Year: 1992
Filming: Color
Length: 114 minutes
Genre: Action/Adventure/Drama/History/Romance/War
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 he 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. Handsome Hawky 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 is 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 Dunc are taken prisoners. But to their credit, it’s not long before Hawkeye and co. 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, “Yes, take them, or take me…out of my misery!!!”) Showing impeccable good taste, the Hurons choose Duncan, who has 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 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 an attitude of contempt for the ways of the past and the code of honor which gentleman were taught to follow. By making it all seem stupid and shallow, the film 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 it’s high time to toss the camera reels in a back-lot ceremonial fire with the incomparably luckless Duncan.
In conclusion, “No matter where you go…stay out of my movie box!”