When I'm calling you-oo-oo-oo
Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe turn "The Last of the Mohicans" into a deliciously roasted chestnut.
By Charles Taylor
May 10, 1999 | Old Hollywood meets new Hollywood in Michael Mann's 1992 version of "The Last of the Mohicans." Based on both James Fenimore Cooper's novel and the screenplay for the 1936 film version (starring Randolph Scott as Cooper's noble savage Hawkeye) the movie is recognizably, even reassuringly, old-fashioned. Mann provides emotions in big, readily identifiable slabs -- heroism, cowardice, loyalty, revenge, love -- and assigns them to his characters as if he were handing out charades instructions. But Mann also employs an MTV slickness that's pure '90s. He conceives of the story as if it were a gigantic piece of mood music. The look of the movie's ravishing landscapes (shot by Dante Spinotti, with the forests of North Carolina and Pennsylvania standing in for New York state circa 1757) and the faces of the movie's ravishing actors (Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe) carry as much emotion as the story does. And Mann slathers Trevor Jones' score -- a synthesized, symphonic wash -- over everything. When Stowe's Cora swoons against Day-Lewis' Hawkeye in a besieged fort as the night sky glows with the fires of combat behind them and Jones' syrup swells on the soundtrack, you can giggle or you can surrender to the very real charisma of the two stars. Probably you'll do both. "The Last of the Mohicans" is a striking mixture of the ersatz and the genuine. In other words, it's vintage Hollywood. It's also a smashingly entertaining and satisfying adventure.
In his other movies, Mann's specialty has been a chic, chilly existential pulp angst that's as simplistic and inflated as his titles -- "Thief," "Manhunter," "Heat." But the adventure-book tone of "The Last of the Mohicans," which is set during the war between England and France for control of the American colonies, clears away all of the director's phony torment. "The Last of the Mohicans" makes you understand why adventure stories were once called romances. It's a date movie in the guise of an action movie. Hawkeye and Cora are like a colonial Tarzan and Jane: She's the white woman who ventures into the wilderness only to be saved by the European who has learned the ways of the natives, and with whom she finds love. That's a female fantasy perhaps even more than a male one. This noble wild man brings out the woman's passionate nature which has no outlet in the corsetted society she comes from. One look at Cora's priggish suitor (Steven Waddington, with his piggy snout), a Redcoat officer given to homilies about how respect and friendship are the basis for a successful union, and civilization doesn't seem like such a hot idea. The way Mann brings together Hawkeye and Cora after he rescues Cora from a band of marauding Hurons shows a witty grasp of movie glamor: You can tell they're a love match by the way Stowe's unpinned tresses match up with Day-Lewis'. Later the pair take temporary refuge in a cave behind a cascading waterfall, the torrents of water standing in for the lovers' emotions. This natural wonder seems to exist to provide a showcase for the stars' sexiness.
Mann shortchanges Stowe and Day-Lewis by allowing his atmospherics to do too much of the work, but romantic roles like these can get down to an actor's essence in ways that more complex parts can't. Stowe has never become as big a star as she should have. Cora is the definitive combination of Stowe's delicate, cameo-like beauty and her unflinching gutsiness. When Cora has to shoot a charging Indian, it's only the expression in Stowe's eyes that's tremulous; physically she's rock steady. Day-Lewis has some fine, subtle moments, as when he allows a ghost of a sardonic smirk to play around his mouth while listening to some idiocy from the British officers, but the heart of his performance is the deadly grace with which he jumps and whirls around as he dispatches opponents in the (breathlessly exciting) battle scenes, or the way he appears to have concentrated every ounce of his being as he runs through the woods. Day-Lewis never seems ridiculous in his long hair and buckskins, never seems to be slumming in this action role because the physicality of his performances has always been on a heroic scale. Like Olivier, he's one of those rare actors who can play a hero without having to resort to parody or apology.
Reducing Fenimore Cooper's turgid novel to a tale of big primal emotions gives the story more immediacy and passion than it ever had. Mann's conception doesn't allow for the lightly self-mocking humor of a swashbuckler. But his willingness to present the derring-do of adventure movies straight gives the picture the sweep and color of legend, as in the moment when the approach of a Huron war party is symbolized by the blurred glow of their torches passing beneath a waterfall.
