The Last Samurai
There's only one moment in ''The Last Samurai'' when the mood of lush Big Movie solemnity is dispelled. Tom Cruise, playing a US military adviser in 1876 Japan, has been captured in battle by rebellious samurai and taken to their mountain village to heal. One morning he dares to try on the clothing of his captors, and as he steps into an empty room wearing a kimono, Cruise crouches and spins across the wooden floor, trying out the kata training moves he has watched from afar. Almost everyone in the audience will be instantly reminded of the giddy underwear dance that made the actor a star two decades ago in ''Risky Business,'' and even if Cruise doesn't break character, you can bet it occurred to him, too. In all other respects, ''The Last Samurai'' is serious business. Big and square and rousing, Edward Zwick's epic drama has been brought to the screen with all the muscle and splendor Hollywood can call up. The camerawork (John Toll), production design (Lilly Kilvert), costumes (Ngila Dickson), and score (Hans Zimmer) are all Oscar-worthy. The film marshals masses of men across a vast canvas while attending to the screenplay's intimate moments with taste and restraint. Even the historical facts haven't been seriously monkeyed with.
So should you care that there isn't a single plot development you won't see coming several leagues off? Or that ''Samurai'' is the latest in that oddly neurotic genre in which an American hero validates himself by becoming an alien culture's great white hope? That's a romantic fantasy as old as James Fenimore Cooper and as recent as ''Dances With Wolves,'' and judging by the applause at the screening I attended, it still works like a charm.
If ''Samurai'' is shallow, it's also sumptuously wide. The scope is set in the opening sequences in San Francisco, where Nathan Algren (Cruise) is trotted out by the Winchester rifle company as a spokesman hero of the Civil and Indian wars. In truth, Nathan is a suicidal drunk who can't escape his nightmares of massacred Cheyenne; an offer to travel to Japan to train the emperor's troops in modern techniques is just a change of venue for his cynicism.
Zwick gracefully sketches in the particulars: the teenage Emperor Meiji (Shichinosuke Nakamura) is under the sway of industrialists like Omura (Masato Harada) who want to modernize Japan as quickly as possible. The samurai clans who initially supported the emperor are now rising up in a doomed attempt to slow the country's race to the future; ironically, they believe that by fighting their young leader they are serving him. Nathan is forced to take his raw army of conscripts into the field against an army led by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), a character based on the historical Saigo Takamori, leader of the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion.
The emperor's soldiers have guns, the samurai only swords, but it's not much of a contest: the samurai mop the forest floor with their panic-stricken opponents. That first battle takes place amidst mist and sunbeams -- it's a fierce thing of beauty, and proof that Zwick has been boning up on his Kurosawa. Nathan, badly wounded, is carted back to the clan's stronghold because Katsumoto wants to ''know his enemy,'' and there the movie takes a turn for the ordinary.
During his winter-long convalescence, Nathan learns to speak Japanese (flawlessly), fight with kendo stick and sword (awkwardly), and respect the paradoxical ways of his ''savage'' hosts. More crucially, he bonds with fellow warrior Katsumoto -- both men who ''have seen too much'' -- and comes to love the samurai's sister Taka (Koyuki), whose husband he killed in the forest battle and in whose house he regains health and humanity.
''The Last Samurai'' plays their romance with a delicacy that's proud of itself -- no sex, please, we're samurai -- but if that's a nice change from the standard movie roll-on-the-futon, why is it even there at all? Well, because this is a Hollywood film starring Tom Cruise and because it's expected. The same could be said for Nathan's embrace of ''no-mind'' in becoming a better warrior; if it's true to Zen Buddhism, it's also true to Yoda.
The movie's strengths and weaknesses are there to see in two back-to-back scenes. In one, Omura's ninja army attacks the samurai village by night and Nathan proves his loyalty in a thundering, brilliantly edited sequence of mayhem that suggests Quentin Tarantino without the show-off arrogance. Then we cut to a cherry-tree garden in which Katsumoto natters on about ''the perfect blossom'' -- and the movie slams to a halt while the filmmakers write off their weekend meditation retreats.
Eventually the last battle is fought, and all the movie's notions of honor, both glib and earned, come to a galloping conclusion. By then we're completely swept up in the characters and their headlong run at fate. As Katsumoto, Watanabe is majestic and canny -- a genuine leader of men -- and Koyuki is beautifully grave as required. Zwick has populated the fringes of the film with lively characters: Timothy Spall as a portly English translator who befriends Nathan; Tony Goldwyn as the hero's villainous superior officer; Hiroyuki Sanada (co-star of the original Japanese ''Ring'') as Katsumoto's growling second-in-command; Nakumura as an emperor so walled off from the world that he seems unsure it's even there.
And Cruise? He's just fine. He's always just fine. Mark my words, the man will never win an Oscar -- not because he's a bad actor but because he's so much better at being a movie star. Still, there's a new hesitancy here that almost looks like nuance. Even if you think Cruise has never had a moment of doubt in his life, he makes Nathan's self-loathing palpable, and the character's regeneration has a hoarse, cautious purposefulness that's striking. Tom Cruise is still playing Tom Cruise, and I'm not sure he can do anything else. But he has gotten a lot better at it.
''The Last Samurai'' gives an audience its money's worth of scope and sacrifice, but at its heart lies a condundrum. What is it about America's cultural insecurity that sends its fictional heroes off on binges of self-help imperialism? Why do our movies look to other cultures for what we feel we lack? As Goldwyn's colonel sneers in one scene, ''What is it about your own people that you hate so much?'' That's an interesting question, but Nathan never comes up with an answer, and neither does the movie.
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