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 October 13, 2010|The first director to have two distinct so-called Director's Cuts of one film since Ridley Scott was bound to be Michael Mann. The exclusive-to-Blu-ray "Director's Definitive Cut" (henceforth DDC) of The Last of the Mohicans rights a few wrongs of the "Director's Expanded Edition" (DEE), namely that it puts back the Clannad song (in Gaelic, mind you, but what's the difference?), restores the money shot to Magua's impaling, and allows Hawkeye to once again talk a little bit of trash, frontier-style, although it still leaves out his (admittedly dumb) rhetorical question to Heyward, "Isn't there anything better to do on the lake today, Major?" I never did catalogue the numerous quick shots that were added for the DEE and can't confirm how many survive in the DDC. My best guess is "some" but definitely not "all," considering the DDC runs two minutes shorter than the DEE and two minutes longer than the theatrical cut. What I can confirm is that Chingachgook's final speech has been re-deleted--which I thought would leave a hole, but it doesn't--and that overall the DDC plays a lot like the theatrical cut, suggesting that Mann is only ever chasing his tail with this constant revisionism. While I'm happy to have The Last of the Mohicans in a state that more closely resembles the movie I fell in love with back in 1992, I must point out that the DEE came out on DVD a decade ago and that the theatrical cut--in North America, at least--existed only on dying or dead formats at that point, thus an entire generation of viewers was reared on a version they won't be able to enjoy in HiDef. That's two iterations of the film Mann has now encouraged the culture to forget, Lucas-like, and I consider this disc a missed opportunity to archive all three cuts for digital eternity.
As for the 2.40:1, 1080p transfer, it's beautiful if not unassailable. Breathtaking and mesmerizing in equal measure, the forest palette is the most intricate and infinite it's looked since the cinema. The image itself, for the most part, boasts a lens-like clarity as well as a tactile quality that gives costume designer James Acheson's stitching its due. Grain is generally there and generally fine--heaviest, but not all that heavy, during the firelit siege on Fort William Henry. Detail takes a hit, unfortunately, when the natural-light aesthetic is taken even farther than it was on 35mm, with faces bobbing up for air in a charcoal milk during nighttime conversations between Cora and Hawkeye (chapter 11) and Magua and Montcalm (ch. 21). (Daytime blacks are comparatively crisp and inky.) The attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track, enhanced for D-BOX playback, is a robust rendering of the best war-movie soundmix pre-Saving Private Ryan; remarkable to think the picture predated many modern techniques for creating discrete audio. Presumably due to lossless compression, the music and effects seem in better harmony here, less prone to cancelling each other out, while dialogue prioritization is noticeably improved. Although the surround channels aren't used as aggressively as the subwoofer, this was always the case.
Michael Mann has recorded a feature-length commentary for this Director's Definitive Cut in which he, somewhat ironically, plays historian. (See paragraph three of my original review.) This is a fairly dry yakker: Mann laments "the rhythms of narrative discipline" and seizes this pulpit as an opportunity to purge the reams of research the film's character-driven structure could simply not accommodate. Fifty-four minutes in, he breaks form to praise Dante Spinotti's cinematography as "masterful," but you can tell he's itching to get back to the subject of muskets. As an aside, I don't know why, but it always surprises me that this man with so much poetry in his soul sounds like he should be hosting a pledge drive for the PBS affiliate in Tonawanda. Also on board is a three-part (rather, "three-act") retrospective featurette, "Making The Last of the Mohicans" (43 mins., HD), that was produced, photographed, and edited by Tjardus Greidanus, the Laurent Bouzereau to Mann's Steven Spielberg. Is it something of a coup that Daniel Day-Lewis participates? He recollects his survivalist preparations for the role, and in vintage home videos we see him learning to fire guns, fight with tomahawks, and skin animals. Perfectionist Mann of course reveres Day-Lewis's Method dedication while casting director Bonnie Timmerman and the still-breathtaking Madeleine Stowe speak of the actor's eccentricities so discreetly as to imply more than they probably intended. Character dynamics and Wolf Kroeger's production design are explored in depth, though the section on Trevor Jones's music is maddeningly absent of any explanation for composer Randy Edelman's co-credit. (Irish folk musician Dougie Maclean's "The Gael" is acknowledged as the Rosetta stone that basically unlocked Jones's whole score.) A solid piece despite the joint absence of Eric Schweig and Jodhi May, the film's real prom King and Queen. Teaser and theatrical trailers for The Last of the Mohicans, both in standard-def, round out the platter--not counting a selection of BD Live trailers for other Fox product.-BC
