Everybody loves Samurai, we associate them with anime action heroes, Tom Cruise and cool swords. Due to this, we have Western, chubby, couch potatoes referring to themselves as modern day samurai as they admire the aluminum katana replica hanging on their walls. If push came to shove the blade would be out, they would take a stance and cut through their enemy the way the old school samurai used to… well, at least this is the assumption. Like ninjas, pirates and knights, the samurai is not only a largely misunderstood lifestyle from a largely foreign culture (speaking as an American here) but one that is depicted so falsely in everything - it makes it painful to watch anything depicting them. When I saw the DVD for The Twilight Samurai, I first looked to see who was in it and Hiroyuki Sanada’s name rung familiar from Ringu, Ringu 2 and Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai. Curious to see him in a different kind of samurai role (he was a bit of a bully in Last Samurai), I gave The Twilight Samurai a chance and now wish I had done so 6 years ago.
Typically the movies that depict samurai semi-accurately get lost in a sea of gross misrepresentations of katana swinging lunatics, living like cowboys and fighting like demons. Having read enough literature and studying more than a healthy dosage history, I began to get extremely cynical about anything “Samurai” in modern movies. For me the Akira Kurosawa, romanticized versions were the best I could ask for so I shrugged off the rest. Speaking of which if you haven’t seen the master’s Seven Samurai, you may need to queue it up and rent/buy it asap. I love The Twilight Samurai, it is a simple story of a man who is afforded no good luck in life but deals with it heroically.
Plot:
Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada) is a low level samurai during the 19th century who has fallen on extremely hard times in life. With his minute salary and low status, Iguchi would work in a storage facility during the day and build insect cages with his two beautiful daughters at night. With the schedule being so hard to maintain, Iguchi’s appearance and unavailability to drink and hangout with fellow samurai gains him the nickname “Twilight”. After losing his wife to consumption and borrowing money to bury her correctly, Iguchi falls into deep debt and is ridiculed by family members and strangers alike. One day by a chance occurrence of fate Iguchi defeats a good swordsman with a mere stick and disgraces him before his retainers. The legend of the “master swordsman” Twilight spreads throughout the land and his attempts at modestly belittling his knowledge fall on deaf ears.
When the lord of the fief dies and the inner clans move into civil war over a successor, Iguchi’s legend comes back to haunt him when he is ordered to kill a samurai who was refusing to commit seppuku. With the future of his daughters in mind and a chance at a love that he felt undeserved by his childhood girlfriend, the Twilight Samurai accepts his command and faces the rogue samurai whose actions in the past has gained him the reputation of being a master of the single sword.
Beyond it all this is a love story about a true samurai. Seibei Iguchi’s selfless modesty and loyalty is a thing of storybooks. He is unreal with his methodology in doing the right thing and sticking to the path, just think Perceval from King Arthur’s legend or the model samurai from Tsunetomo Yamamoto’s Hagakure. The man is a flawless white knight, stuck in a world of peasant work and jeering overlords. To compliment a perfect warrior, you do need a beautiful, supportive and strong woman. In The Twilight Samurai this would be the lovely Tomoe Iinuma (Rie Miyazawa) sister to Michinojo Iinuma (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) and childhood friend to Iguchi. Tomoe is born into a higher ranked samurai family and is defiant to the standard boundaries that are meant for women (reading, talking to samurai, speaking out of turn). She represented a necessary edge in the world of Iguchi that was missing due to his modesty.
The pacing is flawless, the acting is real and the customs felt right. Seeing older samurai discuss the pains in paying for a funeral due to their wages really drove home the reality in the setting. Equally interesting was the reverence and fear shown when the top ranks would meet the lowers. Knowing that on a whim your lord could demand you cut your stomach open for a slight offense would make you go way out of your way not to piss said individual off and this is conveyed very well in The Twilight Samurai. Finally the absolute best scene in my opinion dealt with the final battle of the movie. Where the standard would be a dramatic dual wielding, blood and guts chop fest, director Yôji Yamada gave us karma, Bushido and a little Buddhism. The overall ebb and flow of life’s hardships seen through the eyes of Seibei Iguchi lead to this one life-changing event and it all made sense.
The Twilight Samurai is not a swashbuckling film about fantasy samurai cowboys. It is a story about love, honor and putting the things you love before everything else. I recommend to you movie-lovers that if you have not seen The Twilight Samurai that you do so as soon as possible. It is a beautiful story that can be enjoyed by both the 16 year old karateka with the aluminum sword collection and the soap opera watching soccer mom. This is an excellent film and was a pleasure to watch and review.
Written by Greg Dragon – who has written 364 reviews on Spicy Movie Dogs.
Cinephile and opinion writer, Greg Dragon has been a fan of movies since the 80's when Kung Fu theater was all the rage and Roger Moore was James Bond. As an opinion writer that has reviewed Box Office releases on a number of prominent websites, Greg is the founder and lead critic of Spicy Movie Dogs.
Recent Comments