Return to A Lost World

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

DIRECTOR: MICHAEL MANN

WRITERS: MICHAEL MANN AND CHRISTOPHER CROWE

THE BOTTOM LINE: The saga of James Fenimore Cooper's heroic Hawkeye is retold on a grand scale.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the . . .

Oops. Wrong boring American classic. But Longfellow's lines are appropriate nevertheless to a consideration of Michael Mann's ravishing realization of The Last of the Mohicans. From its first images of a deer hunt to its last shots of hero and heroine gazing westward toward mist-shrouded mountains, the film's sensuous evocations of an Arcadian wilderness draw us into a remote realm -- just as the need to penetrate the majesty and mystery of that landscape draws its characters irresistibly on to fates ennobling and tragic.

Perhaps the poignancy of these images derives from our sense that we are looking into a world now almost entirely lost. Perhaps it derives as well from the memories they stir of movie glories past, when sweeping historical spectacle was a cinematic commonplace. Then again, it may simply be the crazy nerve of this project that disarms one's critical faculties: the French and Indian Wars; a protagonist named Hawkeye; a red-coated English army marching in straight stupid lines through the forest; wily Indian enemies skittering through the underbrush, a menace not only to the soldiery but to virtuous femininity as well.

Director Mann says his first potent movie memory is of the 1936 screen adaptation of the book (with Randolph Scott). He has gone farther than the older picture did in straightening and strengthening the plot -- about a besieged fort, the ill-timed attempt of the commandant's daughter to join her father there and the anarchy that follows his surrender. Even Magua, the treacherous Indian villain of the piece, played with deadly relish by Wes Studi, is given a good motive for his dastardliness, the dignity of his otherness and even allowed a nanosecond of pity for one of his victims. Above all Mann has seen to it that something spooky, suspenseful or just plain action packed happens every five minutes. In the process he has eliminated the last traces of Cooper's high-viscosity prose and sentiments.

As a result, the novelist's only immortal achievement, Hawkeye, who was born Natty Bumppo in a colonial settlement but was raised by a Mohican family, has at last a context worthy of his importance as a mythic figure. This character, blending the Old World tradition of gallantry with the New World's belief in the moral supremacy of those who live in close harmony with nature, is our Ur- frontiersman, the archetype on whom everyone from William S. Hart to Clint Eastwood has fashioned his variations.

But Daniel Day Lewis plays the character as if he were entirely unaware of the heroic line that derives from Hawkeye. This innocence leaves open the interesting possibility that, not knowing any better, he might implode under pressure instead of exploding into more predictable action. Conversely, Madeleine Stowe, playing the commandant's elder daughter, for whom earlier versions of Hawkeye have had only a distant admiration, invests her character with a sureness about her needs and a moral courage that is very much up to date. Mann rewards them with actual sexual contact, quietly yet fiercely staged, that is a wonderful, even startling, break with tradition.

Whether it was because we were young or the movies were young or the world was at least youngish, old-fashioned Hollywood history was exhilarating. In retrospect there is something alarming about its simplicities and the enthusiasm we brought to it. It is the great virtue of this grandly scaled yet deliriously energetic movie that it reanimates that long-ago feeling without patronizing it -- and without making us think we will wake up some day once again embarrassed by it.