"Ran" (1985) Review
I thought a lot about The Irishman after watching Ran.
On the surface, it might not seem like there would be much in common between a Japanese adaptation of King Lear and an adaptation of a book about a man who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa, but I find a startling number of similarities.
For one, both films were long-time passion projects for both directors, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa both spending north of a decade on each of their own films just trying to get them made (strangely, both were funded by extremely wealthy benefactors looking to help an older director out and add to their own prestige in the process, Netflix for The Irishman, Serge Silberman for Ran). Additionally, both films were made when each director was in their 70s, much older than they were when they first made the films that put them on the map.
Which leads neatly into the final comparison between the two, and the most crucial. Both films represent each director returning to the genre that made them famous and putting it fiercely into the perspective that their age brought. It is clear in The Irishman that Scorsese is far from the man he was when he made Goodfellas, let alone Mean Streets. The Irishman is a much more sober affair, with almost none of the pomp and circumstance left, instead lingering on a character who’s only reward for surviving his tenure as a Mafia hitman is to be tended to in a nursing home by people who don’t even know the name of the only man he regrets murdering.
Likewise, Kurosawa was no longer making a film like Seven Samurai, or even quite a film like Throne of Blood, his last Feudal-Japan adaptation of Shakespeare. Ran is its own beast, completely unconcerned with the heroics of samurai duels and showdowns. It is fiercely cynical, and seems to reflect the kind of speeches that other Shakespeare characters like Falstaff would say when looking upon the ruins of war. If there’s anything missing from Ran, it’s someone asking, “What is honor?” and answering, “A word.”
Not that Ran runs too short to explore its ideas, it’s a two hour and forty-two minute behemoth that made use of at least 1,400 extras, 200 horses, and so many costumes that it took two years to make them all. It is a film that operates at a scope that you simply do not see anymore, and is made with such a higher-level of craft that it will certainly ruin other historical epics for you.
The story itself is more of a remix of King Lear than a completely straight adaptation, and all the better for it. King Lear and his three daughters are replaced by Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) and his three sons, Taro Takatora Ichimonji (Akira Terao), Jiro Masatora Ichimonji (Jinpachi Nezu), and Saburo Naotora Ichimonji (Daisuke Ryû). In the Sengoku period of Japanese history, Hidetora is our aging leader whose mental acuity seems to be fading as he naively tries to split his kingdom among his sons with disastrous results.
Changing one of the fundamentals of the King Lear story (the old fool having sons instead of daughters) allows Kurosawa to pull in elements of Macbeth into his version by giving the son Taro his wife, Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). Like every creative decision in this movie, it’s a fantastic call, Lady Kaede is easily one of the most memorable characters in the film and feels like if Lady Macbeth showed up in the middle of King Lear to make everyone’s lives worse.
In case it’s not clear from the way I’ve been writing about Ran up to this point, I think this film is nothing less than a masterpiece. I normally try to save thoughts like that for later on in a piece like this, but when you’re dealing with an actual epic like Ran it feels silly to bury any kind of ledes. This is one of a handful of movies I’ve ever watched where any criticisms feel so insignificant or entirely subjective to the point of being useless to anyone but myself that this is going to be an ode to one of the best movies I’ve seen in my life so far.
I felt that way about Ran well before I was done watching it, if only because this is one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve ever encountered. Akira Kurosawa’s vision faded the older he got, and in order to direct this movie, he essentially storyboarded the entire film in a series of paintings he made. The job of the crew was to bring these paintings into reality inside of the frame, and even if you didn’t know that going into the film you might guess it just from the way the film looks.
It’s not just that the scale of these shots is overwhelming, but that the uses of color and framing are so deliberately chosen in every single scene. Whether it’s a scene between two people in a room or entire armies sizing each other up and preparing for war, every shot in Ran resembles a painting. No scenes feel wasted as a result, you’re so wrapped up in the film’s unending beauty that no matter how long anything goes, you cannot help but stare at all of it with your jaw on the ground.
With such a massive scale and over a thousand extras, you might think that Ran features Lord of the Rings-like fights, and you’d be half-correct. Ran is specifically set in a time in Japanese history when matchlock guns existed and became one of the primary drivers of war, meaning Aragorn-heroics don’t work out for these soldiers. They are senselessly slaughtered by hails of bullets, and those who don’t die from bullets get hit by arrows or trampled by horses. It would be preferable to die by a sword, as so few characters do in this film. There might be more honor in dying that way, assuming honor is more than a word.
The sense of hopelessness that these battles create is suffocating and deliberate. In Kurosawa’s older age, it seems that he no longer saw virtuous warriors but puddles of blood to be wiped away by whatever warlord decides to backstab another on that particular day.
Even the one source of levity the film has, a character named Kyoami (Peter, stage name for Shinnosuke Ikehata), succumbs to darkness of the film. He is this adaptation’s equivalent of a “fool” character, and gradually becomes proof that the lines between comedy and tragedy get awfully blurry in horrific times. It’s a remarkable performance, incredibly physical and deeply emotional as the film goes along.
The performances across the board are excellent, if slightly-over-the-top. Like many of Kurosawa’s films, it draws heavily from Noh theatre traditions that can seem overly-stylized if poorly executed, but since the entire cast is in on it, the traditions work beautifully. Tatsuya Nakadai in particular as the aged Hidetora is something to behold. It’s a performance that feels larger than myth and legend, such a large performance that it feels like if it was even the slightest larger it wouldn’t work.
Suffice to say, it works, just like everything else in Ran. What makes Hidetora so compelling as a character are the ways he’s completely unlike King Lear. Without getting into specifics, Hidetora was significantly more bloodthirsty in his younger days than Shakespeare ever implied about King Lear, and I think it makes for a much more interesting story. Not because it’s a darker idea, but that Ran seems to be exploring how frightening it is to see a doddering old man and know for a fact that despite his pathetic appearance in that moment, he was formerly capable of violence and cruelty on a brutal scale.
Behind all of this horror, some implied, some not, is flat-out incredible music. I don’t know if there’s ever been an Akira Kurosawa film with a bad musical score, and Ran ranks among the very best. Composed by Tôru Takemitsu, it is a score that’s as gorgeous as visuals of the film, which means its among the finest of its kind. There is no level of this film’s production that is untouched by excellence, no part of its craft that is not at the top its class. Costumes, art direction, acting, music, writing, technical coordination of battles (supervised by Ishirô Honda, director of many Godzilla films throughout history), production design, etc. Anything you can name is done phenomenally.
If there is anything I can point to that would even sound negative about a film this great is that the pacing of the film is definitely on the slower side. However, the pace lends itself to the melancholy the film so obviously wishes to create. None of the battles fought are for noble purposes, why should the filmmaking and pacing pretend otherwise?
Ran is a late-period masterpiece from one of the greatest directors who ever lived. Whenever you encounter a film this near-flawless, you have to treasure it and tell people all about it, and that’s what I intend to do for a very long time, whether it’s in the form of breathless conversations among friends or a review like this.
