There is a reason why almost all the great male actors of the different generations have ended up working with Michael Mann. And it’s the same reason why get their best performances out of themin addition to the same reason why they rarely repeat with him -only Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx wanted to repeat the experience and the latter almost wanted to kill him shooting ‘Miami Vice’-.
We are talking about a filmmaker so rigorous and obsessed with having even the smallest detail well captured that it is inevitable that he clashes with actors who also have a lot of character and a very specific way of doing things. But incredible collaborations come out of those conflicts, a bit like the Lennon-McCartney film buffs, only one part of the couple is always changing. One day it could be Robert De Niro in ‘Heat’ or sooner it could be Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘The Last of the Mohicans’.
The first great American hero
This latest film is one of the latest great additions to the Netflix catalog framed in classic cinema. We fit it in there because it’s been 30 years since it was released to begin with (we’re all going to die) and because, while Mann’s painstaking authenticity makes it more contemporary, drink a lot of the classic and epic adventure of old Hollywood -which already adapted the novel by James Fenimore Cooper-.
The film takes us to the year 1757, still in the origins of colonial America. English and French face each other in continuous competition for this new and prosperous territory, but only the latter have the support of the natives. The English have to pull the settlers who have moved there, recruiting them for the cause. Among them is Hawkeye, Day-Lewis’s character.
Hawkeye is a white man who from a very young age was adopted by the natives of the Mohican tribe, and has learned their customs and their tools of survival and battle, in addition to connection with nature. One day he saves the two daughters of a British officer from the ambush of the town of the Hurons, French allies, and later he will form an alliance with the English army for the triumph of his company, which will ultimately be the origin of the future American people. .
‘The last of the mohicans’: colonial epic
Mann get sneak here another one of his complex portraits of the consummate professional through what we could consider the first American hero. There is no doubting the value and significance of Hawkeye, and every element of the story underpins it as strongly as Day-Lewis’ performance.
He is the man that the circumstances require, although an emotional part charged with romance also comes into play that manages to be sold through the chemistry between Daniel and Madeleine Stowe. He also makes a interesting dissection of the politics of the time and the territorial conflicts.
All of those emotional elements add depth and are what have made it such a beloved classic, but ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ also wins for its epic adventure. Mann demonstrates again why it is one of the best action directors in history in a fierce colonial portrait, and the tape is devilishly entertaining for that touch of old morning session tape that the family could share. A perfectly replicable experience now through streaming.
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