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2.40:1, 1080p (MPEG-4); English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English Dolby Surround; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; BD-50
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Why are they running, these Greek gods of men? The instruction manuals tell us that action movies should open this way, with motion and colour, with sound and fury, to get the blood pumping from frame one--don't waste time on exposition. Indeed, the opening sequence of The Last of the Mohicans yanks us in by the collar as Chingachgook, his biological son, Uncas, and his adopted son, Hawkeye (née Nathaniel Poe), pursue an elk with crude yet effective weapons to the urgent beat of synth-and-bass-drum music. Hawkeye scores the killshot with his flint rifle (after a single pull of the trigger), and these hunters--two of whom, we'll soon learn, are the only surviving members of an indigenous race--say a prayer for the animal's spirit.
What a skillful set-up. Swiftly, we learn that our heroes are fast, and yes, there is a lot of running to be done in The Last of the Mohicans. (Even Ben Stiller satirized this aspect of it on his short-lived sketch show: as Hawkeye, Stiller demonstrated a treadmill designed for simulating the daily routine of a Mohican.) Furthermore, they're exceptional trackers, rendering plausible the ease with which they will eventually follow the warpath of vengeful Hurons. Finally, we discover that Chingachgook's clan of three is composed of compassionate hunters, humbled by their ecological superiority.
President Woodrow Wilson said of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, "It's like writing history with lightning," and I can think of no better way to describe Michael Mann's keenly visual approach to storytelling--he strips away dialogue with the instincts of a silent-era auteur. Wordless (and breathless) passages make up the bulk of The Last of the Mohicans, a new-fashioned epic that concentrates on the poetry of movement. Occasionally, the film gets bogged down in the military details of the Seven Years War, most of them deadly inaccurate ("For The Last of the Mohicans, history is a junkyard full of motifs and incidents that can be retrieved, combined, and paired with new inventions as Mann sees fit," American historian Richard White bitterly opined), but searing battle scenes eradicate all memory of dull or faulty revisionism.
New York, 1757. Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) and company rescue the Munro sisters, Cora and Alice (played by Madeleine Stowe and Jodhi May, respectively), from certain death. The women were being escorted, under false pretenses, back to Fort William Henry, where their father Edmund (Maurice Roëves), a British Colonel, leads a cannon-powered charge against Montcalm's troops. Somewhat safely ensconced inside the fort, Hawkeye falls in love with Cora, much to the dismay of ally soldier Duncan Heyward (Stephen Waddington), her rejected suitor, who then jealously supports Edmund's decision to charge Hawkeye with sedition (for helping some drafted settlers go AWOL).
But the villain of the piece is Magua (Wes Studi), a nefarious Huron scout single-minded in his quest to wipe the "seed" of "Grey Hair" from the earth forever. The attacks his people stage on the English have an ulterior bent--we presume that Magua's allegiance to the French will die the day his blood feud with Edmund Munro has been successfully avenged. Of the less plotty dialogue in Mann's adaptation, Magua gets the best of it, dispensing salty wisdom with appropriate hostility. (My favourite: "When white woman is hungry, white man puts down his tomahawk to feed her laziness.") In the time-honoured tradition of denying Native Americans what is rightfully theirs, Studi failed to receive an Oscar nomination for his indelible portrayal of a human cobra.
