Michael Morpurgo’s wonderful children’s novel, War Horse, has been around since 1982. It was one of my favourite books when I was a kid, partly because it’s a wonderful story and partly because like the tale’s human hero, Albert, I was a boy growing up on a farm in Devon. Admittedly times had changed since the 1910s, but it still felt rather familiar, helped by the fact that Morpurgo only lived a few miles away from me and so he was intimately familiar with the area.
Hollywood only came knocking after the novel was adapted into an incredibly successful stage show at the National Theatre. And if you’re going to have Hollywood knocking, there’s no one better to have on the other side of the door than Steven Spielberg, who’s turned War Horse into a beautiful, moving and very sentimental movie, set in a somewhat twee Devon (but more about that later), which then goes off to a more real-feeling war.
Teenaged Albert (Jeremy Irvine) gets a surprise when his father (Peter Mullan) comes back from the market with a thoroughbred horse that he’s massively overpaid for. Although the youngster is excited, his mother (Emily Watson) is less so, as the family doesn’t have much money and what they really needed was a proper work horse. However the animal, Joey, proves his mettle and develops a close bond with Albert.
Then World War I erupts and with the farm in jeopardy, Joey is sold to an army officer (Tom Hiddleston). Albert promises Joey that one day he’ll find him again, even though that seems impossible. Soon the horse is shipped off to France, setting in motion an epic journey that sees Joey pressed into service by both sides of the conflicts, getting close to the innocent casualties of war and finding a way to survive what becomes an increasingly hellish place for both man and beast.
There’s a slight air of War Horse being Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for families. It’s a film that wants to show the horror of war but needs to do so in a way that’s not too gory. Spielberg has always been more interested in the human side of conflict than the politics, and War Horse is the perfect story for that. It is slightly odd, but watching people interacting with animals often brings out a humanity it’s difficult to see when people are mixing with one another. That’s amply demonstrated by a scene where the British and Germans are prepared to call a temporary truce over the fate of a horse.
As Joey goes from Devon into the British cavalry, before being pressed into service by the Germans, he brings out something very human in all sides. As with Morpurgo’s original novel, it’s not about who is good and who is bad – after all, a horse doesn’t have a particularly complex understanding of politics and morality – but about human beings, whatever side they’re on, trying to retaining their humanity and find their way through something terrible. It’s quite a change for Spielberg from the moustache twirling Nazi villains of Indiana Jones to the very human Germans of War Horse.
Admittedly the whole film is slightly sentimentalised, but to be honest, in this context that’s not a bad thing. It’s a moving film, and while there are moments when the movie seems a tad manipulative, that never overwhelms the basic humanity (and horse-anity) at the centre of War Horse. It’s also notable that the film (again like the book), holds back on anthropomorphising the central horse too much. Joey does have a personality, but no more so than horses actually have personalities. It ensures the sentimentality never gets too treacly and yet there’ll be plenty of dewy eyes towards the end of the film.
I have to say though that as a Devonian, it is odd seeing the county portrayed in a Hollywood movie. Well, that’s not quite true as we have a proud film heritage that’s seen Devon appear in everything from Remains Of The Day to Alice In Wonderful, but it rarely appear as itself. When Devon is meant to be on the screen, for whatever reason it often seems to get filmed elsewhere. When a TV series was made of RF Delderfield’s ‘To Serve Them All Their Days’ – which is largely about my old North Devon school – they filmed it in Dorset, because apparently my school didn’t look enough like itself (that was the real reason given). Cameron Crowe was so keen to get Devon off the screen that he transported the upcoming We Bought A Zoo from Dartmoor (where the real life story took place) to America, and turned the distinctly Westcountry twanged zookeepers into more cinema-friendly form of Scarlet Johansson. But as Spielberg shows, Devon is an exceptionally beautiful place that has attracted filmmakers for decades, even if the county is rarely allowed to be itself.
When I first saw the trailers for War Horse, I kept thinking Spielberg was rose-tinting everything and making the Devon scenes way too twee and sentimental (many have criticised War Horse for that). But do you know what? Rural Devon is twee (and the locals ought to embrace that more). At first all the shots looked a little too beautiful, but then I remembered that when I was a kid, I walked out the front door and had a view that stretched across 20 miles of stunning patchwork, hilly greenness. I never appreciated it at the time, but now when I go back home it takes my breath away, so I can’t really blame Spielberg for showing that.
Likewise, when the entire village turns out to see whether a horse will plough a field, it initially seems dumb. Surely people wouldn’t go and watch that? But I’m still amazed at the amount of people you can get to turn up at a village hall just by saying you’ll be selling some second hand clothes and dodgy jam. And if you knew how excited Devonshire villagers can get about a vegetable show, you’d probably worry about them. So getting a full-house to watch a horse do some ploughing isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
Times have changed since the era War Horse is set in, but if you really knew rural Devon – the proper one and not just the tourist trap version – the film is far closer to the truth than you might imagine. Rural Devon is a bit twee, but you’re bound to get a bit of twee-ness in a world where community still really means something, everyone knows everybody else and which has still never fully signed up to the hectic, impersonal modern world. Morpurgo wrote what he knew, and Lee Hall and Richard Curtis’ script retains that.
 The view outside my home when I was growing up on a Devon farm |
Well, that’s my tourist board bit out of the way, and onto things War Horse does less well. For a start, the film is wildly inaccurate by making everyone in Devon understandable to a general audience. Proper Devon people, of which there were many more 100 years ago than there are now, are not easily understandable. My father is one of the last of a dying breed of exceptionally broad accented, dialect spouting Devonians. His accent is so broad that when I was a teenager, many of my friends had absolutely no idea what he was saying, even though many of them were Devon born and bred themselves (but from the less out-in-the-sticks bits of the county). As a result, I have no doubt that War Horse’s light-accented people with a sweet Devon burr are nothing like rural villagers would have been at the time. But then, if everyone in the film talked like my dad, nobody would know what the hell was going on, so you can understand why they toned things down.
I’d also like to point out that Albert and his family live on the most stupid farm ever, which seems to have no livestock (barring a horse and a goose) and so has to rely on a single field of turnips for its future. I think it’s fair to say that any farmer who had that as their business plan would have gone out of business a long time ago. It ensures it’s all very dramatic, but turnips must have been worth their weight in gold in 1914 for it to make any sense. That said, there are pictures of my father in the 1930s and 1940s riding bareback on massive cart-horses, so the close relationship farmers used to have with horses is very true (my dad even had to ride a horse to school), something that’s largely been supplanted by modern machinery nowadays.
I have to admit that I am a bit biased when it comes to War Horse. It’s a story I’ve been close to for over 25 years and a county I’ve been part of for even longer – this year my family will have been living on the same farm in the county for a full century. But even if you’ve never been to Devon, the film still has a lot to offer.
As Albert says at one point in the movie, “We’re Devon boys – and we’ve got to stick together.”
Overall Verdict: Young horse lovers may be a bit disturbed by the amount of animal jeopardy but Spielberg uses it to give a genuine sense of the humanity trapped under the machine of war in this wonderful tale of rural life and the horrors of war.
Reviewer: Tim Isaac