I know something about the First World War, or at least, I am as conversant as a lifetime of books and films and documentaries would allow me to be. I had a few relatives who served, but none who ever talked much about it, so my imagination of what it might be like - on a personal level - for the millions of Tommies and Jerries who suffered through it was, I now realise, limited. Sam Mendes rectified that.
The movie tells a fairly simple, linear story. Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) is serving in the trenches of France in April, 1917 when, because all communication lines have been cut, he is ordered to take a message to the commanding officer of another regiment, in order to halt a potentially disastrous attack. The journey will require him to travel about 9 miles on foot over enemy held territory. He selects his friend, Lance Corporal William Schofield (George MacKay) to accompany him, and the movie records that journey. What gives the film its power is the innovative cinematography, for which it won an Oscar. The movie is essentially one single long take with (seemingly) a single camera following the two men. It sounds simple, but this is an impressive technical feat, as thousands of shorter takes were seamlessly blended into one. 24 hours of journeying are condensed into 1 hour 59 minutes with no loss of continuity or believability. We occasionally pan around to see what the men are seeing but the camera is continually moving. The effect of this is that the audience members have a sense of being there with them. It's the perspective of a first person video game, except we are observers, not participants, and gives the same sense of deep engagement.
There are criticisms I would make about the plausibility of some of it. For one thing, if there is an explosion in a confined underground space sufficient to bring down the roof of a whole trench system, no-one in that confined space could possibly survive. For another, the German soldiers seem, implausibly, to be as bad shots as the Star Wars stormtroopers. In other words the movie lapses into some predictable Hollywood tropes as it rollicks along. But for all that it is continually engrossing and nerve wracking. The horrors of the trenches - the rats, the rotting bodies, the omnipresent mud, the presence of death waiting around every corner - are unapologetically and convincingly shown but the movie doesn't dwell on them. They are all the more real, and all the more shocking for the fact that they are hardly noticed by the protagonists. Acting is superb, as is the direction. And the cinematography is as good as ever I have seen. The whole film is shot with moderate to wide lenses in a muted, khaki pallette. The composition of individual scenes is wonderfully done. All this helped to give a sense of the normalcy and ordinariness of these extraordinary things happening to two young men, and helped make me, the audience member, part of it.
In the end the film is a celebration of courage and honesty and valour. But there is something that hit me hard: This is a men's film, made by men, about men. There is one female character in the whole movie and she is onscreen for about ten minutes. And so it should be. The First World War was a men's event, started and promulgated by men for reasons that, to this man at least, seem trivial and fatuous. This is a film about unfettered masculinity set loose on the world to bring its mechanised horrors to millions of women and children and men. The film is about common soldiers but is bookended by two cameo portrayals of officers, both played ( in a stroke of genius by Sam Mendes) by big name stars. At the start of the film General Erinmore (a suitably corpulent and mustachioed Colin Firth) gives the task to Tom Blake precisely because he knows Blake has a brother in the potentially doomed regiment, and will therefore be motivated to succeed. At the other end of the film we have Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberpatch) prepared to sacrifice any number of men if he can only bring the war to an end. This is a film about the manipulation and destructive power which comes when one section of the human race is left to make decisions for everybody else, devoid of the wisdom of all who will be affected.
At the end of the film William Schofield has emerged as a hero of considerable stature. In the last scene he sits under a tree, away from the trenches, looking at photographs of his wife and two daughters: a brief but powerful statement of true values. We leave the theatre realising that his courage is unlikely to be recognised or celebrated. The big, important men will have their sway and be lauded for it, while the others, the women and children, and the men who pile over the top of the trenches towards probable death are just so many numbers, or names on a roll, or lines on a map. The film drew me in and invited me to know what that might have been like, which hit me like a tank rolling over a trench. Knocked the stuffing and the words out of me for a week.
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