There is one element that Mann's storybook romance can't contain, and that's Jodhi May's performance as Cora's younger sister Alice. May (she also played Barbara Hershey's daughter in "A World Apart") has almost no lines; possessing a face worthy of silent film, she doesn't need them. Alice spends much of the movie watching in paralyzed fear as her adventure into the colony outposts turns into a nightmare. May plays these scenes almost stock still, unblinking, as if Alice had turned into a movie camera as the images she sees are burned into her brain. With each new horror (which we see as she does, lightning fast and lingering at the same time), you sense Alice retreating further and further from the reality of what's before her. But she returns to possession of herself in a scene that both embraces and explodes Cooper's vision of the character as the pious young woman who will do anything to keep her virtue. May is terrifying in this moment, drawing out the seconds before Alice makes her final choice until they feel like an eternity. May turns the scene into Alice's revenge, payback for every atrocity her young eyes have been made to see, a promise to haunt the dreams of her tormentors. The scene cracks the movie open. Stowe and Day-Lewis may be its heroic/romantic soul. May is its avenging angel.
salon.com | May 10, 1999
Not for sissies, A leading conservative scholar's hardball new translation of Tocqueville's classic "Democracy in America" is a daunting example of tough love. By John W. Dean
November 27, 2000 | Consider, if you will, the morass of our presidential election while reading a few observations from Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," the 19th century classic, which has been newly translated, edited and introduced by Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard University political scientist, and Delba Winthrop, his wife, a Harvard lecturer:
" ...one can still consider the moment of the Presidential election as a period of national crisis."
" ...the parties have a great interest in determining the election in their favor, not so much to make their doctrines triumph with the aid of the president-elect as to show by his election that those doctrines have acquired a majority."
"Parties are an evil inherent in free governments."
"In the United States, it is people moderate in their desires who involve themselves in the twists and turns of politics. Great talents ... turn away from power in order to pursue wealth ... It is to these causes as much as to the bad choices of democracy that one must attribute the great number of vulgar men who occupy public office."
"Democracy in America" is as relevant today as it was when first published as two volumes in 1835 and 1840. For Tocqueville did for democratic government what Euclid did for geometry, Aristotle for drama, Darwin for biology and other great analytical minds for a host of other subjects -- he arrived at many clear and simple truths based on careful observation. This is not to say, however, that all his findings are correct. Many were wrong; more are now dated. Yet no one has better understood and explained the nature of democracy, and its impact on human nature.
Tocqueville's portrait of America is as much political Rorschach test as a profile of the early American character. It is a work of ethnohistory, sociology and political philosophy to which people of all political persuasions turn for authority. A small sampling of those who quote Tocqueville is illustrative of his broad appeal: Vojislav Kostunica (on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic ), Sen. John McCain (2000 Republican Convention speech), President Clinton (1995 State of the Union), Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (opening 104th Congress), Ross Perot (1995 book on Medicare), Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (Powers vs. Ohio), James Reston (memoir of the New York Times reporter), Margaret Thatcher (autobiographical book), Lani Guinier (the law professor's book, "The Tyranny of the Majority"), Robert Reich (Clinton's secretary of labor's book, "The Work of Nations"), Dan Quayle (autobiography) and Richard Nixon (autobiography).
A check of the Congressional Record for the 104th Congress shows almost twice as many Republicans as Democrats cite Tocqueville. This confirmed my hunch that he is slightly more popular with the right than the left. Or is it that for conservatives Tocqueville represents a state to which they would like to return, while for progressives he represents a place from which we started? This is not always clear, for more often than not Tocqueville is quoted out of context. When viewed in context, however, his study of America shows the roots of our democracy and its early growth.
The United States was young on May 11, 1831, when the 25-year-old French aristocrat arrived at the port of New York. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was busy ushering in a new era in which all Americans could improve both their social and their political standing. Commerce and trade thrived in the Northeast, and agriculture (tobacco and cotton) created wealth in the slave-owning South. Vast unsettled territories of the American continent were being seized from indigenous Indians by wave after wave of westward-migrating settlers seeking new land and a new life. When Tocqueville arrived with his traveling companion, Gustave Beaumont, our burgeoning nation consisted of 24 states with an official population of 12.8 million people.
Tocqueville and Beaumont, lawyers and French magistrate judges, came to America ostensibly to study the country's penitentiary system. But, as Tocqueville later explained, this was a pretext, "an excuse: [we] used it as a passport that would allow [us] to go everywhere in the United States." Beaumont, who wrote to his father as they sailed to New York, explained rhetorically: "Wouldn't it be good to have a book that gives an accurate notion of the American people, that paints a broad portrait of their history, boldly outlines their character, [and] analyzes their social state?" The young noblemen wanted to observe the workings and ways of American democracy because they believed their findings could serve as a prototype for France.
They explored America for nine months, studying its geography and history; interpreting the town, state and federal components of its confederated union; discerning the impact of democracy on people and institutions like the church, the press and public officeholders. Traveling by foot and horseback, stage coach and river boat, they started in the North, then went West, South and back East, to meet with people from every walk of American life: tradesmen and farmers, craftsmen and manufactures, teachers and ministers, slaves and masters, Indians and Indian hunters, mayors and judges, legislators and governors, congressmen and senators, cabinet officers, a Supreme Court justice and a former president, John Quincy Adams. Like auditors, they filled notebooks with what they saw, heard and learned.
