The Last Of The Mohicans

From the protracted opening scene with a long-haired Daniel Day Lewis fetchingly sprinting through lush woodland in rustic garb one’s heart sinks. When it resolves with "Hawkeye" DDL drawing a bead on and shooting a large deer with his rifle it pretty much stops with a clunk and doesn't really get going again. The DDL cross-country sprint is Mann's signifier of living at-one-with nature in precivilized pantheism harmony etc.etc. and he essentially repeats the same scene over and over again in various permutations as DDl and his two companions run now here to fight blood-thirsty savages, now there to save his feisty love interest (Madeleine Stowe).Although it’s Michael Mann the film is deadly boring and at times, particularly, when it slows down for its romantic interludes, it 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 to date and since.  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 Irish accent is impossible to accept.

With these insurmountable misjudgements, as a historical adventure romance, Mann’s film is pretty fails to convince on every level 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. The relentlessly histrionic under-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 but somehow ended up with something more akin to Hugh Hudson 's Revolution. (1985). I haven’t seen the 1936 Randolph Scott version which presumably impressed him but on the basis of this, he should have left well-enough alone.

 

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