Year: 1992
Filming: Color
Length: 114 minutes
Genre: Action/Adventure/Drama
Maturity: R (for graphic battle violence)
Main Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Hawkeye), Madeleine Stow
(Cora Munro), Steven Waddington (Duncan Hayward), Russell
Means (Chingachgook), Wes
Studi (Magua), Jodhi May (Alice Munro), Eric Schweig (Uncas), Maurice Roeves (Col. Edmund Munro)
Director: Michael Mann
Personal
Rating: 1 Star
***
There is painful, and there is very painful. This
revisionist cinematic production of James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans falls into the
latter category. Or at least that’s true if historical accuracy, believable
acting, and a well-written plot mean anything to the vast array of viewers. Or
at least a chosen handful of them. But I digress.
The story opens in
Colonial America during the French and Indian War, whereupon we are promptly
introduced to Daniel Day-Lewis playing Hawkeye, a buckskinned frontier scout known
as “The Long Carrabine” who looks just a little bit too prettied-up for the
part. Traveling with his adopted Mohican father and brother, Chingachgook and
Uncas, he makes a pit-stop in a remote settlement where British officers are
trying to coerce American colonials to reinforce the defenses of local British forts
against the French attacks. In true stereotypical fashion, the redcoats are
portrayed to a man as dandified tyrants, fanatic about their duty to the Crown
but with a definite lack of talent for real fighting.
The colonists
refuse to comply with British demands, saying they will not leave their women
and children defenseless at home while they are serving elsewhere. Hawkeye,
loitering around in the crowd, also gets his chance to make a splash by announcing
that he doesn’t see himself as “subject to any man”. And here we come to first
major bend in the road: unlike previous productions, Hawkeye is most certainly not on the British side.
Realizing they can
make a process a lot easier by just lying to the colonials in order to gain
their allegiance, British General Webb makes a cursory promise that they can
leave to protect their homes should they see fit (accompanied by ominous music
and an evil snicker, of course). Then we get our first up-close glimpse of
Major Duncan Hayward, a young British officer who we remember for being a nice
guy in the book and past film versions, but who has now been transformed into an
incorrigible louse. He gets to give an overblown speech about making “everywhere
England” at the council-of-war, and then speedily exits to take care of some
personal business.
Enter Miss Cora
Munro, played by the attractive Madeleine Stowe. She is the eldest daughter of the
British commanding officer at Fort William Henry, and it is up to Major Hayward,
an old family friend, to get her and her younger sister, Alice, safely to the fort
and their father. From the get-go, Duncan seems to have an unlucky streak in
both love and war, since his marriage proposal to Cora doesn’t particularly exhilarate
her and his detachment is subsequently wiped out by renegade Indian scouts.
Duncan and his lady-friends seem doomed to be tomahawked
(especially since Duncan is less than athletic in hand-to-hand combat), but
then, charging out of the woods just in the nick of time comes the dashing,
crashing, man’s man, Hawkeye, who shoots up or scares off all the attackers
with the help of Chingachgook and Uncas. Yes, one must wonder how they manage
to do what a whole detachment couldn’t do, just as one would wonder how Mel
Gibson manages to annihilate a British detachment with just two little kids as
back-ups in The Patriot.
But for Cora Munro, logistics don’t matter. Hawkeye is her hero, and love is
soon wafting through the wilderness air. In keeping with his buoyant
perspective when facing set-backs, Duncan begins scheming to do away with “The
Long Carrabine”.
By the time everybody makes it to Fort
William Henry under the cover of a French barrage, things inside are looking
pretty bleak. Colonel Munro, who in the book and other movies had been
portrayed as a rather proud but basically decent career officer, is remade into
a war-criminal who has incurred the particular wrath of a Huron warrior named
Magua because of atrocities perpetrated against his tribe. Munro also goes back
on the promise to let the Americans go home should their homesteads be
attacked, even though Indians are massacring everyone in their path.
Hawkeye, of
course, has to step in here and help some of the colonials escape after a cozy
fireside chat where the Americans assert their opposition to tyranny in true
revolutionary fashion, even though the foreshadowed revolution is a long way off.
For this good deed, Hawkeye is thrown into the fort’s prison and sentenced to
hang. Cora makes a gallant effort to plead for his life in front of her father
and Duncan, but to no avail. Duncan even goes so far as to deny that a promise
granting the Americans leave to go home was ever made, and his-would-be-fiancée
proceeds to disparage him and make a rousing declaration in favor of “freedom”
for the colonials.
Cutting to the
chase, when the fort finally surrenders to the French, Magua and his Hurons
disregard the terms of surrender and slaughter many of the British and American
prisoners. Once again, Hawkeye, who conveniently hasn’t been hanged yet,
rescues Cora and Alice, and starts paddling up-stream in a convenient canoe
that happens to be on-hand. Duncan, also renting a parked canoe, follows in hot
pursuit. Yes, the whole thing does look as ridiculous as it sounds. Anyway,
after everyone bales out near the rapids and cools off behind a picturesque waterfall,
Hawkeye breaks the news to Cora and Alice that their father has had the
misfortune of getting his heart cut out by Magua. And speaking of the devil,
Magua shows up as if on cue, encircling their waterfall oasis.
“No matter where
you go, I will find you!” declares Hawkeye, in order to thematically
synchronize with the title song track written by Clannad, and then he and his Mohicans leap through the falls and head
for the hills while the girls and dear ol’e Duncan are taken prisoners. But to
their credit, it’s not long before Hawkeye and family show up again at a nearby
Huron village where Cora, Alice, and Duncan are about to be burned at the stake.
