LEGENDS OF THE FALL
A film review by Gregory Lavery
Copyright 1995 Gregory Lavery
The first thing that came into my mind as I was watching LEGENDS OF THE FALL was, when was Henry Thomas going to die? Not that I have anything against Mr Thomas at all, it's just that I could tell from the first thirty seconds what his fate was going to be. The timing, of course, was to be a bit harder to guess.
LEGENDS OF THE FALL is Brad Pitt's latest film and it is quite obvious that it is desgned to specifically to revolve around his, not undeveloped, chest. The story, such that it is, concerns three brothers, Tristran (Pitt), Samuel (Thomas, as already mentioned) and Alfred (Aidan Quinn) who live with their father (Anthony Hopkins) in a secluded part of the American Frontier in the earlier part of this century. Samuel, the young idealist, feels it his duty to go off to fight in the war in Europe conveniently quickly after he brings his Bride-to-be, Suzannah (Julia Ormonde), home to meet the family. Pitt and Quinn, being more worldly wise than their younger brother, decide to accompany him to the trenches in an attempt to keep him out of trouble. Strangely, circumstances arrange themselves in such a manner as to create a situation in which young Samuel is sadly killed within the first twenty minutes of the film.
When the brothers return to their home and to their father, Anthony Hopkins, the emotional battle begins for the hand of Suzannah who, quite obviously, couldn't see Samuel's death coming. The rest of the film charts the emotional tossing and turnings of the relationships between the brothers and the woman which, of course, ends in a way that I could see coming from the first ten minutes of the film.
From the above synopsis and my opening comments it may wel appear that I did not like the film that much. This would be true, to a certain extent, but not the whole story. Rather I enjoyed it immensely because I saw the comedy in it. I laughed, as everyone else did in the cinema, at the film's attempts at emotional manipulation, of a forlorn tugging on my heartstrings that were both pitiful and comical. From the point at which Pitt performs the bizarre ritual of cutting out his brother's heart and putting it in a box to take home to America, I was utterly astounded at what they would try to use as shortcuts to an understanding of the character's psychology. It suddenly went beyond stereotype and into grotesque parody when we were supposed to get a feeling of the 'animal' nature of Pitt's character trying to preserve the 'spirit' of his dead brother.
Being familiar with all of those movies made in the vein of AIRPLANE!, it is obvious that most of the comedy of this genre of films revolves around their exploitation of old movie cliches. Conventions like 'We'll head them off at the pass' and 'It's not what you think, I can explain everything' crop up all the time and we laugh at them because we know, in these cases, that they are there to be laughed at. It is here that the most brilliant aspect of LEGENDS OF THE FALL comes to light, here that every movie cliche is brought out for our inspection and here that the greatest joke of all lies. The people who made this were being utterly serious when they did it.
It is hard to remember a film in which so many movie cliches are paraded about without any sense of irony in it all, the saving grace of the AIRPLANE! genre. The director, Ed Zwick, worked on the series 'Thirtysomething' and this background in soap operas would directly point to where all these cliches creep in. Does this mean that Zwick is a bad director? Not necessarily. It would be more correct to say that he is totally unsuited to this kind of film, as it requires something in addition to an overinflated sense of melodrama that he quite obviously and abundantly possesses. The main thing that this movie required was subtlety, an understanding of how small gestures can mean so much in a relationship, of how world events are always mirrored in the tensions across even the smallest family scale and that suffering may not always manifest itself in tear ridden angst and howls of wolf-like pain. It would seem obvious then that here, Zwick simply doesn't understand how this story should be constructed, the film becomes an epic that simply shouldn't be an epic.
As a better example of how to direct this type of film, Zwick would have been well advised to watch something like DW Griffith's Birth of A Nation. In this film, the events of the American Civil War are made more personal by showing the viewer how it affects the day to day lives of two families on differing sides of the conflict. It carries the epic scale of the events to the viewer by showing how the 'real' person would react. This firm grounding of the story in reality creates a better empathy between character and viewer in that what is shown on screen takes on a life of it's own, the characters become like our friends and the result is that we care for them that much more.
Also, because the story doesn't reflect any major events, even, one suspects, that the war in Europe is used only as an excuse to kill Henry Thomas off, the story doesn't really fit with it's epic production. A lot of the time the screen is filled with wide open vistas of the American Praries and some of the story events don't really have any relevance to the main story, even in the most tenuous fashion. What results then, is a lot of baggage which shouldn't really be there, wasted time from a story point of view and yawn inducing nonsense for the viewer.
The main story itself is also somewhat oddly organised in that it really is difficult to predict how the ending will be constructed from the events which are unfolding. With most Hollywood movies the climax will be quite obvious from the first few minutes of action, perhaps a killer will be caught or a couple will romantically get together. Of course, how this will be done takes it's cue from those events unique to that film. Usually though, the circumstances will be immediately obvious to the spectator. In this film the ending is not quite as clear cut as this and when viewed in conjunction with the the vast amount of excess story 'baggage', the viewer can't help but become lost and irritated when it just seems to go on and on.
There are several other aspects of the film which are worthy of attention, favourable or otherwise. The first is the performance given by Anthony Hopkins as it really does deserve some sort of award. When watching him play the old fashioned patriarch in the first stages of the film he is utterly convincing, a performance up to his usual standards. However, one gets the feeling that approximately halfway through the shoot he got bored, or realised what the film was going to turn out like, and started to ham up the performance to an utterly hilarious degree.
At one point his character suffers a stroke which leaves half of his face paralysed and his temper doubly magnified. Speaking logically, it would be quite difficult for Hopkins to mentally disable half of his face, even though he may be a great actor, so the solution arrived at would never quite be 'realistic'. The way he got around this was to turn himself into a kind of Elephant Man on Speed, a caricature so grotesque that it turns Donald Duck into an eloquent thespian. From this point on it is impossible to take him, or anyone else in the film, seriously. I'm sure that faithfulness to the source novella was in Zwick's mind while making the film but, with all respect to artistic integrity, a film is a translation of the source text not a direct copy. For reasons of credibility, and actorial feasibility, perhaps a change from a stroke to some other non-fatal debilitating ailment would have been a better course of action.
The ending of the film, when if finally arrives, also deserves praise as the masterpiece of cliche and predictability it unashamedly is. Without revealing anthing I'll just say that you'll never guess who manages to save Brad Pitt from almost certain death, just in the nick of time!
Of course, it's very easy to be cynical about films such as this. They aren't really made to be torn apart in the manner that I've done above and most films these days would fall apart under any great scrutiny. So, to finish off I'll give ratings in several categories that are more illustrative of the film itself. As a challenging film, a 2. As a brainless entertainment film, a 5 and as a comedy in the style of AIRPLANE!, a 7. Just bear in mind though, anyone who has ever see any film before will be able to predict what's going to happen right from the first few seconds. Henry Thomas has got to die!
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