Hooray for Omura!

Rating: Null/10 (8 April 2004)

Let it never be said that Edward Zwick doesn't know how to make beautiful movies. Glory, Courage Under Fire, and The Siege are all magnificent to look at, and The Last Samurai is the most gorgeous of them all. It is also, by far, the worst story of the four.
Tom Cruise plays Algren, an American Army officer tortured by guilt over his role in the slaughter of Indians and seething with bitterness toward his former commander, Custer. He speaks disparagingly of his comrades who died for `modern conveniences.' So he feels conflicted when he is hired by a Japanese railroad baron named Omura to train the Japanese Emperor's army to crush a rebellion by traditionalist samurai who want to block Japan's Westernizing path to modernity.
Now, a word or two about those `modern conveniences' that Algren disparages. Those conveniences include living past the age of one (which about half the Western population owes to modern vaccines and plumbing), being able to read (a luxury of the church and nobility until modern schools came along), and the radical concept of constitutional democracy, which may have been conceived of in Greece but not successfully practiced until modern times. These modern conveniences are worth fighting for, and it is no credit to Algren - or to Katsumoto, the leader of the samurai rebels - that they fail to see their worth.
The man who does see their worth is Omura, who is made out as a villain but who ought to be the hero of the film. He is represented as being a coward and a fool on the battlefield, but in fact he does the single bravest thing of anybody in the movie. Katsumoto enters the imperial council chamber wearing his swords, defying the Emperor's law forbidding these weapons. Omura bars Katsumoto's way, standing unarmed before a master swordsman who could cut his head from his shoulders with one well-practiced motion, and says, `We are a nation of laws.' Omura stands in the shoes of many Japanese who stood up for law against Japan's feudal reactionaries, and happily he wins, instead of being defeated and murdered like many of the militarists' opponents in the 1920s and 1930s1.
The message Zwick wants to get across is simple; the samurai lived for honor, therefore they were good. Westerners are dishonorable, and any Japanese who wants to Westernize his country is a despicable sellout. This is simply an ignorant idealization of the samurai. There was much to admire about the followers of bushido: allowing for individual variation, they were disciplined and brave beyond anyone else the human species has yet produced, and were taught to make and appreciate art in a manner that their Western counterparts, the medieval knights, would have scorned as effeminate. But like all human beings, the samurai were far from perfect. They were hidebound traditionalists who froze Japanese society in stasis for hundreds of years. They may have protected the common folk from bandits, but they were equally capable of testing a new sword's blade by cutting down a passing townsman. They were xenophobic to a degree even the most ignorant and bigoted redneck would be hard-pressed to match.
Akira Kurosawa, who understood the history of the samurai, saw through the simple-minded myth that Zwick has swallowed, as he showed through his character Kikuchiyo's speech in The Seven Samurai: `But then who made them [the Japanese farmers] such beasts? You did! You samurai did it! You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labor! Take their women! And kill them if they resist!' Kurosawa's samurai are people, real individuals with both good and bad in their natures. Zwick's samurai are simply symbols, non-human ideals to which his guilt-ridden hero aspires.
The Last Samurai is an excellent example of what George Orwell called `transferred nationalism.' Orwell saw that after someone like Zwick has been stripped of attachment to his own country, he `still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack -- all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshiped with a good conscience. . . . [Transferred nationalism] makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic -- more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest -- than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.' This is exactly what has happened with Zwick. His knowledge of American history has made it impossible for him to portray the U.S. cavalry or the cowboys as pure-hearted superheroes, so he has simply transplanted those traits into the samurai, and because he does not know much about the samurai he can avoid seeing that they do not live up to these ideals. Kurosawa, with a real knowledge of bushido and its influence on Japanese culture, could never have done something so silly.
But despite its naivete, The Last Samurai is worth watching. The cinematography by John Toll is breathtaking. The acting is very good all around. Anyone who was watching Tom Cruise with an open mind saw that he did an outstanding job of shedding his 20th-century persona. Masato Harada is excellent as Omura despite Zwick's butchering of his character; Shin Koyamada is heart-wrenching as the young samurai Nobutada, and Hiroyuki Sanada does great work as the gruff old warrior Ujio. There is a magnificent score by Hans Zimmer, which Zwick uses to excellent effect (there is a sequence in the final battle where Zwick times his cuts to the beat of the music, which may be the single best use of a film score that I have ever seen). As a story and a lesson, The Last Samurai is poor; as just plain cinema, it's terrific.
Rating: **½ out of ****.
Recommendation: Watch it, just don't believe it.