philosophical commentary on Man's place in the cosmos which, I fear, gets lost in translation to any other language, let alone Japanese. I'll expand on that a little later.
But first, praise is due. If the poetic meat of "Lear" necessarily must be excised from the milieu of 16th-century war-torn Japan, one can still admire Kurosawa for brilliantly adapting the play's plot and characters to their new setting. Obviously, the tired old king of ancient Britain morphs easily into a tired old samurai overlord (Tatsuya Nakadai as "Hidetora"). But instead of the three daughters, we get three sons. As in Shakespeare, the elder two are bad, the younger good: the former use language to hide their true natures from the king; the latter's inability to use language to SHOW his true, good nature causes his precipitate banishment from Hidetora's dominions. The good son is accompanied in banishment by loyal samurai Tongo, the equivalent to Kent. The wife of the eldest son, Lady Kaeda (Meiko Harada in the greatest female role in all of Kurosawa), is nominally this movie's version of evil Edmund, but in actuality she is Edmund, Goneril, and Regan all rolled into one silk kimono. Indeed, the "bad" sons seem unable to commit the vilest crimes without Kaeda's prodding. One scene that demonstrates Kaeda's nastiness with absolutely brilliant economy shows her sobbing on the floor, trying to soften up second son Jiro into marrying her after the eldest son Taro -- her former husband -- has been treacherously killed in battle. With Jiro's back turned, she viciously squashes a moth on the floor without the least interruption in her performance.
Minor roles are also transposed: the old samurai has in his service the Japanese equivalent of a court jester, who, as in Shakespeare's play, serves the somewhat tiring function of continually pointing out what a mistake the ruler has made by abdicating and then dividing the kingdom. The good characters Gloucester and Edgar are sort of mixed and matched interchangeably with a brother and sister tag-team of woe: the brother, blinded, is a hermit living in squalor, and the sister is a frightened mouse having fully retreated into Shindo Buddhism. Both of these characters are the damaged results of Hidetora's warlike past, their misfortunes entirely due to their father having been Hidetora's enemy.
And this elemental difference in Hidetora's and Lear's back-story is what finally trips up *Ran*, in my judgment. Artists are always attempting to re-write Shakespeare; all fail, even the greatest artists like Akira Kurosawa. Lear was "more sinned against than sinning"; Hidetora is basically getting his comeuppance for past brutalities. This is perhaps a suitable enough alteration for Eastern sensibilities: a movie that invokes the Great Buddha is bound to find dramatic justice in an old man suffering the retribution of all of his bad karma. But this idea just isn't as bold as Shakespeare's. Lear pays the price for his foibles twenty-fold, and his sad story is really but a small item in a world of chaotic violence in which maliciousness is the one certainty. Life just isn't fair, and karma has nothing to do with it, either way. Kurosawa, despite depicting all manner of barbarities in this film, clearly couldn't stomach Shakespeare's nihilistic vision of the world. In *Ran*, Tongo reprimands the jester for getting angry at the gods, going on to say, "The gods weep for us"; in "King Lear", the gods are simply absent. I think Kurosawa lost his nerve. I also think that the Lady Kaeda could have done without the tiresome "motivation" for her actions. Unalloyed evil was good enough for Goneril and Regan, and, for that matter, Asaji, the Lady Macbeth-figure in Kurosawa's own *Throne of Blood*. Giving Kaeda a revenge motive deprives her of no small amount of force.
Of course, the latter quibble can be considered more than adequately compensated for by such scenes as when she requests a henchman to salt the head of the Lady Sue after cutting it off, so that it would keep better in the heat for presentation. And, of course, any other deficiencies *Ran* might have can be relegated to nitpicking when one considers the great siege of the Third Castle in the middle of the film -- the crowning glory of Kurosawa's epic mode. Horrific carnage mounts over a mournful, Mahlerian score (which changes suddenly and explosively into ambient sound when Taro gets shot), finally culminating in one of cinema's greatest moments: a $1.5 million set going up in flames while Nakadai as Hidetora, denied seppuku and now finally mad, parts two armies like some awesome ghost, trudging his way toward oblivion. If Hidetora is sadly denied Lear's articulation, Kurosawa gives him some of the most brilliant visual presentation that a great artist can conjure. As such, comparisons between the actual director (seventy-five during the film's making) and his subject seem notoriously wrongheaded. Kurosawa hadn't abdicated any throne. Not yet.
7 stars out of 10.