The Twilight Samurai is a drab, unassuming movie, and that's what's good about it. One expects heroics with a movie that has "Samurai" in the title, lots of blood and throbbing hooves, Toshiro Mifune jumping up and down like Yosemite Sam, but Yoji Yamata is too subtle a thinker for that, he finds hypocrisy in the vaunted Samurai code, and questions the very meaning of heroism.
Less Kurosawa than Ozu, the film zeroes in on the mundane details of life in feudal Japan for a low-rent Samurai with two young daughters, a dead wife and a senile mother. This Samurai-as-schnook conception is good just for its novelty value, but there's more to Yamata's film. Twilight, a crack-swordsman-turned-storehouse-laborer, is sucked back into the Samurai life, the violent, hierarchical existence he tried to leave behind. He approaches heroic action with a tentativeness quite out-of-step with the myths of classic Samurai films. Yamata, looking behind the myth, reveals the practical necessities behind heroism - Twilight is just trying to make a life for himself despite his low standing and small income, and violence is his only path.
This is not quite the stuff of legend, unless it's the legend of how feudal Japan stumbled into the era of individualism. Yamata has a questioning nature, and so does his Twilight Samurai. Behind the Samurai code-of-honor Yamata, and Twilight, find hypocrisy - that a man of low rank should be forced into violent duty, into "heroism", despite the clan's indifference to his domestic struggles. For Twilight there's no way out except back in, yet his reluctance serves as an example, his questions, unanswered, point the way to post-feudal modernity.
Yamata has the gift of clarity without simplicity, the ability to get his point across without spelling things out, without resorting to symbolism or movie tricks. The theme is embodied by the character of Twilight, his struggle to live and his reluctance to engage in violence in the name of an out-moded, bankrupt code. If the movie were more emphatic it might be considered iconoclastic, the way it knocks out the under-pinnings of Samurai myth, but Yamata doesn't try to jack you up like that, he's more gentle sage than fiery revisionist. The film's elegiac tone may recall Unforgiven, but its means of expression are far subtler than those of Eastwood, who leans on violence while trying to repudiate it. It's an anti-violence film that really denounces killing, rather than unwittingly glorifying it.
Less Kurosawa than Ozu, the film zeroes in on the mundane details of life in feudal Japan for a low-rent Samurai with two young daughters, a dead wife and a senile mother. This Samurai-as-schnook conception is good just for its novelty value, but there's more to Yamata's film. Twilight, a crack-swordsman-turned-storehouse-laborer, is sucked back into the Samurai life, the violent, hierarchical existence he tried to leave behind. He approaches heroic action with a tentativeness quite out-of-step with the myths of classic Samurai films. Yamata, looking behind the myth, reveals the practical necessities behind heroism - Twilight is just trying to make a life for himself despite his low standing and small income, and violence is his only path.
This is not quite the stuff of legend, unless it's the legend of how feudal Japan stumbled into the era of individualism. Yamata has a questioning nature, and so does his Twilight Samurai. Behind the Samurai code-of-honor Yamata, and Twilight, find hypocrisy - that a man of low rank should be forced into violent duty, into "heroism", despite the clan's indifference to his domestic struggles. For Twilight there's no way out except back in, yet his reluctance serves as an example, his questions, unanswered, point the way to post-feudal modernity.
Yamata has the gift of clarity without simplicity, the ability to get his point across without spelling things out, without resorting to symbolism or movie tricks. The theme is embodied by the character of Twilight, his struggle to live and his reluctance to engage in violence in the name of an out-moded, bankrupt code. If the movie were more emphatic it might be considered iconoclastic, the way it knocks out the under-pinnings of Samurai myth, but Yamata doesn't try to jack you up like that, he's more gentle sage than fiery revisionist. The film's elegiac tone may recall Unforgiven, but its means of expression are far subtler than those of Eastwood, who leans on violence while trying to repudiate it. It's an anti-violence film that really denounces killing, rather than unwittingly glorifying it.