I don’t hate Akira Kurosawa, but after seeing his 1985 Ran, I’m beginning to see how it can be done. This film is so awfully earnest, overwritten and, are my fingers actually typing this, pretentious that I fantasize about a viewer who lets out a brayish laugh at every overacted dead-in-the-water scene. I didn’t laugh once during Ran. Somehow the damn film involved me just enough that I was unable to look upon it with total condescension. The fact that it is somber instead of genuinely goofy also makes it difficult. But this is a film that somebody really needs to laugh at. I keep wishing that I could find some sort of organization, maybe “Kurosawa Haters Anonymous” where I could attend meetings and hear testimonials. Not as much so I could join as much as so I could more fully develop my feelings towards his work. Kurosawa is regarded again and again with utter reverence. People are enveloped into the ideals presented in his work. They take them all seriously. I have heard the film called poetry, and so it is. That is not a value judgment, however, as much as a description. Bad poetry is not an oxymoron, and Ran is, well, bad poetry. I could write this review in iambic pentameter and that would not change the fact that it too is overwritten and overlong.

The film is based on or inspired by William Shakespeare’s King Lear. I’ll admit my ignorance; I have never read or seen King Lear. If reading or seeing King Lear, if understanding the play is necessary to appreciating the film, then I am a philistine and Akira Kurosawa has gone over my head. From what I have read from other reviews, it’s not as much an approach toward Lear as an approach to the themes in Lear. The film is about an old lord who announces one day after hunting that he will retire and divide his kingdom up among his three sons. One objects, saying that no good can come from what his father is doing. The lord banishes him. Sure enough, the sons betray him, warring with one another for a bigger piece. They feel that their old man is a nuisance, and they banish him from their kingdom. Akira Kurosawa was 75 when he made Ran, and it's difficult not to think that it's autobiographical. In the ‘70s, Kurosawa had great difficulty obtaining funding in Japan, as he was considered "too Western" and had turned in a financial failure with his Dodesukaden. His mental health was also failing, and so he slit his wrists. He survived his suicide attempt and made a big come back in the ‘80s with Kagemusha, which was financed by Kurosawa fanatics George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and this movie was co-financed through the French producer Serge Silberman. You see this in the movie. The old lord goes insane in depression throughout the film, and at one point contemplates suicide, to the indifference of his sons. He makes peace with his banished son, and he still has many loyal soldiers. He appreciates this. Kurosawa always seems to have had a reputation for being a bit of a hardass. He was fired from or quit the production of Tora! Tora! Tora! due to arguments with the studio. They disliked his perfectionism. He disliked the fact that his co-director was Richard Fliescher and not David Lean as he had originally thought. We hear that the emperor in Ran was extremely cruel. We never really see it, although we meet a man whose eyes he had taken, the brother of a daughter-in-law he had taken through war. I sometimes question whether this is a wise choice. Shortly before I watched Ran, I saw Walter Hill's mediocre Johnny Handsome. The title character in that was a career criminal that was deformed. The film kept telling us that he was bad to the core, but it had to tell us. Right until his heroically romantic death, Johnny Handsome was a highly sympathetic character in our eyes.

To its credit, Ran is more complex. The lord is constantly suffering and rather regretful about the life that he has lead. We can see that he probably has it in him to be a ruthless killer. He's very much used to the power that he wields, and has grown arrogant through it. You have little doubt that he has been able to live much of his life sleeping soundly at night, and only fairly recently has developed regret for his lifetime of misdeeds if he has at all. Kurosawa does not exactly humble his lord, but even more interestingly he refuses to let him triumph. The lord does kill one person with an arrow, but the murder has a certain degree of cowardice in it. He never is able to take a sword and slash somebody into pieces. There is a powerlessness to him that he is never able to conquer. Kurosawa was nearly blind when he made Ran. It seems that through the lord, he is acknowledging the anger that he had lived his life in, and the frustration stemming from his current lack of industry. He has become a pathetic old man. The lord is rejected by his sons the same way that Kurosawa was rejected by Japan. In portraying himself as a great lord whose has been stripped of his power and pride, you begin to hear a distinct sound in the background. It's the dank sound of Akira Kurosawa congratulating himself. You may also hear a somewhat louder noise in the background occasionally existing simultaneously with the previous sound. It's the dank sound of Akira Kurosawa feeling sorry for himself. If you ask me, either way you cut it, it's masturbation. (Roger Ebert sort of interprets the sons as American filmmakers who bought and remade Kurosawa's films. Jesus. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.) Because Kurosawa does not let his lord triumph, there seems to be something in the back of his head that will not allow Ran to be his own personal triumph and masterwork.

