Michael Mann’s frontier romance is stirring, forceful entertainment, with Daniel Day-Lewis giving its hero a conviction few actors could sustain. The dialogue sometimes labours, but the action and music make its solemnity feel earned.
The Last of the Mohicans asks us to accept a hero who means what he says and a romance that matters as much as the war around it. Michael Mann makes that earnest combination work, and the result is a forceful, absorbing adventure. There is something faintly absurd about the seriousness with which everyone approaches love and danger. Mann accepts that risk, giving the characters no convenient joke with which to excuse their feelings.
Daniel Day-Lewis is the chief reason we go along with it. As Hawkeye, he makes physical competence attractive without seeming to demonstrate how much preparation has gone into it. His concentration does the persuading, keeping the performance credible even when the heroism becomes extravagant. Madeleine Stowe’s Cora gives the romance a firmness that keeps it from becoming merely decorative. Stowe meets his intensity with enough composure to avoid disappearing beside him.
Dante Spinotti gives the frontier forests scale without making the people look like accessories to a landscape photograph. The views make the journeys feel exposed, and the beauty never quite makes the wilderness reassuring. Wolf Kroeger’s production design is particularly persuasive in the substantial construction of Fort William Henry. The detail helps us understand the military presence and what people are defending, without requiring us to stop and admire the research.
We were gripped by the fighting, especially the way musket smoke makes a violent encounter harder to read. Mann allows the confusion to register without letting the action become shapeless. Editors Arthur Schmidt and Dov Hoenig keep the physical movement urgent, yet there is enough time to feel the effort involved. The violence is brutal, and the film would be considerably less involving if its hero could pass through it without seeming to exert himself.
Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s music is almost as forward as the leading man. It pushes the romance hard and gives the action a momentum that carries across the changes of pace. This could become exhausting, and there are passages where a little less insistence would help. Mostly, though, the music earns its place because Mann has committed so fully to the feelings it asks us to share.
The weaker passages come when the characters have to explain themselves. Mann and Christopher Crowe’s screenplay sometimes gives them language that sounds too comfortable in a modern mouth, and the solemn delivery makes the awkwardness more noticeable. The attention given to the central romance also leaves some of the supporting cast short of space. Wes Studi’s Magua and Russell Means’s Chingachgook could sustain more attention than the script gives them. We would gladly have spent longer with both.
The film belongs to the kind of adventure in which courage, skill and devotion are enough to justify a hero. Mann is good at showing the effort those virtues require, even when the screenplay makes them sound a little too simple. Its severity will be too much for anyone who needs these things delivered with a wink. Choose it when a romance played entirely straight appeals, and forgive a few lines that the faces could have handled better.
