Windtalkers

Mon Jun 17 15:15:24 UTC 2002

I have a question for people who know Navajo: how authentic is the usage
by the various actors playing the roles of Navajo code-talkers
(windtalkers) in this recently-released movie?  Beyond that, how authentic
was the depiction of the training of code-talkers?

I was extremely disappointed that this movie didn't show the process of
development of the code, the role of the Navajos themselves in the
development and training, and other interesting sociolinguistic issues.
What this movie showed was white folks doing the training, with a
classroom situation that looked really inauthentic, either for language
learning, code training, or whatever.  There was also a lot more focus on
Nicholas Cage and his various heroics than on the role of the language.
(For people who haven't seen this movie and intend to, be forewarned that
there is an immense amount of combat footage, carnage, death, destruction,
an unbelievable decibel level of explosion sounds, and about two minutes
of actual Navajo language use.)

Thanks,

Hal Schiffman

<title> Windtalkers </title>

Nytimes,  June 14, 2002
<center><h2>
Of Duty, Friendship and a Navajo Dilemma
</h2>
By ELVIS MITCHELL
</centr>

In "Windtalkers," the director John Woo is meticulous in melding his own
intimate style into the cliches of a large-scale war movie, paying homage
to all the tired conventions of the genre. But it's an honor that these
cliches don't deserve. We expect more from this director, who has almost
single-handedly saved the action movie from exhaustion by grafting the
yearning heartbeat of classic musicals to the leathery skin of wanton
gunplay.

Driving the plot is the tension between Sgt. Joe Enders (Nicholas Cage)
and Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), a young marine who along with other Navajos
is being trained to transmit information from the battle front, because
their native language is a code that cannot be broken by the Japanese.
They're called codetalkers or windtalkers.

Ben's training supplies the picture with one of its few departures from
the worn collection of such chestnuts as the eager young marine's tearful
departure from his wife and infant son as he's shipped off to camp.

Mr. Cage plays the hoary role of the grizzled sergeant assigned to
shepherd a novice through the crucible of battle. He appears in a prologue
that's pure Woo: a butterfly floating above a still pond that becomes
murky as a streak of blood is introduced to it. Here Joe is fighting in
the campaign against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. He is caught in
a battle that takes the lives of all his men. As the lone survivor, he
uncorks a soul-scream before he is nearly killed himself. With the aid of
a sympathetic nurse (Frances O'Connor), Joe tricks the Marine doctors-- he
had inner ear damage--so he can return to combat.

By now Mr. Woo's martial lyricism has itself become a cliché. His
particular brand of action filmmaking has been so thoroughly appropriated
by other directors--the interiors of movies including "Black Hawk Down"
and "We Were Soldiers"--were selected from pages of the John Woo scrapbook
that he seems like an imitator for simply indulging in the heightened
violence that was once his sole province.

Mr. Woo has always taken the requisites of action filmmaking seriously:
his standoff with two men jamming guns into each other's temples was a way
of taking slow-motion carnage as close to the principals as possible and
putting the audience right in the middle of it. He offers such a scene
here, with Ben and a Japanese soldier aiming rifles a centimeter from each
other's foreheads.

Because "Windtalkers" is about contradictions--including the one that
marines charged with protecting the codetalkers were also ordered to kill
them rather than let them be captured, to protect the code--the movie
seems to be pitched to the director's strengths. Mr. Woo's lyrical guy's
guy pictures have been about the conflict between friendship and duty as
well as about men unable to get through to each other.

Recognizing what duty may force him to do, Joe doesn't want to become
friendly with Ben and warns another marine, Ox (Christian Slater), not to
pal around with Ben's fellow Navajo codetalker Charlie Whitehorse (Roger
Willie). And there's the house bigot, the low-wattage Chick (Noah
Emmerich), whose taunt is that the Navajos look just like the Japanese.
"Windtalkers" has its own Navajo problem because it gives short shrift to
the real dilemma: imagine becoming an elite marine during World War II
only to be baby-sat.

"Windtalkers" invents an angle kill--the Navajos if necessary to prevent
their capture, an act not known to have happened--and ignores the more
compelling truth, that the Navajos are prevented from being front-line
troops in the same war in which a Native American helped raised the flag
at Okinawa. How do you prove you're a patriot if you're treated like a
second-class citizen?

Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to
see "Windtalkers" evade pertinent facts that could have recast the
doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to
contemporary times. The director is choosing to walk away from his
long-standing interest in duty versus loyalty as a dramatic motif, one
that has made him a nonpareil action director instead of just an
accomplished stunt coordinator.

If "Windtalkers," which opens nationwide today, often succumbs to the
standard "Greatest Generation" plot elements that have tainted World War
II films since "Saving Private Ryan," Mr. Woo shows he's easily Steven
Spielberg's equal at large-action sequences. He shifts from his specialty
of staging shootouts in enclosed spaces--something he choreographs with
the confidence of a Bob Fosse--to recreating key battles in the Pacific
campaign. He shatters the quiet with thunderous assaults and gives us a
grunt's-eye view of soldiers handling the smoldering just-fired shells
ejected from the cannons.

One riveting moment comes when Joe's unit, behind the lines, is hit by
misdirected American fire. In these scenes Mr. Woo displays an ability to
startle without resorting to the bad-taste horror-movie shock employed in
"Private Ryan." His fastidiousness keeps the action clear and easy to
follow, even during the momentary confusion of Joe's men trying to evade
the misdirected American fire. Some of Mr. Woo's attempts to wrest
"Windtalkers" away from the obvious are just plain bizarre: the
Swedish-born actor Peter Stormare, playing the gunnery sergeant Hjelmstad,
often sounds like a windtalker in need of translation himself. As he
bellows out orders, it's hard to tell exactly what he's saying.

Other speech patterns work far better. Mr. Beach's Great Plains drawl
balances sweetly against Mr. Cage's Bay Area drawl. Mr. Beach's quick
smile and likability has to do a lot for the film, as Mr. Cage is limited
to heavy-lidded suffering with a been-haunted-by-a-million-screams sorrow.
Mr. Cage lets a welt of purplish scar tissue covering his jawbone do his
acting for him; he's become so minimalist as an action star that he may
not even appear in his next film. The most notable thing about his work
here is that he doesn't flinch or blink when loosing machine-gun fire at
the enemy; he's developed calluses on his eyelids from pulling the trigger
so often in past action films.

Mr. Cage's presence is such that we still want more from him. One of the
last watchable performances he gave was in "Face/Off," his first film with
Mr. Woo. The actor is not banking his fires here; he's dousing them. We
can only view "Windtalkers" with the same shaken detachment that
characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real
story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been
given its true dramatic import.

"Windtalkers" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult
guardian) for strong language and blazing, unforgettably rendered
battlefield violence.

WINDTALKERS

Directed by John Woo; written (in English and Navajo, with English
subtitles) by John Rice and Joe Batteer; director of photography, Jeffrey
Kimball; edited by Steven Kemper, Jeff Gullo and Tom Rolf; music by James
Horner; production designer, Holger Gross; produced by Mr. Woo, Terence
Chang, Tracie Graham and Alison Rosenzweig; released by
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures. Running time: 134 minutes. This film is
rated R.

WITH: Nicolas Cage (Joe Enders), Adam Beach (Ben Yahzee), Peter Stormare
(Hjelmstad), Noah Emmerich (Chick), Mark Ruffalo (Pappas), Brian Van Holt
(Harrigan), Martin Henderson (Nellie), Roger Willie (Charlie Whitehorse),
Frances O'Connor (Rita) and Christian Slater (Ox Henderson).