"To survive you must discard loyalty and affection," Daisuke Ryu tells father Tatsuya Nakadai early in Ran. After two hours and 40 minutes, the film has proven Ryu's point again and again. Akira Kurosawa's 1985 reworking of King Lear, like its source, keeps returning to a keynote of pessimism, but it's pessimism of the most thoroughly considered and compellingly argued kind, the sort that only a humanist who's spent a lifetime watching humanity betray its potential can fully express. After illustrating it repeatedly, Kurosawa puts that sentiment in the dialogue so there's no missing it. Where others might imply, Kurosawa shows with little concern for subtlety, at least when it comes to big-picture issues. When needed, he's got samurai thundering over a hill to drive his point home.
Yet while Ran is often about making a film of big themes played out on a grand scale, it works because Kurosawa pays as much attention to the characters living in his outsized drama. Nakadai plays the 16th-century Japanese Lear figure who, after banishing Ryu for daring to question his decision to retire and divide his kingdom among his sons, watches as his heirs betray him. Trapped in a small castle, he wears an expression of otherworldly disbelief as his sons' arrows whiz past. What's happening is beyond his comprehension. It shouldn't be. Fading in and out of madness, Nakadai spends the rest of the film wandering the kingdom he once ruled as loyalists remind him of the brutal ascension that brought him to rule. Even before his betrayal and madness, he'd fallen victim to the delusion that his own ascent to power and vision of how life ought to be had somehow changed the nature of existence itself.
Ran should be required viewing for everyone who wants to rule the world, and not just for two unforgettable battle scenes in which oversaturated blood pours out beneath grey, uncaring skies. As lifelong Kurosawa admirer Sidney Lumet points out on the indispensable new two-disc DVD, Ran is a story about the inherent tragedy of how one generation never really connects with the next. Neglected in his own country, which had come to see his films as too old-fashioned and influenced by the West, Kurosawa probably felt this acutely in the decade it took him to secure financing for Ran. But Kurosawa's magnum opus just gets richer with each year that bears out its hard truths and vindicates the mastery of the man behind them.