During a long and messy transaction involving walking the gauntlet and using
Duncan as a French translator, Hawkeye tries to convince the Huron top-brass to
release their prisoners unharmed. The top-brass decide to compromise: Duncan
will be released, Alice will remain in captivity, and Cora will be incinerated.
Not a good deal as
far as the two rival lovers are concerned, and they start whining in unison,
“Take me! Take me!” (I couldn’t help but mentally insert, “No, take me…..out of
my misery!!!”) Showing impeccable good taste, the Hurons choose Duncan, who had
purposely mistranslated Hawkeye’s attempts to offer himself in exchange so that
he would be taken instead. This touching gesture of last-minute redemption results
in him being raked over the coals, with Cora shrieking “What are they doing to
Duncan??” (Great minds think alike: I asked the same thing at the beginning of
the film when I realized they had transformed him into a rat!) In the true
spirit of throwing someone an anchor when they’re drowning, Hawkeye then uses
his marksman to skills to….er….end his rival’s pain.
With only a few more
main characters left to deal with in a film that’s running overtime, Uncas is
killed trying to rescue Alice, Alice jumps off a cliff (no, we don’t know why),
and Magua is killed by Chingachgook. With no further ado, Hawkeye and Cora
smooch on the bluffs as the sun sets over the wilderness, and Chingachgook
makes a few dour predictions about the future demographics of Appalachia since
he is, evidently, “The Last of the Mohicans.” Or maybe he’s just saying that to
attach himself to The Wild Bill Hickok Show in the future. It’s a non-issue.
By now, you have
probably realized I’m not a major fan of this chick-flick-romp-in-the-woods.
But even so, I’m going to go the extra mile to say something nice about it.
I’ll admit that it does have some appealing visual features. Costuming is good,
props are good, sets are good, and scenery is good. One scene that particularly
stands out as a majestic display of old-fashioned pageantry was the parlay
between Colonel Munro and General Montcalm in which both armies line up in
their spit-and-polish best with colorful banners flying against the backdrop of
lush forests, dark mountains, and a foreboding cloudy sky.
Also, I must say I
absolutely love the music track by Dougie MacLean entitled “The Gael”, which I
first heard played by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. I think they did a much
better job than the actual film rendition, and I feel the tune itself is a
thousand times more inspirational than the motion picture to which it has been
inextricably attached. More’s the pity; I want it to sign a petition to have it
rehashed when someone takes the notion to create a good big-budget blockbuster set during the French and Indian War!
As for any spiritual overtones, I suppose I
could say that the main characters seem to have a belief in the
afterlife, and Chingachgook does offer a memorable prayer to “The Great
Spirit” for the repose of his son’s soul. But that’s small pickings in
comparison with James Fennimore Cooper’s novel, which makes numerous references
to faithfulness of the characters and their belief in the workings of
providence. Traditional Christianity definitely takes a back seat to native
spiritual practices in this rendering. While the film does not contain anything
directly immoral (except perhaps gratuitous fight/torture scenes which can
easily be skipped without missing out on what little “plot” exists), there
isn’t anything outstanding in the realm of virtue either.
I guess Duncan sacrificing himself might have been a nice twist, if the
rest of the plot hadn’t been so lame. But the fact is it was so lame. There’s really no way around it. The romantic triangle
totally underwhelmed me by its superficiality and predictability. It lacked the
substance needed to sustain a would-be epic, especially because so many of the
other characters had been made unsympathetic or downright detestable, and was
bolstered by pathetic pop-music-generated dialogue. Acting was equally
horrendous, with the noteworthy exception of Jodhi May’s dramatically intense facial
expressions before taking her flying leap onto the trampoline below the papier-mâché
cliff in her role as Alice.
I found it very hard to get past the obvious agenda being pushed
in the movie, portraying the British as monsters with the French not much
better. The Indians and American settlers, on the other hand, are portrayed as
being “victims” of Imperialism who would live in peace and harmony if not for
the intervention of the big-bad-big-wigs from Europe. In reality, Indian tribes
were almost constantly fighting each other before and during the colonization
of America.
Furthermore, it
was the white settlers who had as much, if not more, to gain from the wars of
colonial expansion as their British rulers, and this was proven by their
resentment of any attempt of British authorities to curtail their incursions
into Indian lands. Trying to constantly pit the British and Americans against
each other in the colonial period is simply overdone, and I do wish more motion
pictures would decide to focus on the positive connections between Mother
Country and her Colonies.
I have no problem
with an honest, critical analysis of European Imperialism and the class system
it was built on. But it irks me to no end when self-righteous revisionists try
to generalize and condemn whole swaths of people from a different time period
because their views did not coincide with present-day political correctness and
their customs relied more on ceremonial decorum than is currently fashionable
in our jeans-and-tee-shirt society. Even the best ceremonial scenes from The Last of the Mohicans tend to be tinged
with attitude of contempt for the ways of the past and the code of honor to
which gentleman were taught to follow. By making it all seem stupid and
shallow, the film has instantly lost touch with the past it aspires to
represent.
I am not a book
purist, and am usually fairly lenient on film adaptations for their tweaking of
original plots. After all, visual dramatization is a different art form from
written novelization, and different considerations are needed to make it work.
However, this particular film had me yelling at the TV almost the whole time,
and I couldn’t be bribed to watch it again. When movie producers try to
completely “reinvent the wheel” by projecting modern perceptions into the past,
vilifying characters we used to like, killing off others at random, and then
introducing a synthetic romance to plug the holes in their cynical plot, I say
the whole enterprise has gotten off message and its high time to toss the camera
reels in a back-lot ceremonial fire with the incomparably luckless Duncan.
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| Hawkeye (Daneil Day-Lewis) humors Chingachook while he rants about demographics |
