The Last Of The Mohicans

From the protracted opening scene of a long-haired Daniel Day-Lewis fetchingly sprinting through lush woodland in rustic garb one’s heart sinks. When it resolves with DD-L drawing a bead on and shooting a large deer with his rifle it pretty much stops with a clunk. It doesn’t get going again as Mann essentially repeats the same scene over and over again in various permutations as DD-L runs now here to fight blood-thirsty savages, now there to save his feisty love interest (Madeleine Stowe). It’s Michael Mann so the action staging is effective, albeit a lot  of it is set at night, presumably to help with issues of authenticity (you can't criticize what you can't see) but the film itself is deadly boring and at times, particularly when it slows down for its romantic interludes, borders on the ridiculous.

Based on James Fenimore Cooper’s iconic novel and more particularly, as the credits tell us, Philip Dunne's screenplay for the 1936 film version starring Randolph Scott, The Last Of The Mohicans is set during the war between Britain and France over the American Territories, a war in which the Indians took part, some on one side, some on the other.  Day-Lewis plays Hawkeye, the adopted son of Mohican scout, Chingachgook (Russell Means), who saves a couple of English beauties, Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe), and her younger sister, Alice (Jodhi May), from a Huron war party led by the treacherous Mugua (Wes Studi, the only actor in the film who performance impresses). This however only leads to greater danger as the British fort to which they are heading is being besieged by the French with assistance from the Huron.

Who thought it a good idea to cast Day-Lewis who hadn’t made a film since winning the Oscar for My Left Foot in 1989? And more importantly, why did the actor accept the part, one which being so incongruous with the rest of his exemplary work perhaps indicates how ill-suited it is to his deferential English manner?  Handsome Day-Lewis is but an old school screen lover and a modern action hero he is not. And despite a bit of expository dialogue his broad contemporary American accent is impossible to accept.

With those three insurmountable deficiencies, given that it is a historical adventure romance, Mann’s film is pretty much buried and we’re left with his hero either running around or getting in a clinch with the independent-minded Cora (the sort of woman, one is given to think, who would have been very scare in the mid-eighteenth century) who clearly has no problem with body odour where her dashing hero is concerned. Neither option is persuasive, even less so when portrayed to the accompaniment of a relentlessly histrionic score by Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones.

Clearly Mann was trying to pull off something like Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986) in the historical romance stakes. I haven’t seen the 1936 version which presumably impressed him but on the basis of this, he should have left well-enough alone.

 

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