War Horse (2011)

As a director, Steven Spielberg has been known to lay it on thick: Heinz 57 on shepherd’s pie. Sometimes it goes wrong: “Amistad” was weakened by obvious speechifying. But the great many of his dramas are draw-dropper movie epics -- the kind of big screen behemoths that inspired man to build movie palaces so a few hundred people could sit together and stare at light on a screen, and be carried away. Sometimes for joy and escape, other times to see a tear-jerker story of triumph over tragedy, or just the tragedy. Think “Saving Private Ryan,” or for my 13-year-old self in 1987, “Empire of the Sun.”

“War Horse” is among the later, an unabashedly, unapologetic and amazing big-screen World War I drama about a boy-turned-man and his horse that recalls a 1950s Techicolor epic long gone from cinemas, but with an important distinction, there is no glorification of war here. Rather, the carnage of war is more likely to break a man’s soul than leave him square-jaw John Wayne heroic. (Fact: Most of the war films of the 1940s through 1960s were propaganda flicks, designed to get young men to suit up and die for their country. Wise, bold liberal filmmakers ended that genre. Wayne and his patriotism-at-all-costs ilk were mad, and on the outs. “Green Berets” included.)

Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) is a Brit teen who witnesses a thoroughbred foal being born, and instantly falls for the creature. The horse is bought by Albert’s father to serve as a plow horse, an unwise, but moot decision: For Joey, the horse, is conscripted to serve in World War I. Albert follows. From there, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski drops his sun-bright color palate and sinks Joey, Albert, and us, into an ashen and poison-gas-filled hell, as Joey is traded from one owner to the next, a British officer to two German Army youths to a young French girl, and on.

Is there a happy ending? Spielberg’s films almost always fall that way, and this is no different, but the path to the final “magic hour” shot is ghastly, full of the cruelty of mechanized war against humanity and nature, mud, barbed wire, blood, and much, much death. Going for mature older children and young teens, Spielberg pulls back on the gore and splatter to … great effect. We have experienced “Saving Private Ryan,” its endless up-close visceral bloodbaths, so the camera is set atop a windmill to shows two boys being shot point blank, the blade hiding the impact as bullets rip through flesh. And, damn if the entire audience didn’t gasp and shudder. I sure as hell did.

Oh, Spielberg is grandiose and sentimental without mercy, and John Williams’ old-fashioned score pulls out the full orchestra, and whips and pulls for every emotion, but when Joey is running shell-shocked and horrified through a godless battlefield, ripping through barbed wire, cut to pieces, the guy who made “E.T.” back in 1982 reduced me once again to blubber. Critics be warned, this is Hollywood film-making at its best. Horse enthusiasts be warned, this is a bloody film with ceaseless animal cruelty (faked and CGI'd, thank the gods). A