Word: algren
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When we meet Tom Cruise's Captain Nathan Algren in 1876, he's a wreck, drinking heavily to drown his memories of massacring Indians on the American frontier, lost in despairing cynicism. Then he's recruited to help train a modern army in Japan, the chief function of which is to put down a samurai rebellion against the new, dishonorable, Westernizing ways that his army symbolizes. In the first, brilliantly staged fight, Algren is captured by the samurai and sequestered for a long winter in their remote village, where there's nothing much to do but learn the harsh...
...particular instructor is Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the samurai leader, who recognizes in Algren something of the warrior stuff. The American is not afraid of death. What has to be burned out of him is the desire to seek it. This gradually happens, and Algren and the widow of a man he killed (the Japanese model turned actress Koyuki) fall shyly into unspoken love...
What makes this film riskier than Braveheart or Gladiator, each of which did well commercially by anachronistically having its heroes fight and die for a form of modern democracy, is that Nathan Algren is battling for something that is somehow more personal and more abstract: a highly individual concept of honor. In the context of this very beautiful film, it is a struggle worth attending. --By Richard Schickel