The Twilight Samurai

If it's one thing I enjoy in movies, judging from the past few movies I've seen, it's stripped-down stories contradicting heroic generalities.

I reviewed Dirty Harry and said it was about how being a cop isn't all it's cracked up to be, and how you can't always be a hero.

In The Twilight Samurai, we see a man both satisfied and dissatisfied with his own position, and how unwilling he is to be a warrior.

This movie is about a very low-level samurai near the end of feudal Japan whose wife has been killed by a disease they call "consumption," or tuberculosis. So he's left to care for his two young daughters and his aging, senile mother. So when it's time to come home from work, it's all making dinner and tending to his garden. Oftentimes, he doesn't even have time to bathe himself.

The woman he married was in a station above his own, and she always wanted him to try to rise in his station, seeking to quell her family's disgust. So when she eventually died, she requested a funeral way more expensive than he could afford, leaving him in drastic debt. However, he's made peace with his own way of life, and he truly loves his daughters. He's made them do book learning, something women were not normally even allowed to do, in favor of learning just enough to make a proper home. He doesn't even seem to care that his co-workers call him "Twilight" because he never wants to go out drinking and he never seems happy at all.

Upon visiting a friend of his, he learns that a childhood friend of his, a girl named Tomoe, has been divorced from her husband, a high-ranking samurai, because he habitually got drunk and beat her. A divorce was also controversial, and getting one required direct permission from the lordship. He inadvertently gets in the middle when the ex-husband comes around, and challenges him to a duel.

I won't tell you how the duel goes down - it's one of the more exciting scenes in the movie. But our hero fares well.

Eventually, he gets called upon to kill a renegade general who refuses to commit suicide upon orders from high above. Only, Twilight doesn't want to. He's not a killer, and he's been considering giving up the sword to become a farmer. But he's a samurai, and he has to obey orders.

Twilight's character represents the general feeling towards samurai near the end of the 19th century - who needs them anymore? There isn't a whole lot to fight for - every time a leader dies, there's a political war that causes former allies to fight against one another. It's a shit life.

The story and acting, all great, put aside, another thing to take note of is the period recreation. Everything looks beautiful and genuine. There are a lot of earthy tones and a lot of shots of open fields. I've seen a bunch of period pieces, and one of the main differences between the good and the bad is how much effort is put into generating every detail relevant to that period.

Likewise, there are a lot of good medieval movies - but put in a rock and roll soundtrack, and the entire movie gets turned to complete crap (see: the unbelievably god-awful A Knight's Tale).

This one is a great twist on the familiar samurai genre flick. This is a thinking man's samurai. Definitely rent it. Or borrow it from your local library, like I did.