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All-Reviews.com Movie/Video Review
Windtalkers
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  out of 4
Review by Harvey Karten
No Rating Supplied
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Is a movie that takes over two hours to tell its story every
justified? Absolutely. Take "Lagaan," for example, the 3 hours
thirty-five minutes' epic that was Oscar-nominated for best
foreign film of 2001. "Lagaan" was not only about something, an
eipc story of a conflict between India's colonial masters and the
native population which challenged the British to a round of
cricket, but it featured a panoply of scenes of dance, superb
music, believable action, and a story with razor-sharp wit and
intelligence. By contrast, John Woo's "Windtalkers" would have
been fine at 95 minutes but at 133 (that's two hours, thirteen
minutes) Mr. Woo seems almost to have contempt for John
Rice and Joe Batteer's script (can't blame him for that: the
writing is as pedestrian as the agitprop sort I grew up on during
World War II) in favor of Woo's signature as martial arts
specialist. While there is no kung fu, the battles look as though
they were designed by the choreographers at the Joyce Theater
in New York which specializes in flamboyant modern dance.
But there is little variation. When the Japanese are shot, they
fly through the air and are dead before they hit the ground.
When the Americans are done in, they take their time in
expiring, in some cases showing up in the audience their
wounds to the chest, demonstrate the difficult breathing with a
bullet in the lung, and in one case display the results of a leg
shot off below the knee. Each Japanese soldier moreover dies
with a single shot or a quick thrust of the bayonet. Americans
can trot back to the trenches while carrying their wounded
comrades, while bullets fly everywhere but into their bodies.
The big virtue of the story line is that we learn about the
contributions of the Navajo Indians, mostly from Arizona, to the
war effort. While the Japanese succeeded in breaking almost
every code the U.S. forces used to inform headquarters of
potential targets for the aircraft, the Navajo Indians used their
own language to stand in for important concepts. For example,
to represent a patrol plane, the Navajos would use their word for
crow and for hand grenades, the term for potatoes. The
Japanese could not figure out what was what but for some
reason known only to scripters John Rice and Joe Batteer, the
enemy knew that if they caught anyone who looked different
from the mostly white forces on their land, they should take him
back alive for "interrogation."
At the heart of the story are the orders given to Sergeant Joe
Enders (Nicolas Cage) to babysit for Pvt. Ben Yahzee (Adam
Beach) to make sure that Yahzee would not get taken by the
enemy. If Yahzee were on the brink of capture, Enders had to
shoot him. (This is fictional: no such order was ever given to a
marine during World War II or any other time.) This meant that
Enders would avoid becoming too chummy with his windtalker
(i.e. code communicator) lest he be reluctant to do the dirty
deed.
You know the rest. Would it spoil the movie to know that
Yahzee really had to exercise his discretion in carrying out the
order? That that Yahzee would face a yahoo marine would
would bait him now and then ostensibly because the white
marine remembers the fate of General Custer? Or that Enders
would have a gal (Frances O'Connor), a hospital worker who
helps him to cheat on a hearing test after his eardrum got
perforated so that the gung-ho sarge could get back into the
action?
And oh, yes, another good thing about "Windtalkers" is that an
art house filmmaker is bound to take up the little-known story of
Navajo help to make a sincere, character-driven movie on a
human level that might interest even those movie fans who may
realize that there's more to the screen than explosions, chases,
and cliches.
Copyright © 2002 Harvey Karten
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