War and Peace (1956)

King Vidor's "War and Peace"

It can be said that the prevailing directing style of King Vidor is that of the 'epic.' With his epics, Vidor crafts mechanisms of storytelling that place characters in a world of vast scale or scope. The grandness of scope is used by Vidor to elevate the more intimate aspects of the story. With his adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's dense 1869 novel War and Peace, Vidor executes his mastery over the cinematic language of the epic. 

The story takes place during the early 1800s in a time of war in Russia. Napoleon's forces control much of Europe. Russia takes necessary preparations to defend their homeland against the French invader. The protagonist of the film, Count Pierre Bezkhov, is not interesting in joining the army as he views himself an as intellectual and pacifist. He watches as his dear friend Prince Andrei Bolkonsky leaves for battle. In the meantime, he is left a vast inheritance after his father's death. He is attracted to Natasha Rostov but because she is too young, he gives in to his base sexual desires and marries the shallow and manipulative Helene. After discovering her adultery, he leaves her. While visiting with Natasha's family in the countryside, he reunites with Andrei. Andrei had been captured and released by the French only to return home to watch his wife die in childbirth. Despite Andrei's grief, he falls in love with Natasha, who in turns falls in love with him. However, he postpones marrying her a year until she comes of age. During the year, he is sent away on a military mission. While away, Natasha falls in love with the known womanizer, Anatole. Just before she is able to elope, Pierre intervenes and reveals the true nature of Anatole. 

Throughout the first half of the story, the characters expectations are let down. Pierre is the only character who does not start the film in a jovial state. Both Andrei and Natasha are ecstatic by the prospect of war and view it with great pride and with a celebratory tone. Pierre, on the other hand, views life through a pacifist lens and cannot bring himself to understand the nature of men. He does, on the other hand, become disenchanted with his first wife after finding her deceiving him. As all the characters enter into their adult years, they became disillusioned. Andrei became traumatized by war, grief-stricken over the death of his wife, and disappointed over the lost love of Natahsa. Natasha was led astray by her passions and was let down by the deception of a trusted Anatole - shattering both her trust in other people and her own virtue. The characters all experience disappointments with how they thought their life was going to go. 

After all of this, Napoleon's army invades Russia, prompting Pierre to go and visit Andrei on the eve of battle. He ends up lagging behind and catching the battle - traumatized by the carnage. The battle sequences are filmed by Vidor with a great field of visual spectacle. With hundred of extras charging through vast terrains of environment, the viewer becomes immersed and almost lost among the range of view. After being overwhelmed by battle, the Russians are forced to retreat. Napoleon forces the people of Moscow to evacuate the city. Natasha encourages her family to leave their belongings behind and allow their home to be used by wounded soldiers. While the people of Moscow are fleeing the city, it is important to note the scale Vidor provides. With the assured high production cost, Vidor acquired numerous extras to expand the sight of the crowd leaving the city. The effect almost takes your breath away as your view takes in the enormous migration of a whole society. Because of this visual spectacle of size, we are more likely to enhance the emotionality of Natasha having to leave her home. Rather than just being concerned about Natasha, we are concerned about the society at large as well, made real by the mastery of Vidor's execution. Because of this, we empathize more and more with the singular individual of Natasha. The 'small' of her emotions are made 'big' by reconciling the immensity of what's happening, and the 'big' of the society's evacuation is made 'small' and intimate by comparing it to the individual concerns of Natasha. 

The French invade the city and set it on fire. The Russians' plans of waiting out the French succeed. The French are forced to retreat due to lack of food and supplies in the abandoned city. All the while, Pierre is captured by French forces and must accompany the soldiers on a 2,000 mile march through a harsh winter terrain. Many soldiers and captors die from the harsh environment. Vidor makes a clear choice of providing shots of the soldiers and captors having great difficulty walking through perilous mud. With these shots, Vidor makes it apparent that we are trapped with the characters, sludging through with them. The story is so long and immersive that the viewer feels as if they live in this world, grinding their way through the twists, turns, and disappointments along with the characters. We are so intimately placed in the middle of these characters' lives (while such largescale developments are occurring around them), that the viewer almost feels overwhelmed by it all. As we see the scale of their struggle, so too do we feel the immensity of it, thanks to Vidor. 

Pierre walks coldly along the frozen tundra, now a captor of the enemy army. While viewing this, the viewer begins to wonder how we go here. The cold eventualities of the characters' lives make the values they held before seem meaningless. The relationship struggles and worries over social criticism are now replaced with the realities of survival. The severity of life has now granted the characters (and the viewer) a more intimate perspective of what truly matters. The relative comfort they experienced before provided them with relaxed and optimistic expectations for life and what life would become. These fragile perspectives ended up causing their psychological downfall, as they were not prepared for the harsh reality of what was to come. The peace they experienced in the beginning did not healthily prepare them for the wars to come in the end. 

While the enemy army marches across a bridge back to France, the Russian army sends cannon fire to destroy the bridge, killing a majority of the French army in the process. Even Napoleon is equally let down along with the protagonists. As the bridge his army stands on collapses, so too collapses the foundation that Napoleon's expectations lounged on. As he rides away listening to the cannon fire, Vidor provides a medium shot of the French general crying. With this, it becomes apparent that even the antagonist of the story does not escape the story's theme. After all the conquering and plans he laid out for building his empire, his empire falls; not with an exclamation of battle, but with the whimper of his retreat, the cold and harsh snowy environment slowly executing his men one by one, and now the remainder of his forces trapped on a collapsing bridge. Much like our central characters, Napoleon becomes ultimately let down by life, as it provides him with nothing but bleak reality in contrast with his bright assurances of conquering it. 

Pierre is rescued and arrives to find Natasha and her family excavating the remains of their war-torn home. With war having ravaged its way through Russia, the only thing left is the ruin of what they once held. While the physical structure of Natasha's Moscow home remains, the inside is ransacked and falling apart. This visual indication by Vidor displays the psychology of the characters. The structures of reality and perspective they once found themselves in are now nothing but a hollow shell. All that stands now is rubble. Pierre and Natasha embrace, as the viewer contemplates their future. They must continue on, of course. All that's left is to make something out of what's left in the ruin of their lives. 

Vidor's adaptation of War and Peace provided a three and a half hour experience mixing the intimate with the grandeur, allowing both to permeate the other. The experience however still can at times come across with more American optimism and peppiness than the Russian literature it is based on. This is no surprise, given that it is an American adaptation administered to an American audience. However, the themes still fall in line with their Russian origin. The harsh winter of life will break your comfort and expectations. The war of tomorrow will collapse the peace you expect out of life, providing you with the bleak reality of life perspective. Aside from its American perspective, Vidor still is able to take this theme and use it to construct a mighty epic - providing a scale that can handle its big ideas.