(Continuing on our facial hair theme from the last entry . . .)

So The Last Samurai isn’t a bad movie. It is a thoroughly conventional movie; if you’ve seen the previews you pretty much know what’s going to happen, and if you’ve seen any of a dozen or two Hollywood movies of the last twenty years you pretty much know how it’s going to happen, too. (I’m not going to worry about spoilers here because there isn’t really anything to spoil; no point in trying to hide plot twists when you can see straight from one end of the plot to the other.) The writing, while adequate, is Hollywoody, and the dialogue occasionally clunks. And the truth is the film just doesn’t have that much to say — except, as Stephen Notley put it,

it’s not that war itself is horrible, an orgy of ugly useless death; just that certain ways of waging war are cooler than others. Samurais are just intrinsically cooler than Civil War-style musketeers and so it’s sad to see the passing of those better, purer times when a battlefield was strewn with dead bodies chopped to pieces by highly trained swordsmen rather than riddled with bullets by dummies who can barely reload their muskets. Truly, the business of killing large numbers of people lost something special that tragic day, something that can never be recovered.

The film’s not so much historically inaccurate as it is historically myopic — if you want to read about the real Satsuma Rebellion you can have fun counting the important details they omitted, such as the fact that the main motivation for Ken Watanabe’s real-life counterpart was that he couldn’t talk his fellow oligarchs into annexing Korea. (Eventually they saw the error of their ways, but not for a generation or so — see below.) Like Barthes’ Empire of Signs, The Last Samurai is not so much about Japan as it is about “Japan”, a hypothetical and largely fictional — yet fascinating — construct.

But if you can put these flaws behind you, the film does have its good points. It’s probably best to approach The Last Samurai as a sort of science fiction movie, not so much about the encounter of the real Japan with the real West as about the encounter of a hypothetical feudalism with a hypothetical modernity.

Divorce the film from its historical specifics and you’re free to muse, for instance, about the pathos of the peasant musketeers Cruise commands in the first act: terrified, half-trained conscripts set to be slaughtered by ruthless professional warriors, in a war they never chose to fight — but a war that, nonetheless, stands to liberate them and their descendants from serfdom. (For those of us who happen to know quite a few Japanese people, this is where it’s worth noting that despite whatever romantic notions we might have about the samurai, it’s among those conscripts, or people like them, that most of the Japanese we know probably count their recent ancestors.) Then in the second act, in the unreconstructed traditional countryside, you can set aside your class loyalties for a moment and share with Ken Watanabe’s noble rebel and Koyuki’s war widow the knowledge of the brevity of this last winter idyll, the awareness that each victory serves only to postpone the inevitable defeat. In the first two acts you can find yourself racking your brain trying to find a way to make it all work, reconcile tradition and modernity — give these distressingly cute children a chance to grow up.

In the third act — well, in the third act you get some 19th-century Tokyo street scenes and a couple of decent action sequences. The filmmakers do their best to undermine the sympathy you felt for the conscript soldiers in the first act by giving you not just well-drilled riflemen but swaggering uniformed thugs. Ken Watanabe’s character exposes the essential hollowness of the film when, asked by the young Emperor for his advice, for an alternative to the policies of the modernizationist clique, the best he can do is to prostrate himself and abdicate the responsibility. (If Watanabe’s turning up in Tokyo mid-movie despite being Japan’s Most Wanted reminds you, structurally, of Russell Crowe’s mid-movie confrontation of Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator, it’s probably because both screenplays were written by John Logan.) Fencing, fighting, chases, escapes, and we’re into the fourth act, which, despite the references to Thermopylae and Little Big Horn, you can pretty much tell is going to end up as the Charge of the Light Brigade, only less successful.

In the epilogue, naturally, the young Emperor, moved by Ken Watanabe’s futile self-sacrifice, gives the chubby plutocratic prime minister and the mercenary American ambassador their comeuppances and, holding the sword with which Watanabe served him, utters some suitably portentous platitudes about the necessity of the Japanese people never forgetting where they came from. (If this reminds you, structurally, of Russell Crowe’s deathbed call for the restoration of the Senate in Gladiator, it’s probably because . . .) At this point the hypothetical feudalism, hypothetical modernity structure breaks down, and we’re into a different kind of science fiction: an alternate history in which everything after this counterfactual incident happens exactly the same as it did in our timeline — but with a completely different light thrown by this incident on all the events that followed it. Cruise’s lovable surrogate sons grow up to sink the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905 and conquer Korea in 1910; their children invade China. The Emperor’s endorsement of Japan’s martial heritage in 1878 leads directly to the establishment of military dictatorship sixty years later.

The Second World War, in the final analysis, is all Tom Cruise’s fault.

Sorry — I just finished a set of alternate-history vignettes a couple of weeks ago, and I got a little carried away there. What I meant to say was that the sets, costumes, and scenery (New Zealand again — and did I see Sala “The Dark Lord Sauron” Baker’s name in the list of location scouts?) alone make The Last Samurai worth seeing. The story may be one you’ve heard before, but the film’s capable of making you stop and think about that story again, if you’ll let it. The performances are better than the script deserves; the kids are almost up there with Anna Paquin in The Piano, Ken Watanabe is the next Chow Yun Fat, Koyuki, um, doesn’t have much to do (but she’s nice to look at), and Tom Cruise comes closer to disappearing into this role than any other I’ve seen him play, though maybe that’s because of the beard.

And the swordfighting, all things considered, is actually quite decent.

(Gohatto’s swordfighting is still better, though. Plus, I mean, gay love triangles in a secret police death squad fencing academy — how can you go wrong?)