The Twilight Samurai

AS THE HERO OF The Twilight Samurai, Hiroyuki Sanada has a quiet decency that sneaks up on you. He plays Seibei Iguchi, a widowed father in 19th-century Japan who once trained at a legendary dojo, but now downplays his fighting ability and lives a quiet life as an accountant. He takes seriously all the things in life that matter, including the care of his two children, his senile mom and his mom's brother, a brusque and sometimes cruel old man. Though Seibei doesn't discuss such things, he is still grieving over his wife's death. He keeps to himself, avoiding social gatherings and small talk. He dresses badly and smells worse. He seems withdrawn, cautious—not a shell of a man, but a man who lives in a shell.

Of course Seibei will be pushed to violence. What would be the point of a movie called The Twilight Samurai if the hero never drew his sword? But what makes the film so fascinating (and for impatient action fans, vexing) is the context in which the violence occurs. Maybe it's fair to say that action fans will be vexed by the fact that there's a context at all; most action fans hate context because it prevents them from enjoying violence without guilt. While there are some brutal sequences in The Twilight Samurai, they're not choreographed to the point of cartoon abstraction, like the violence in the Matrix or Kill Bill pictures. They're spontaneous, clumsy and grimly comical; in other words, real. Those characters involved in the violence don't exist solely to kill or be killed; they're complicated human beings whose existence appears to predate the film's opening credits. Seibei's town, which is built around an all-powerful but conflicted and unstable shogunate, is a full-fledged community in the way that the towns, forts and frontier outposts of John Ford pictures were full-fledged communities. The townspeople have families, jobs even, and the shogun's armed men aren't cartoon bad guys. They're just soldiers that interact with the town while remaining psychologically isolated from it. This is not one of those action movie fantasylands where people are killed in broad daylight and a day later nobody remembers that anything unusual happened. It is a real community in which all violence is a public act, whether people personally witness it or not.

If violence with consequences annoys you, there's no point in seeing this movie. Director-cowriter Yoji Yamada—the man responsible for the unfashionably sweet Charlie Chaplin-esque Tora-San pictures, about the adventures of a wandering peddler—is not interested in pandering to the modern action film crowd. Nominated for a 2004 Foreign Language Oscar, it's not a swordplay picture in the contemporary sense—i.e., a movie in which longhaired men in robes hang suspended in midair and hack away at each other while techno music throbs on the soundtrack. It's a samurai picture in the old- school, Kurosawa sense—a deliberate, even slow drama that just happens to be about a samurai.

The first violent scene is not a typical movie fight. Seibei has struck up a cordial, slightly nervous relationship with an old girlfriend, the divorced Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa, so beautiful she hurts your eyes), and he walks her home after a day of courtship. Tomoe's ex-husband, an alcoholic, bullying samurai, is waiting at her house; we can hear him inside, drunkenly intimidating Tomoe's relatives. The ex-husband isn't a mustache-twirling villain—he's just a drunk, but no less dangerous for being pathetic. When Seibei intervenes to stop the man from disrupting the home, what ensues is spontaneous and clumsy. I even felt vaguely embarrassed to be present.

The ex-husband challenges Tomoe's brother to a duel; Seibei, a trained fighter, knows he can win this challenge, so he volunteers to take the brother's place. The showdown takes place the following day, on a riverbank behind a temple. Taking his compositional cues from old masters of Japanese cinema, Yamada puts the camera far back whenever possible, framing his performers from head to waist or from head to toe. When they move out of camera range—into another room or behind a tree or building—he sometimes chooses not to follow them and instead stays put, making you listen and guess what might be happening. This is not Kill Bill, with its spectacular camera gyrations, geysers of blood and close-ups of a bare foot squishing an eyeball. During the fight on the riverbank, Yamada films the bulk of the action in a series of medium-long shots, and stages it to feel absurd and awkward. There is no music. During the buildup to the violence, we hear birds chirping and river water rushing past. When the violence starts, the birds stop chirping, but they resume the minute it's over. Afterward, one of the participants is in such a hurry to get out of there that he forgets his own shoes.

Yamada's strategy produces two results. First, it makes you aware not just of the combatants, but the reaction of people watching them and the environment around them, including the natural world. Second, it makes the violence seem more disruptive and its perpetrators unheroic, at times nearly comical. One gets the sense that contrary to so much Japanese and American cinema—much of cinema, period—The Twilight Samurai sees violence as inevitable but rarely necessary, sometimes righteous but almost never heroic. (Perhaps this is why Seibei doesn't trumpet his physical skills to the world.)

There's a longstanding cultural kinship between the samurai movie and the American western, which might explain why it's so easy to imagine The Twilight Samurai being remade as a western. In some ways, it already feels like a remake of an American western—not a guns a'blazing western aimed at boys of all ages, but one of those small, elegiac pictures that appeared now and again during the 60s and 70s. I'm thinking of movies like Monte Walsh, Will Penny, The Hired Hand and John Wayne's valedictory movie, The Shootist—psychological dramas in period dress that preferred silence to violence. Yamada's non-glorifying attitude toward bloodshed reminded me of those movies. It also reminded me of one of my favorite images in all of movies, from the scene at the end of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven where a fugitive is shot dead by a posse of lawmen, falls in a river and floats downstream. On the riverbank, a well-dressed family watches the corpse pass by, curious but far from horrified. The implication is clear: For our heroes, this was a devastating, life-altering event, but for that family on the riverbank, it was just a strange sight to tell one's friends about. The Malick connection is further strengthened by the film's distancing narration, which is spoken by one of the hero's now-adult daughters. Throughout, she sees her father not as a hero or even a violent man, merely as a modest, mysterious person who was important to her and whom she wishes she could understand better.

"My father had no desire to rise in the world," she tells us, "and I don't think he considered himself unlucky."

LIFE OF BRIAN Monty Python's Life of Brian, about a man born in the stable next door to Jesus who becomes a reluctant messiah, returns for a theatrical engagement at Landmark's Sunshine Theater, in time to cash in on the furor over The Passion of the Christ. (Coincidence?) The movie's scatalogically rude and politically astute satire has dated, unfortunately. This is no reflection on the movie, which is still funny—just the fact that no group of moviemakers has the cojones to make genuinely dangerous comedy these days. The late, great Graham Chapman stars as the title character, who establishes his radical bona fides by writing ROMAN ITE DOMUN ("Romans Go Home") on a wall, and becomes de facto figurehead of a "revolutionary" group that mainly seems interested in griping. The movie's reputation as blasphemous always seemed unearned; the true targets of Brian are those ignorant human beings throughout history who would rather follow a leader, any leader, than think for themselves, and who mistake political opinions for actual convictions. In its silly way, it also reminds us that no matter how savage our world might seem, it's an improvement over the world of 2000 years ago.

"What will they do to me?" an imprisoned Brian asks a cellmate.

"Oh, you'll probably get away with crucifixion," the prisoner replies.

"Crucifixion?" Brian gasps.

"Yeah," the prisoner replies. 'First offense."