The Last Samurai

By Jan Stuart | Staff Writer

10:39 AM EST, December 4, 2003

(R) Pageantry and pulchritude rule in this earnest 19th century epic, wherein Tom Cruise venerates himself as an unsinkable American officer in Japan ennobled by a community of samurai. Ken Watanabe is elegant in the title role. Ed Zwick directs the traffic. 2:27 (strong violence and battle sequences).

Perhaps no other country treats its popular heroes as lavishly as America, and no other country disowns them as bluntly. This can happen when too much success is further burdened by profligacy (Mike Tyson), eccentricity (Michael Jackson), misogyny (Martha Stewart) or, in the case of Tom Cruise, Scientology. It's hard to find anyone eager to sing praises for Cruise these days, despite (or perhaps because of) his willingness to mock his own warrior-sex-god image, as he did so courageously in "Magnolia" and "Eyes Wide Shut."

This very rebel spirit keeps the ex-Mr. Kidman afloat during a period of mid-career fatigue, but he's treading in shallow waters. In the opulent post- Civil War epic "The Last Samurai," Cruise once again plays a fighter who rejects the heroic role that has been thrust upon him by society. Like Ron Kovic, the Marine-turned-activist he played in "Born on the Fourth of July," his latest character is a military careerist disillusioned by the brutality and depravity he has witnessed among Uncle Sam's ranks. The film's a dubious bet to reverse Cruise's waning appeal, as the role not only reeks of self-congratulation, but comes at a time when Americans are struggling to believe in the integrity of their country's strategic choices abroad.

Cruise's Capt. Nathan Algren is an embittered survivor of Little Bighorn, a battle he recalls for the wanton destruction of an American Indian community and the blind ego of Gen. Custer. Having been pressed into peacetime service as a traveling-show exemplar of American valor, the cynical vet.eran is more than happy to accept a lucrative commission from the young emperor of Japan to mold a motley assemblage of peasants into Japan's first conscript army.

Algren leaves the boomtown of San Francisco for the boomtown of Yoko.hama, only to find a country dominated by the self-interest of American and Japanese bureaucrats, who are bent on wiping out samurai insurgents holding fast to the old ways. After his neophyte army is cut down in a face-off with the rebels, an injured Algren is carted off to a distant samurai stronghold, where he is held under the wary but admiring eye of head samurai Katsumoto (a charming Ken Watanabe) and nursed back to health by the wife of a samurai he killed in battle.

The comely widow, Taka (Koyuki), resents her husband's murderer, but is predictably disarmed by his Tom Cruise aura and way with children. In turn, Algren's initial revulsion at the samurai's brute traditions turns to admiration for a discipline and sense of honor he finds missing back at home. As Katsumoto tutors the American into a samurai fighting machine, the simmering affection between Taka and Algren takes a back seat to the picture's real love story: the deepening bond between the two warriors.

Director Ed Zwick, who has of late been touting his high regard for the samurai classics of Akira Kurosawa, has missed an essential point: Kurosawa movies moved. A proponent of decorous, grandiloquent films ("Glory," "Legends of the Fall"), Zwick has made another decorous, grandiloquent film. "The Last Samurai" trudges ahead slowly, weighed down by the armor of its own gravity and photographic splendor (via cinematographer John Toll and production designer Lilly Kilvert). Algren's conversion is further freighted with prosaic voiceover reflections, such as "There is some comfort in the emptiness of the sea" and, my favorite, "I am beset by the ironies of life." Welcome to the club.

The battle sequences are formidable and punctuated with enough beheadings and dismemberments to pacify the video-game mavens. But the film's romanticized idealization of old-world samurai values, at the expense of Westernized progress, manages to come off as reactionary and liberal pleading at the same time. Through it all, Tom Cruise stares soulfully past the camera, on toward a catering truck where sushi rolls and ham sandwiches dwell side by side in harmony.