Although at times Cruise comes off as too contemporary for the 19th century -- at one point, he seems to be waiting for a cellphone call to confirm his terms for a cover of Details magazine -- this displacement fits better when he becomes a prisoner. Algren appears to be reacting to this strange new world through sounds; nothing he's hearing makes any sense to him. He's a mangy gaijin that Edgar Rice Burroughs might have invented, though James Clavell got there eventually.
The film includes notable performances by actors not drafted to shoulder the burden of the entire production. Billy Connolly, emanating a gamy, sly menace that he's rarely suggested before, plays Algren's former sergeant at arms, Zebulon Gant. Gant, used to propping up his old friend and superior officer, joins Algren in the journey to Japan. Connolly's loose, hostile vivacity registers so clearly that it's obvious we won't be seeing very much of him. But this is crackling, rigorous comic work; he doesn't have to present the face of tragedy.
The far more weighted and daring acting comes from Watanabe, as Katsumoto. Probably best known outside of Japan as the reedy, restless sidekick in the gourmand classic Tampopo, Watanabe has filled out physically and spiritually. The formality he brings to Katsumoto is hard-won, especially when he's having pointedly thoughtful conversations with Algren that sound more like translations of ideograms than actual dialogue.
The film never really explains how or why this resolute, isolated samurai learned to speak English better than the emperor. His fluency doesn't quite make sense, though it gives the movie some needed mystique. It plays better than the inexorable pull of romance, drawing Taka and Algren together.
The Last Samurai, which Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz wrote with John Logan, from a story by Logan, super-glues together a host of contradictions. Unfortunately, as dramatized, they function as conventions that are older than the story the film is weaving. The movie, which opens in Taiwan today, is most watchable during the majestic brutality of the battle sequences. This is not only because of the handsome staging, but also because the keywords sacrifice and honor are evoked with verve and simplicity, more so than in the "exchange of idea" chats between Algren and Katsumoto, which sound like statements being read into the Congressional Record by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Zwick has absorbed the lethal agility of Akira Kurosawa; what registers just as powerfully as the sureness of the combatants is the ugly futility of the battles themselves. When the film sets up the lessons that Algren has to learn, the hero is not really a fish out of water; he's more like a big fish in a dry pond, picking up a lesson in Eastern deportment and philosophy a step away from the "wax-on, wax-off" curriculum of The Karate Kid. In those scenes presaging his Eastern conversion, Algren can't suppress his eagerness to learn, picking up the ways of the sword and the Samurai code of Bushido with an alacrity that's mandated for movie stars: flash-card education.
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