1917

Or: Mendes’ Inferno

The fields of France on an April day. Far off a lone tree stands in leaf and in the foreground two young brits Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), have their eyes closed, at peace. But a pair of khaki legs appears in frame and everything goes to hell. For Blake and Schofield are Lance-Corporals in the King’s Army and engaged in the war to end all wars. Unsure of why exactly they’ve been summoned they trudge through a camp, trading mumbled comments, and down into the trenches, and onward into a world of death, mud, war and horror. The situation is this: The Germans have abandoned their fortifications and are apparently on the retreat, the second battalion of the Devonshire Regiment (including Blakes older brother (Richard Madden) hot on their heels. But (say it with me now) IT’S A TRAP! The Germans are waiting to handily slaughter the Devonshire boys to a man and only Blake and Schofield are interested with the orders to call off the next morning’s attack and stop a massacre.

I must confess, when the first previews of 1917 appeared in theaters I was less than impressed. I’ve had my fill of epic war movies for the decade (thinking back to the noise and confusion and timey wimeyness of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk) and wasn’t much interested in seeing this one, however much mud it was willing to soak itself in. What grabbed my attention was a brief word by director Sam Mendes (who distilled the story from his grandfather, Alfred Mendez) describing the care and effort his crew were putting into the film and the fact that it would done In One Continuous Shot. Even for a filmistine like me that’s enough to sit up and take notice. From the moment the camera starts rolling Mendes promises “It never leaves our two boys.”

This isn’t precisely true, but the end product (done through the magic of Rodger Deakins cinematography, with the fair assistance of a gripping score by Thomas Newman) while wrenching as any story about the great war ought to be, is done as a poetry of light and set. The moments of great power come without fanfare, we turn a corner in our trudge and suddenly encounter a beautiful vista: the boys pausing to stare at a dead german solider, would up in a robe of barbed wire, a flare-lit gunfight in the ruins of an old cathedral, Schofield emerging like a phantom out of the woods to an impromptu concert of soldiers singing “Wayfaring stranger” in an eerie heartbreaking tenor.

It puts both actor and audience through a terrible wringer but it replenishes as much as it takes. The story is strong though the script is light: both our heroes are special in their ordinariness, their love of their families, or trust in their duty, not for the threat of poetry lost or great strength of spirit. There’s a sprinkling of Briton’s best and brightest but only Benedict Cumberbatch as the flinty Colonel McKenzie is sharp (or intelligible) enough to leave much of an impression.

1917 is a war movie that doesn’t try to outdo itself in telling a war story. It is committed to the boredom of battle as to the terror, the paralysis to the heroism. The dead become part of the scenery, the wounded pass by in desensitizing parade. It hangs on to one of the truths about war in any time in any age: a soldier doesn’t care much about the conflict, about land grabbed or ideology unfurled. They are trying to keep their mates alive, and come home again, and feel forced to kill the poor bloke on the other side who’s just trying to do the same. Mendes has created a movie that rests upon that truth and that slips and speeds and keens and dashes (yes, in one nearly continuous shot), for something that creates beauty out of horror, and carries us through desolation, a modern hell Dante could not imagine, to end as the best stories do, back where they began, beneath a tree, a young man closing his eyes, at peace, at last.