Too much of the film is theatrical instead of cinematic. The opening shots, of the lord parceling out his kingdom, were the biggest cause for worry. They look like Kurosawa shot them in his backyard. The film looks like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film shot today of actors in medieval costume. I quickly got into Aguirre (and for that matter Pasolini's later films), and feel that it is an aesthetically challenging film, maybe because that film is all effect and we had to acknowledge and emotionally deal with the low-budget style. That never happens in Ran. Every moment that I looked at the screen I was distracted. The film does not take you back in time. It's devoid of any the atmosphere and deep reality that you would expect from 1) the most expensive Japanese film ever made, 2) a film that was ten years in the making or 3) a film that was storyboarded with paintings. That's right, Akira Kurosawa painted every shot by hand. And yet the film is simply dead in the water. There is something icy and detached about it. He does not allow the score to be used very much in the film. Shots linger in medium or long shot, shouts and screams simply die in the air. The characters are presented more or less without comment. I read a review of the film by John Beachem of Culturedose.com who praises Kurosawa for not telling us what we should think. Well, yes, I don't like it when Tom Shadyac or Joel Schumacher make films either. Chris Columbus and Michael Bay aren't exactly off my shitlist either. But what Kurosawa does in these scenes is not filmmaking. The cinema is about moods and emotional effects. The moods and emotional effects in the work of the hacks I have listed are simplistic and in some cases repulsive, but they are alive. This isn't minimalism. It goes beyond minimalism and becomes nil.

What is frustrating is that there is one sequence, in addition to an image or two, where Kurosawa DOES do some filmmaking, and it's probably some of the best stuff I have ever seen. A raid on a castle is presented with absolutely no sound. The only thing we hear is Toru Takemitsu's haunting score, creating a smoothly calming ballet of violence. Soldiers struggle to stop their bleeding while the camera dances into the castle where the concubines help each other die. Flights of burning arrows fly through the sky like lasers as the carcasses of the fallen lie in bright red puddles of blood. It's both moving and horrifying, Saving Private Ryan's storming of the beach done with a calculated grace. Kurosawa proves himself the master here. You actually wake up when you see this. But then you wonder why the rest of the film wasn't more like this. It doesn't make me feel more forgiving towards the film, only more frustrated. Kurosawa himself has said of the film that it is looking down on these people from heaven. The coldness is then intended. However if we accept this viewpoint, as I feel forced to do, then it is not at all consistent for us to feel anything towards the emperor or anyone else in the movie. The film is at its most comfortable when it is looking at armies, and at its least comfortable when it's looking at individuals. There is nihilism, a frustration, in the lord that is consistent with the film's style, but is nonetheless impenetrable. People cannot be a type and individuals at the same time. That's a logical impossibility. The reason that Aguirre, the Wrath of God worked is because we really didn't give a damn about anybody in the movie. It didn't ask for our sympathies and it didn't get it. Part of Ran wants to be tragic, but it doesn't work. The static direction suggests that it is post-tragedy. For this film, I think that tragedy is what it calls for. Hey, I'm all for the view that life is meaningless in this indifferent universe and we shouldn't bother to pray to the Buddha, because he is frankly not listening. But you have to find a way to reconcile this with the characters. Either you distance us from sympathy with the characters or vicariously draw us into the existential horror of the concept, you know like a Bergman film. Ran doesn't seem to do either.

In its own way, the battle sequence that I mentioned is highly manipulative. The reason that it works is because we are able to experience the mindset of the lord. He is surrounded by suffering and tragedy. The more that he wants to wish it away, the more that it is rubbed in his face. With all of the heavy plotting of the politics in the film, it really fails or maybe even refuses to get into our face. Kurosawa casts the transvestite pop star Peter as the lord's jester. Peter has been in very few films. Before he was in Ran he had a part in The Fruits of Passion, what looks like a sex film that bears a bit of a resemblance to the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. After Ran, he starred as the lead in a Guinea Pig film. The problem is not that the presence of Peter is distracting; it's that he seems to be wasted. He doesn't bring any of the sleazy absurdity that you would expect to the film. The sex in Ran is generally a problem. One of the brothers is seduced by his sister-in-law, helping to facilitate the war. We never see any nudity and there isn't any eroticism. The sex is downplayed; it's there only to advance the plot. The problem with this is that Kurosawa is trying to show that this war is being motivated by a base animal needs, like lust, greed, or et cetera. But he talks about it more than he shows it. He makes the film so dead that there he is unable to allow for passion.

