‘The Last Of The Mohicans’ Is An Opera Of Testosterone And Michael Mann’s Best Film – Decider

The Last of the Mohicans is my favorite Michael Mann film. Its a testosterone opera of the first caliber, a sweeping melodrama, an adventure film full of expansive gestures and an action film that ends on a crescendo rather than a down note. Its a war film about three men passing through it just as they, as Native Americans, are passing through their own moment in history as a conquered people: betrayed, exterminated, relegated to patches of land in an expanse once thought to be unconquerable for its vastness.

Mann gets the vastness of America circa 1757: a land largely untrammeled by the ugliness of white Christian colonization (but its coming), and that doom is what suffuses every frame of this piece. When Mann is at his best, hes identifying how men cast themselves as the tragic, romantic heroes at the center of their operatic and pathological melodramas. Here, in a period of time already Romanticized as the headwaters for our rugged national character, we join James Fenimore Coopers an author whose florid writing was handily eviscerated by Mark Twains 1895 essay Fenimore Coopers Literary Offenses Leatherstockings in mid-hunt, sprinting through a verdant green in what fast becomes the signature narrative lubricant of the picture. In fairness to Cooper, he only ever wrote in epic where Twain, from a vantage in the postbellum South, was a harsh critic of any purple hagiography of the violence that men do.

Which is to say that for all the ways Manns The Last of the Mohicans deviates from Coopers The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, particularly in the elevation of minor character Hawkeye into key protagonist, what it gets absolutely right is the spirit in 1826, the year Cooper wrote his best-remembered novel, of Americans deep in the process of mythologizing the birth of their nation as one in which brave and resourceful men forged a civilization from uncivil clay. Even in todays gilded halls, American men made bloated by salt and grift, speaking in elevated language in the commission of impotent and embarrassing ritualized tradition, still imagine themselves outlaws and protectors of the right to bear arms against imaginary foreign threats (but, in reality, many of these threats are domestic in origin).

In truth, our leaders are now closer in mien to the stuffy Redcoats this film depicts as woefully unprepared for the hardships and guerilla warfare of the New World. Early, as heroes Hawkeye (Daniel Day Lewis), Uncas (Eric Scweig) and Chingachgook (Russell Means) rescue Maj. Duncan Heyward (Steven Waddington) and his two charges Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), Hawkeye prevents Duncan from murdering one of the good guys by disarming him easily and observes that Duncans aim isnt better than your judgment. Hawkeye is a Man, you see, Duncan is a powdered wig and a collection of antiquated rules of engagement. Real Americans are Hawkeye, you see, the brother of Uncas and son of Cingachgook. We continue to LARP this idea of ourselves with outfits purchased from a place called Amazon and weapons procured from Bass Pro-Shop. I aint no scout, Hawkeye says, and I sure aint no damn militia. Funny how modern-day weekend warriors cherrypick the bits they like the best.

How The Last of the Mohicans presents this dream of manhood is as attractive as it is demented. It is the basis of a 1776 Project championed by white supremacists desperate to suppress their cowardice behind a truly Orwellian reframing of history. It is an illusion of the masculine self and, aside from Walter Hill who is the master of this subgenre of masculine opera there is no other living director as good at the romanticization of Man than Mann. We are a country that valorizes the outlaw and the rebel: and Manns Hawkeye is more Daniel Boone bearing witness to the tragic, what was in 1826 believed to be the looming total eradication of Native Americans, without also reckoning with the fact that should this genocide be completed, it would have been completed at the hands of, and for the profit of, the very people now conferring them with supernatural poetry and nobility. The film takes place during a brief period of the Seven Years Wars northern front; a battle between the British and the French waged across the American colonies with both sides allied with Native American tribes. The story is a simple one: after an ambush eradicates Maj. Duncans garrison, its up to three real Americans to escort two ladies fair across the unforgiving landscape first to their father Colonel Edmund Munro (Maurice Roeves) under siege, and then to rescue them from a vengeful Huron leader Magua (Wes Studi) holding a grudge against Munro. I dont know if I can express to you how good this movie is: its a Douglas Sirk war movie about the American frontier.

I think The Last of the Mohicans is good because of how uncomplicatedly problematic it is, and not in spite of it. It is the quintessential myth of the American self and as fine an example of how men, especially arrested men, answer exclusively to the call of their epic, and imagined, tales of valor and chivalry. At heart, American men are all Don Quixote: but the vicious version of him, deadly when threatened with the puncturing of their burnished self-image. Manns film, particularly through the creation of Magua, one of the screens great villains, understands the polarized violence of mans desire on the one hand to be celebrated as the hero; and the jagged peril on the other of ever disabusing him of that notion. Maguas pursuit of vengeance is a force of nature, the rage of the conquered made manifest in this body of pyrrhic motion.

The Last of the Mohicans is good because of how uncomplicatedly problematic it is, and not in spite of it.

Theres so much motion in The Last of the Mohicans it never sits still, Dante Spinottis camera is restless, liquid, and its Real Men slide through it like bayonets through English flesh. Hawkeye is the champion of women and the common man. His enemy isnt Magua (who, after all, has good reasons for his fury), but rather all the other white men in the picture who he sees, accurately, as only ever pretending to be Men. The real struggle of the film is between how men wish they were versus how men suspect they really are. Uncas falls in love with Alice but the suggestion of interracial love is punished by the murder of the one and the suicide of the other. Again, the film is spectacular because it tells the flat truth about the society that we have built as shaved apes pretending at order the better to disguise the whims of our lizard brains. I dont think were going to make it. The Last of the Mohicans is sure we wont.

The last twelve minutes of the The Last of the Mohicans are the single best twelve American minutes of film in the last thirty years. Set to Clannads interpretation of the Celtic Gael, it follows Duncans first and last act of true romantic masculinity and then the desperate pursuit of Maguas hunting party by Hawkeye, Uncas and Chingachgook up the side of a mountain and off the side of a vertiginous outcrop. It is the best of Mann, it goes without saying, a sequence that he has approached most notably in the failed heist at the climax of Heat and, for my money, in the opening theatrical version of the nightclub sequence in Miami Vice but never surpassed. Its so good because in a way his other films dont quite manage, it provides equal stakes for both the male protagonists and one woman, Cora. Madeline Stowe plays her as complex, fully-fleshed; a protector, in her own right, of her helpless sister and, at one point, occupying the position of would-be savior over her briefly-imprisoned lover. Mann is not good at women as much more than the emotional catalyzing agents for his men; Cora is the notable exception.

Both sides of the chase, then, hold drama: the obvious pursuit elements, but the less obvious moments where Cora demonstrates courage for the benefit of Alice, resilience for herself, and defiance towards her captors. Shes more than an object and because of that the stakes of this pursuit are doubled, and the reward, because its the reunion of two white people and not in spite of it, is as bittersweet for it as it is earned. Chingachgook declares himself the last of this tribe after a brutal engagement that has seen Native Americans slaughtering each other as the final solution of the white colonizers. Whats left is just this idea, written in blood on this haunted dirt, of what it means to die well for the right cause. This misguided perception of our value is the root of all of our problems in this broken country. The Last of the Mohicans is a devastating map of our self-destruction. Its extraordinary.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

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'The Last Of The Mohicans' Is An Opera Of Testosterone And Michael Mann's Best Film - Decider