Windtalkers
dir.: John Woo
R, 133 min.
Now playing at area theaters
As Windtalkers dies a fairly rapid death at the box office, those who make a living analyzing such things have speculated that the film is bombing because of post-9/11 war fatigue, even though audiences weren’t so sick of international conflict and big explosions that they failed to show up for The Sum of All Fears a few weeks back. Of course, The Sum of All Fears offers superheroes and moral absolutes, whereas Windtalkers depicts confused men getting ripped apart by bullets in the mud—in slow motion, no less. The film features a Navajo man (played by Adam Beach) fighting for a country that has shunned his people, alongside a white man (played by Nicolas Cage) who believes he was cheated out of an honorable death, and so fights for no greater principle than a violent rage against the injustice of the universe. Windtalkers bears the personal stamp of its director, and if pundits want to know why it hasn’t drawn crowds, there may be one reason above all: It’s a John Woo film.
Beloved by cineastes for the balletic action scenes and macho pensiveness of his Hong Kong crime stories, Woo came to America a decade ago to helm the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target, only to see his graceful gunfight choreography get hacked to ribbons by nervous studio interlopers. So Woo came back with the conventional, explosion-packed thriller Broken Arrow, which was a big enough hit for the director to make the idiosyncratic, serious-and-silly mano-a-mano pipe dream Face/Off. Then Woo partnered with Tom Cruise on Mission Impossible 2, which was an even bigger hit, even though its muddled, ponderous style left many filmgoers feeling numb and let down when the credits rolled.
Windtalkers may be Woo’s most accessible Hollywood film to date. It has a steady narrative flow, and the rent-garment pathos and operatic sense of movement of a typical Woo shoot-out have been scaled back to human size. Even so, anyone who’s seen the trailer would be excused for thinking that the movie would be too heavy, too wrenching for a summer-evening outing. Working against it also have been the mostly tepid reviews, which have complained that Woo and screenwriters John Rice and Joe Batteer trot out too many war movie clichés—the multi-ethnic troops, the racist who learns to respect his darker-skinned comrade-in-arms—while burying the real-life story of the soldiers who helped the U.S. defeat Japan in World War II by using the Navajo language as an unbreakable code.
The Navajo “codetalker” story deserves to be told, but perhaps in a documentary. In Windtalkers, the premise serves mainly to set up a characteristic Woo dilemma. Cage’s Sgt. Joe Enders has been ordered by top-level marines to prevent the capture of Beach’s Navajo character, Pvt. Ben Yahzee, by killing him if necessary. In Woo’s hands, this plot device allows the director to dwell once again on male relationships, and to raise questions about where loyalty lies. Enders purposefully avoids getting close to Yahzee, so that he can do his duty with no personal feeling, but a friendship develops naturally, and when the moment of decision comes, Enders has to decide whether the person he’s seeing at the end of his gun barrel is a Marine buddy, or a tool that can’t fall into the hands of the enemy.
Cage plays Enders in a constant state of glumness, which may be another reason that audiences have avoided Windtalkers. But with Cage’s brooding intensity, Beach’s positivism, a supporting cast of watchable faces (including Mark Ruffalo, Christian Slater and Peter Stormare) and an in-the-trenches focus accentuated by masterful use of hand-held cameras, Windtalkers develops a firm grip that gets tighter as it moves to the inevitable climax. The grand finale, like all the action sequences in the film, gains potency from the internal and external turmoil of the characters. In a pivotal earlier scene, Yahzee poses as a Japanese soldier so that he can infiltrate the enemy camp, radio HQ and get the U.S. Navy to stop shelling its own troops. That shifting of racial and national identity in the service of higher principles may not offer a comfortable lesson about good and evil, but it’s in the main of Woo’s obsession with the ways men deal with each other. And if Windtalkers signals the end of Woo’s string of surprise Hollywood hits, its sense of control and deeper purpose may return the director to the people who have always been his core audience: movie lovers.
