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In which Michael Mann assumes the mantle of his namesake predecessor, The Last Frontier is the fitting model of composition. (Vidor's Northwest Passage and Boetticher's Seminole are equally vital to the form.) New York during the French and Indian War, settlers and natives and civilization and wilderness and Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) the Leatherstocking who "would know both worlds." The maiden (Madeleine Stowe) rejects the proposal of the Redcoat major (Steven Waddington), stands up to the military patriarch (Maurice Roëves), protects her sister (Jodhi May) in the middle of a skirmish—plenty of steel behind her lace. Fate of the colonies, romance in the besieged garrison. "It is more stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been." A thorough winnowing of James Fenimore Cooper's turgid prose for rapturous movement and emotion, something of a Zen Tarzan opera and pure Mann from beginning to end. Night illuminated by cannon sparks, the rigamarole of gallantry between European invaders through the eyes of indigenous braves. A truce has little meaning to Magua (Wes Studi), whose vengeful fury will not be denied: "Magua took the hatchet to color with blood. It's still bright. Only when it's red, then it will be buried." The quickening pulse in a clearing moments before an ambush, the deliverance of a bullet in a pyre, burnished light for nascent myths. An eye closer to Maxfield Parrish than to Thomas Doughty, a full-bodied expressionism that turns a waterfall into a curtain of roaring foam for lovers. "The whole world's on fire, isn't it?" A sublime crescendo on the edge of the precipice, the righteous gunstock war club of Chingachgook (Russell Means) giving way to the awareness of impermanence. "Once, we were here." Malick in The New World has his own elemental vastness to sort through. Cinematography by Dante Spinotti. With Eric Schweig, Patrice Chéreau, Edward Blatchford, Terry Kinney, Tracey Ellis, Dennis Banks, Pete Postlethwaite, and Colm Meaney.
--- Fernando F. Croce |