The theatrical elements are exploited particularly well in three instances. The first is of the lord's makeup near the end of the film. He is in whiteface, made to look pale and chalky, like death has finally taken over his body. I am sure that there is a practical explanation for why he looks this way, but the impractical explanation is far more intriguing. Kurosawa's visualization of blood flowing is often interesting. When the lord kills one man with an arrow, his blood flows out of him like a red silk scarf, like a dying puppet. The subtleness of the effect is memorable and affecting. The best effect is when one soldier kills a major character. We don't see the blow. The camera pans up and we just see a splash of blood splatter on the wall. There is something mechanical about that splatter. It reminds me of the killings in the Playstation 2 video game Onimushu 2. I never played any of these Playstation 2 games before, but when you kill somebody in the game you more or less do it the same way. You are also able to feel the controller vibrate when you make a hit. The blood splatters, but after twenty or thirty killings the violence obtains a sort of tempo and rhythm. Onimushu 2 is not about real life violence but about video game violence. There is something reassuring about the feeling of the kill. You can tap your toe in time with the sound of the splatter. This single scene is able to say more about war than most films made entirely about the subject. You wish that Kurosawa had been this audacious with the rest of the film's theatrical elements. The problem doesn't seem to be as much the approach that Kurosawa took as much as his lack of joy in filmmaking.

It is difficult to really criticize dialogue. What criteria should I be using when deciding whether or not a particular bit of dialogue is good or not? This particular line is the worst in the entire film, but is typical of the sort of things that people say in the picture: "The hen pecks the cock and makes him crow." I do not find this line to be poetic, likely, or at all very interesting. Kurosawa and his writers have their characters talk in these absurd metaphors and idioms. At its best the dialogue is functional. I say, "at its best" to suggest that often it is not even that. There are few quotable lines in the film. The Internet Movie Database provides this as one of their "memorable quotes": "Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies." That line gets funnier every time I read it. I know that it's supposed to be nihilistic and pessimistic, but come on. I had greater insights when I was thirteen. Seriously, isn't there anybody around here who laughs out loud when they read that? What pretension, what arrogance Kurosawa has in having his characters speak this nonsense! It seems that Kurosawa is aiming for some sort of faux-Shakespeare effect. William Shakespeare was probably an overwriter also. He gets away with it, because his dialogue was often interesting to listen to. It's all symptomatic to the tiresomely pious seriousness of the picture.

Kurosawa helped design all the costumes and they were all made by hand. Why is it then that the more I look at them, the more that they look like they are made of plastic? This complaint seems to be symptomatic of the extreme detachment that I felt towards the film’s content and the truly tragic misdirection of the film's resources. I went into Ran expecting to see my first of Akira Kurosawa's masterpieces. Obviously I was shocked at how much it came short. How could this be the most expensive Japanese movie ever made? How could it have been ten years in the making? You keep thinking that someone had to have gotten snowed. Ran is not a great work of art; that is understandable. What is not understandable is that it frequently is not even a great work of heavy labor. I think that Kurosawa has confused being a great filmmaker with being a great artist. He's like James Cameron. Hell, maybe even worse. I caught the tail end of Titanic last night, a film that I haven't seen in five years. It's just as stupid as ever, but I was taken back by the fact that just because Cameron thinks that he is the King of the World, he didn't use that as an excuse to cease to be a filmmaker. Whatever you say about Titanic, it wasn't dead. Not like this. Kurosawa has the goods. What the devil is he doing here? Kurosawa's best film is Rashomon. It was made in 1950, two years before Ikiru and four years before The Seven Samurai. It's a small film, half as long as Ran. It's the sort of film that you talk about with a date over coffee, or argue about over the Internet. It's not the sort of film like Kurosawa's later films that wants to make you pee your pants in awed reverence. Think about what a better film Ikiru would be if Kurosawa cut forty minutes out of it and made it a low-key work. Now, I realize that there are things that are highly undesirable about making small films. And I also realize that grand epic films make an important part of a filmgoing diet. Movies have been able to provoke transcendent experiences before, and I encourage them to keep on trying again. I am unable to hold it too hard against in being pretentious. Sometimes you see a film like Austin Powers: Goldmember and want to scream out loud for an artwork to find the ground again. But it is not working for Kurosawa. He seems to have been listening to his own press so much he has forgotten what made him great.

This is easily Akira Kurosawa's worst film to date. I don't want to have to write him off, but choosing which one of his films to see next is like drawing straws. I know that there is a masterpiece somewhere in here, but I think that I've come to the conclusion that it's not to be found in his later work. I think that I'll probably stick with his work in the forties and fifties for a while. Maybe even check out Yojimbo. I mean, there has to be more than this. There has to be.