The "Top Gun" image of George W. Bush's victory landing on an aircraft carrier has been officially recalled. Since the mission was not accomplished after all, we were given a replacement tableau of the president bestowing Thanksgiving grub on troops stuck in a long, hard slog.
But Tom Cruise, whose Reagan-era movie was the inspiration for Mr. Bush's flyboy stunt, has been busy, too, retooling his own image. His latest, in "The Last Samurai," is also in line with our changing national circumstances. The star plays a Civil War veteran so disillusioned with his country that he joins a band of samurai terrorists to fight a coalition of American interests and the Japanese Imperial Army in the 1870's. Transpose "The Last Samurai" to the present, and it is the story of an American veteran who is recruited by DynCorp to train the Iraqi police or by Halliburton to service Iraq's American troops and then bolts to the insurgents, if not Al Qaeda. "The Last Samurai" was America's No. 1 box-office movie last weekend. . . .
. . . [Nathan] Algren [the protagonist of "The Last Samurai," played by Tom Cruise] fought in the Indian wars but now dismisses General Custer as an arrogant murderer "who fell in love with his own legend" and didn't understand "the natives." Nathan sides with the natives in Japan, prompting his decision to turn his back on his employers and enlist with the samurai guerillas. And yet "The Last Samurai" presents its deserter as a hero, not a traitor. He is Tom Cruise, for heaven's sake, not Christopher Walken, and he gets the (native) girl in the end, too.
"Cold Mountain," Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Charles Frazier's best-selling Civil War novel, is a romantic American take on Homer: "The Bridges of Madison County" refracted through The Odyssey. But there is nothing romantic about its take on war. The gore on screen in this movie, as well as in "Master and Commander" and "The Last Samurai," is far more explicit than anything broadcast to the American public from our actual war in Iraq, where the administration's censorship and television's self-censorship conspire to sanitize the bloodshed as much as possible. That a 2003 American audience can revel in the disembowelments of 19th-century warfare but must be spared the bloodshed of a present-day war, even when encased in coffins, is itself an index of the nation's ambivalence about our continuing mission in Iraq.
The hero of "Cold Mountain" is another American deserter, a Confederate soldier named Inman (Jude Law) who by 1864 has had enough of the carnage and laments "every fool sent off to fight with a flag and a lie." Eventually there are so many atrocities featuring so many top Hollywood character actors that Inman's sheltered belle back home (Nicole Kidman) agrees: "There will be a reckoning when this war is over." So does her best buddy (Renée Zellweger), who castigates men who "call this war a cloud over the land" when "they made the weather." . . .
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/arts/14RICH.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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