History does not explain why their considered collaboration never came to fruition. Beaumont did most of the work for their joint study, "The Penitentiary System of the United States and Its Application in France" (1833), and they remained lifelong friends, yet the contemplated book that Beaumont described to his father would be written by Tocqueville alone. Tocqueville, it appears, had the mightier mind and pen. Regardless, in 1842 Beaumont's American experience became a successful novel, "Marie, ou l'esclavage aux Etats-Unis (Marie, or Slavery in the United States)," although it was not translated into English until 1958.
"Democracy in America" was first translated from French to English in 1838, by Henry Reeve, an Englishman. When first asked to undertake the project, the 22-year-old Reeve wrote in his diary that the study was "perhaps the most important treatise on the science of states that has appeared since Montesquieu ... I decline to translate it because I do not believe in my inmost heart ... I will not promulgate an erroneous doctrine." Less than a month later, after a dinner with Tocqueville, he reported in his diary that he found the author "a very agreeable man, and the more I see of his book (which I have now nearly finished) the more I like it. My first impression as to its democratic tendency was entirely erroneous. He regards democracy as the inevitable lot of Europe, and as an evil which we had best prepare to meet, since we can not escape it."
Reeve and Tocqueville became fast friends. But in a letter to Reeve, dated Nov. 15, 1839, Tocqueville took issue with his translator's work on the first volume. He felt that Reeve was softening his criticism of the French aristocracy, and that prompted him to instruct: "I beg you earnestly to struggle against yourself on this point and to preserve my book its character." Because of Reeve's attitude, and Tocqueville's concern, this first translation has always been under a bit of a shadow.
Nonetheless, Reeve's translation enjoyed great popularity in the United States. It was not until the late 1880s that its popularity began to weaken, although as late as 1899 a special edition of "Democracy in America" was released as a part of the series called the World's Great Books published by D. Appleton and Company. By the 1920s, the book had gone out of print in the United States.
In spring 1945, as World War II was coming to its brutal climax, Americans were again examining their history, and Knopf published a revised (but not completely new) translation of "Democracy in America" by American scholar Francis Bowen. While critics were pleased to have "the first reissue of this classic" in years, they were underwhelmed with the partial translation effort. The Brits sniffed that the book was "not easy to render into English, and on this side of the Atlantic it will seem to many people that Henry Reeve did a better job than his pedantic corrector, Professor Bowen." Jacques Barzun, the French-born American historian and linguist, observed, "Unfortunately, Tocqueville is still given us in a stiff, ambiguous and often incorrect English."
The Cold War -- uncannily predicted by Tocqueville, who foresaw Russia and the United States competing for global mastery -- further renewed interest in "Democracy in America." While few high school or college students were assigned the entire book, countless young Americans read chapters relating to equality, individualism and the operations of a civil social order, which helped them define themselves vis--vis the Soviets. The anti-Communism of the Cold War made Tocqueville a staple of American education.
In 1966, Harper & Row, in Great Britain, published a completely new English translation of "Democracy in America" by George Lawrence (a translator of Tocqueville's later books), which arrived in the United States in 1967 to mixed reviews. The Journal of American History questioned, "What, one may well ask, is the need for a new translation if it fails, as this one does, to offer any substantial improvement over the old?" The Library Journal, on the other hand, found that "George Lawrence has provided ... a translation that flows freely and is a pleasure to read."
With two prior translations, why has the University of Chicago published yet another? This is very lengthy work, I'd guess over 300,000 words. So bringing out a new translation was no small task. Libraries and used book stores everywhere are still filled with Reeve and Lawrence translations. In fact, the Reeve translation, now in the public domain, can be downloaded free from a number of online sites. The explanation for this new translation would appear to be the translator -- Harvey Mansfield.
I first met Mansfield in the reception room of my doctor's office in Santa Monica, Calif. He was lying on the floor, and I mistook him -- since he was upside down -- for the author Tom Wolfe. More exactly, he was on the cover of the September-October 1999 issue of Harvard Magazine, which had fallen to the floor. When I picked it up, I discovered the dapper-looking gentleman, with a cream-colored sport coat and matching Panama hat, was Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., described as a translator and analyst of the works of Machiavelli. The magazine cover dubbed him the "Prince of Conservatives," noting his criticism of Harvard's liberal political culture. Since that first encounter, I have seen him, from time to time, on the Fox News Network, which unabashedly relishes his conservative credentials and thinking.