The Last of the Mohicans is operatically structured--those with only a fleeting interest in America's past should be won over by its amped-up passion: whatever happens, Hawkeye must protect Cora, the woman he adores; Uncas must protect Alice, the woman he adores; bonds are broken and renewed; transgressors seek redemption; and so on and so forth. I am a sucker for its romantic sweep.
That said, I don't want to portray Mann's film as Harlequin bullshit. There was a consensus about The Last of the Mohicans at the time of its release that it lacked character development, but I considered it then and still do as hinged on aesthetics, with base feelings represented in silent, pretty takes. It's the film's purity of emotion that has some mistaking it for shallow: could the beautifully raw climactic montage have such an overwhelmingly sad impact if we didn't understand, and sympathize with, the plight of Uncas, who utters barely a syllable throughout? Only if you see dobs of paint on a two-dimensional canvas as having no opportunity for subtext will this observantly photographed (by Dante Spinotti) masterwork leave you unelated.
Why are we less critical of movies that reorganize factual events (see: Braveheart) than unfaithful screen adaptations of best-selling novels? Because history is this amorphous thing, subject to the whim of imagination in the absence of a strong dissenting voice. Moreover, it's rare that one develops a sentimental attachment to the recounting of a period, while books become, for their brief duration, a vacation for the mind, and all that that implies. The Last of the Mohicans retools both our dark past and a popular, if largely dismissed, tome, yet in this case, two wrongs make a right: the film is a Michael Mann Experience (and a deeply sensitive one, at that), above all else. He has rewritten history with lightning.
An exclusive-to-DVD Director's Cut reinstates a prophetic closing speech delivered by Chingachgook:
"The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the red man of the wilderness forests in front of it. One day there will be nowhere left for the red man to go....Then men like Hawkeye will go, too. Like the Mohicans. New people will come. Work. Struggle. Make their light, and change the world."
The film now ends on a more anthropological note than before, ironically putting it closer to Cooper's vision (wherein he perceived the frontier as a sort of utopia destroyed by racial discord) than any previous adaptation--that I've seen, anyway. (For the record, the theatrical release runs 114 minutes, while the DEE clocks in at 116.) However, Mann's omission of Clannad's "I Will Find You," which once underscored a sequence of Hawkeye tracking captured Cora to ethereal effect (heck, it echoed the exchange these lovers had just moments before), is wrongheaded: the song was a welcome breather from eighteenth-century artifice. In its place, find loud footsteps and more of the Trevor Jones/Randy Edelman score.
The disc contains an exceptional, 2.35:1 letterboxed, THX-/Michael Mann-approved transfer (a disclaimer inside the package warns us that for this definitive edition "certain shots had to be lengthened, resulting in a momentary jump in the image"). Though not enhanced for 16x9 televisions, the DVD improves upon the LaserDisc, at least in terms of picture quality: we get brighter colours, increased definition (I have renewed respect for the meticulous costumes), and black level with jaw-dropping range. A blue-toned midnight stakeout lacks shadow detail, but otherwise, no complaints--The Last of the Mohicans is among a handful of superior-looking non-anamorphic discs.
The DD 5.1 audio gives your system a good workout: for one thing, the LFE channel produces avalanche-style bass. The sound design team won the film's lone Oscar, and while their work is slightly better showcased on the ear-splitting DD Laserdisc of three years back (perhaps Mann's re-edit forced changes to the six-track master that could not be smoothed over easily enough.), music and sound effects have thunder. The mix as a whole could be louder, but if you've never heard The Last of the Mohicans in surround before, you won't be disappointed. (Note: the French Dolby Surround also housed on this DVD contains subtitles where footage has been added.)
I wish that Mann had given DVD owners the option of viewing the theatrical cut as well (easily achieved via the seamless branching technology). Regardless, his choosing to debut "Mohicans '99" on DVD marks a special occasion--it means the format has officially defeated LD in a turf war for completists.-Bill Chambers
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author. |
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DVD GRADES:
Image A
Sound A |
DVD VITALS:
Running Time
116 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.35:1 ONLY
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround,
French Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Fox
Buy THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS poster at Moviegoods (click on image)
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD
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Published: February, 2000
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