"Windtalkers"

The real strengths of "Windtalkers" lie in the latitude and guidance that Woo gives his actors, and his great skill at old Hollywood touches that would most likely come off as corny in the hands of lesser directors. Cage has become so adept at playing the tortured, conflicted soul that many of us have become tired of seeing him do it. But he is perfectly cast here, and completely believable as a reluctant war hero who's more no-nonsense than jaded.

When Enders tells Yahzee about the colleagues whose death he was largely responsible for, Yahzee, who hasn't yet been toughened by battle, earnestly urges Enders to do what his people would do: Tell a story about them. With a glare that's halfway between hostile and amused, Enders replies drily, "What a magical pile of Navajo horseshit." But he also lets you see the way the fragile openness of Yahzee's face is working on him. What makes Cage such a terrific and dependable actor isn't just that he knows how to deliver a line but that he visibly responds to the faces -- and all the most subtle, nonverbal cues -- of his fellow actors.

Beach (who, for the record, is a Saulteaux Indian and not a Navajo) is an interesting actor; it might take you three-quarters of the movie to figure out what to make of him. He delivers his lines in a slow, easy drawl, making the men around him, and us, wait for the words to come out. But if it seems like an affectation at first, it ultimately comes to express more things about his character than we might initially think. As we wait for him to finish his sentences, we're temporarily pulled from our world and into his. Woo may exaggerate some of the differences between Navajo culture and the modern world of the 1940s, but those exaggerations (a scene in which Yahzee and Whitehorse say a protective pre-battle prayer, for instance) are more like shorthand than cartoons. With every line, Beach reminds us exactly where Yahzee comes from, opening up a quiet, airy space in the midst of wartime's gruesome, messy horror.

Woo wants to give us plenty to think about, and so he packs every frame with nuanced references to the meaning of honor and the importance of fulfilling our responsibilities toward one another. He's alert to racial issues without being blandly correct about them: The men in Yahzee's company are naturally suspicious of him at first simply because he's an outsider, but later, in a particularly ugly encounter, a fellow soldier needles him for how much he looks like a "Jap."

"Windtalkers," shot by Jeffrey L. Kimball (who also shot "Mission: Impossible 2"), is a handsome film -- sometimes a little too much so. (Woo may be overdoing it when he shows us a pool of blood welling on the body of a dying soldier, gleaming just so.) But the movie's grand sheen does give it an air of regality -- you know exactly where Woo is coming from, which makes even his loftiest ideas that much easier to take. Frances O'Connor has a small role as the nurse Cage falls for and hopes (though he won't admit it) to return to. Women are outside the bubble of Woo's world, but even if they're peripheral, they're not insignificant. They're stand-ins for some vague but vital notion of security, love and calm, existing far away from Woo's man-centric universe, where guys spend their time blowing each other's heads off willy-nilly.

This is retrograde in feminist terms, but then Woo's movies are all about the world of men, viewed through a very specific, traditional, highly movie-centric lens. And there are much worse ways to depict women: O'Connor has something of a saucy flair. She may be keeping the home fires burning, but it's at least partly because she likes the heat.

But my favorite moments in "Windtalkers" are the ones that no other director I can think of would even try to get away with. Whitehorse has brought a wooden flute with him, and he whiles away the evenings away from the other Marines, playing quiet tunes on it in the firelight. Ox comes by and starts making silly, overly friendly chitchat: Is Whitehorse self-taught? he asks. Whitehorse answers him tersely, hanging on to his dignity in the face of the nerdy white guy, but Ox presses on, pulling a harmonica from his pocket and insisting that the two play a duet.

Whitehorse says it won't work, but at Ox's urging, he reluctantly leads off. The mournful wails of his flute are answered by Ox's equally plaintive honeyed tones. It's an eerie call-and-response, but it makes aural sense as a bridge between the two characters.

Of course, you don't need a code talker to discern the message of the scene: Roughly translated, it's something like "Despite their differences, the red man and the white can make beautiful music together."

But there's a secret coded message embedded deep within the obvious one, and it explains why Woo, even when he's fiddling around with some of Hollywood's oldest conventions, still has the power to make movies that resonate. He doesn't work in the same imaginary Hollywood he used to, but he's built a new one for himself on top of the old. In the real Hollywood, as opposed to the dream one, the movies are slicker, the politics more slippery and the financial stakes much, much higher.

In John Woo's Hollywood, sound, light and movement still reign supreme, and the relationships between characters mean everything. As he did in the old Hong Kong days, he still values, above everything else, the things that money can't buy.

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