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All Wind and No Substance, 24 November 2006
The word "windtalker" is not in my dictionary, but if you were to ask the man in the street he would no doubt think it meant something uncomplimentary, such as one who talks nonsense or talks too much. It refers, in fact, to a programme during the Second World War when the US armed forces made use of a secret spoken code based upon the Navajo language. The idea was that native Navajo speakers would be trained both as code-speakers and as radio operators so that they could broadcast battlefield messages that could not be understood by the enemy. Although the code is sometimes described as "unbreakable", many experts believe that it could have been broken by a skilled cryptographer who was also a fluent Navajo speaker, which explains why it was used only in the Pacific theatre of war. Comparative linguistics is something of a national sport in Germany and the Germans, unlike the Japanese, had plenty of linguists and anthropologists with knowledge of Native American languages.
The story of the code-speakers is a potentially fascinating one, although not perhaps one that could easily be told through the medium of film, unless it was a film made in Navajo for speakers of that language. "Windtalkers" revolves around the relationship between two men, the code-talker Private Ben Yahzee and Sergeant Joe Enders (an Italian-American despite his Scandinavian-sounding name) who has been assigned to him as his bodyguard. (Most of the action takes place during the American assault on the island of Saipan in June and July 1944). What Yahzee doesn't know is that Enders has been ordered to protect the code at all costs, which means that, if necessary, he will kill Yahzee to prevent him from falling into enemy hands.
"Windtalkers" uses the buddy-buddy format, a familiar plot device in both war films and other genres (such as cop dramas). In keeping with the normal conventions of this format, the two main characters have diametrically opposed characters. The rookie Yahzee is idealistic, polite and friendly, a happily-married family man. Enders is a cynical, hard-bitten, battle-scarred veteran. They start off disliking one another, but develop a mutual respect which turns to friendship. Eventually the two become so close that Enders realises that he will not be able to kill Yahzee if duty demands it.
The actual mechanics of the spoken code might have been difficult to convey in an English-language movie, but I was disappointed with "Windtalkers" because other potentially interesting themes were ignored or treated perfunctorily. The tone is notably patriotic, with the Navajo soldiers depicted as even more ardent American patriots than their white counterparts. (Significantly, Yahzee's young son is named George Washington Yahzee). The film does not explore the issue of what motivates the Navajo to fight for America, a country into which they were forcibly incorporated in the nineteenth century, whose watchword seemed to be "government of the white man, for the white man, by the white man" and which in the 1940s still treated American Indians as second-class citizens.
One theme that the film does treat is, of course, that of racism. Indeed, some critics such as James Berardinelli have criticised it for dealing with this theme in a too heavy-handed manner. We see the Navajo soldiers being abused by racist whites, and then saving the life of one of those who have abused them. War films, however, strike me as being a curious vehicle for propagating anti-racist views; war, after all, is about fighting people who belong to a nation other than one's own, and in this film the Japanese are simply presented as the enemy, to be slaughtered with a clear conscience. The message of an anti-racist war film seems to be that to abuse a man because of the colour of his skin is wrong, to kill him because of the colour of his passport is acceptable.
There are some occasional fine directorial touches, such as the scene where we see a butterfly above the surface of a stream, which then slowly turns red with blood as a corpse floats into view, juxtaposing the beauties of nature with the horrors of war. There are, however, also some remarkably silly scenes, such as the one where Yahzee poses as a Japanese soldier and Enders as his prisoner so that they can capture a radio-set from the enemy. Adam Beach might "look like a Jap" to a bigoted soldier who cannot tell one non-Caucasian race from another, but I doubt if the Japanese themselves would have been fooled.
Second World War movies were something of a rarity in the eighties and early nineties, but have made a modest comeback since the success of "Saving Private Ryan", and "Windtalkers" seems to have been modelled on the earlier film. The advance of special-effects technology means that it is now much easier to create realistic battle scenes, and John Woo follows Stephen Spielberg's lead with plenty of graphic scenes of carnage. The film, however, is less successful than "Saving Private Ryan"; that film had its faults, but the battle scenes had an immediacy and emotional impact much greater than anything in "Windtalkers". If Spielberg's film is a flawed epic, Woo's is little more than a standard wartime action movie. It is also, at about 2¼ hours in length, rather too long-winded, which gives an unfortunate sense to the title. 5/10.
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