Word: coopered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story, in brief, is this: Natty Bumppo and his two Mohican companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, help an English officer, Duncan, escort two young maidens through the wilderness during the French and Indian War. In the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, romance blossoms between the officer and the younger woman, and between Uncas and the elder. To avoid shocking his readers with miscegenation, Cooper gave the elder just the tiniest trace of Black blood. This racist attitude so shocked our modern screenwriters that they decided to make make Natty the romantic lead instead of Uncas. So the central romance...
...Cooper's Natty was in his forties and very low-key; he liked to hang out with Indians and shoot a deer now and then. Not very marketable. The new-style Natty Bumppo (Daniel Day-Lewis) has had so many heroic stereotypes packed into him that he seems nearly schizophrenic. New Natty is young and hot-blooded; he makes speeches about independence from England (at a time when dupes like George Washington were still supporting the Crown), schmoozes with settlers and isn't averse to clasping a woman in his arms and breathing heavy. Day-Lewis alternates between agitation...
...part. But she's saddled with horrible lines. America, she tells Natty, "is more deeply stirring in my blood than any imagining could possibly have been." This, right after she's seen her entire retinue slaughtered by marauding Hurons. "The whole world's on fire," she tells him later. Cooper was a notoriously bad writer of dialogue, but even he couldn't have written stuff this awful. "I will find you!" Natty assures Cora, "No mater how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you!" Really, now. Maybe Uncas was lucky to get written...
...BOTTOM LINE: The saga of James Fenimore Cooper's heroic Hawkeye is retold on a grand scale...
...dastardliness, the dignity of his otherness and even allowed a nanosecond of pity for one of his victims. Above all Mann has seen to it that something spooky, suspenseful or just plain action packed happens every five minutes. In the process he has eliminated the last traces of Cooper's high-viscosity prose and sentiments...