METRO-GOLDWYN MAYER PICTURES
Nicolas Cage, front, stars as a Marine sergeant assigned to protect a Navajo codetalker, played by Adam Beach. Cage's character becomes torn between protecting the individual or the code.
In code blood Is there anything more like a modern major general than an auteur director? John Woo's fingerprints are all over "Windtalkers" as indelibly as Patton's or MacArthur's. Woo's favorite themes -- duty, loyalty and honor tested under extreme fire -- are laid out like carp on a serving table.
'Windtalkers' woos audience
How you can critique the film
with tale of duty, loyalty and honorBy Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.comSuch flashy filmmaking suits the melodramatic, grand-operatic nature of his previous and hugely influential Hong Kong gangster movies. Squirted like Tabasco into the grimy realities of a realistic combat film, Woo's approach, however, feels inappropriate and thematically misfires.
This is being touted as Woo's most personal Hollywood film to date, basically because it wholly translates a crucial theme of his earlier work, namely the emotionally wrought bonding between two men in a violent world, both sharing a spirituality out of step in a world filled with bloody rites of passage. But Woo's lyrical passages of violence are too few and far between the many real horrors of war.
"Windtalkers" supposedly concerns the Navajo "code talkers" of the Pacific campaign in World War II, and it's a noble effort in that Hollywood-savvy marketing way. But what the movie -- filmed primarily on Kualoa Ranch here on Oahu -- is really about is the spiritual wounding and redemption of Marine Sgt. Joe Enders, played with typical brooding intensity by Nicholas Cage.
The damage is made manifest when Enders gets his ear shot off in the first scene, a horrific shootout in the Solomon Islands campaign in which all the men under his command are slaughtered. As he comes out of that with a case of survivor's guilt and a damaged equilibrium, Cage also gets to clutch his head, grimace and stagger about whenever the script demands his character to be overwhelmed with cosmic-sized angst. (Cage keeps it all bottled inside, unlike his last foray into WWII as the goofy Italian soldier in "Captain Corelli's Mandolin.")
METRO-GOLDWYN MAYER PICTURES
Director John Woo doesn't gloss over ugliness of war.
Trying to make amends, Enders agrees to shepherd Carl Yahzee, a Navajo recruit "code talker." Yahzee and his friend Charlie Whitehorse are shown in an earlier scene how the code-talking system works, since the Japanese could break any code that repeats letter groupings or is based on an existing language system. The Marines used the Navajo language, which was rich in metaphor and slang but was unknown to the Japanese. On top of that, the "talkers" used a code within their own language, one that only a native Navajo speaker could figure out. Tanks became "turtles," for example, or artillery became "logs" or "pipes."
This top-secret program (it wasn't declassified until the 1970s) began in September 1942, based on a recommendation made by a Philip Johnston, a white missionary who lived among the Navajo and knew the language was strictly oral, to Maj. Gen. Clayton B. Vogel. A "code talker" on the battlefield would radio directly behind the lines to report on battle action, and a "talker" on the other end would translate and write up the message. It was faster than encoding transmissions, and the Marines enjoyed secure fire control during later campaigns.
THE TOP-SECRET nature of the scheme sets up the central drama of the movie. The Navajos aren't aware that their white bodyguards are secretly assigned to kill them if it looks like they're going to be captured by the Japanese. This makes the Enders character taciturn and, at first, unwilling to become buddies with Yahzee.
Yahzee is played by Adam Beach ("Smoke Signals," "Mystery, Alaska") in a breakthrough performance. His is the most nuanced and complete character in the film, a naive recruit who breaks down Enders' spiritual bitterness and befriends him in the heat of battle.
The film's secondary relationship is between Whitehorse (Roger Willie) and his keeper, Sgt. "Ox" Henderson, played by Christian Slater, bonding over the common love of music. (Both Slater and Cage have acted in two of Woo's previous U.S. productions -- Slater in the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle "Hard Target" and Cage in 1997's "Face/Off," co-starring John Travolta.) Of everyone in "Windtalkers," only Slater and supporting actor Mark Ruffalo seemed to have shucked their post-2000 angst and transported themselves into the psyches of people from the 1940s.
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Roger Willie plays the codetalker Whitehorse in John Woo's "Windtalkers," filmed primarily at Kualoa Ranch.
The rest of the squad are your basic foxhole buddies, one from each dim corner of America, pieces of an ethnic pie, and a cliché that dates from World War II propaganda films. There's the token racist who exists mainly to try and beat up on Yahzee -- in the midst of a battle! -- because he looks "more like a Nip than like us." This piece of intelligence later becomes a plot point in one of the battle scenes but makes no sense dramatically or historically. As for the Indians, when they're not cozying up to their white comrades in arms, they're off having mystic, honorable and dramatically lit "protection" ceremonies.
Besides an aborted attempt at a romantic side story, that's the plot. "Windtalkers" is a war film after all, the last of four major combat films to be released after last year's Sept. 11 assault, even though it originally was scheduled to open as a major fall studio film last November.
"WINDTALKERS" largely takes place during the invasion of the Japanese stronghold on Saipan. Woo imagines this as a startlingly large canvas, like a majestic Victorian painting, of thousands of men in desperate, bloody combat on a lush, green landscape.
Although it's disappointing as a drama, the movie does an admirable job of showing the sheer savagery of close-order combat, as well as the devastating effects of high-volume firepower.
Woo's vision is a peculiar kind of hell, one in which flames play a large part. Explosions are enormous and consuming; even simple hand grenades go off like nuclear fireballs. A surprise-attack sequence that takes place in the shattered town of Garapan is the most effective of the four battle sequences in the film, showcasing the random and brutal nature of combat at its most horrifying.
This is one of those war movies in which the characters are defined by their weapons, and Enders/Cage uses a Thompson machine gun, widely used by American Marines in close-order combat. But I suspect Woo liked it because it's a mobster weapon, and the hero can blaze away like crazy, kicking up dust and debris like a hurricane.
Everyone on "Windtalkers" did their best to re-create the viciousness of World War II, not re-imagine it, nor inject a sentimental, glossy vision of what they think audiences will accept, i.e. "Pearl Harbor." And to do any less is not only an insult to veterans, it's also a slap to audiences. Whatever its failings, "Windtalkers" makes the effort.
"Windtalkers"
Rated R
Opening tomorrow at Consolidated Kapolei, Koko Marina, Ko'olau, Mililani, Pearlridge and Ward; Signature Dole Cannery, Pearl Highlands and Windward; and Wallace Enchanted Lake
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