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The New Yorker
The Beauty of Sam Mendes’s “1917” Comes at a Cost
By Richard Brody, January 7, 2020
Sam Mendes’s “1917,” a film of patriotic bombast, has an
imagination-free script filled with melodramatic coincidences that
trivialize the life-and-death action by reducing it to sentiment.
The most vulgar visual effect that I saw in a movie last year wasn’t
Marvel-ous or otherwise superheroic; it was in “1917,” and depicted the
death of a soldier in combat. The soldier is stabbed, and, as he bleeds
out, his face is leached of pinkness and turns papery white just before
he expires. The character’s death would have been as wrenching for
viewers if the soldier’s appearance remained unaltered and he merely
fell limp. Instead, the director, Sam Mendes, chose to render the moment
picturesque—to adorn it with an anecdotal detail of the sort that might
have cropped up in a war story, a tale told at years’ remove, and that
would have stood for the ineffable horror of the experience. Instead,
rendered as a special effect, the character’s end becomes merely
poignant—not terrifying or repulsive—making for a very tasteful death.
That tastefulness is a mark of the utter tastelessness of “1917,” a
movie that’s filmed in a gimmicky way—as a simulacrum of a single long
take (actually, it’s a bunch of takes that run up to nine minutes and
are stitched together with digital effects to make them look
continuous). Yet that visual trickery isn’t the fakest aspect of the
movie. Rather, the so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of
earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the
cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of
the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.
The story is a sort of “Saving Private Ryan” in reverse, and that
reversal is by far the most interesting thing about “1917,” with its
suggestion of an antiwar ethos. Somewhere behind the lines in France, a
young British lance corporal, Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), dozing
during downtime, is awakened by a sergeant and told, “Pick a man, bring
your kit.” Blake chooses a fellow lance corporal, Will Schofield (George
MacKay), a friend who’d been napping in the grass alongside him. The
sergeant sends the duo on a special mission: to cross the former front
lines, now abandoned by German forces, and take a letter to a colonel
who’s with his troops at a new forward position. That colonel is about
to launch an offensive against the apparently retreating Germans, but
aerial reconnaissance shows that the Germans are luring the colonel’s
two battalions into a trap, and the letter is an order calling off the
offensive. What’s more, the battalions to which Blake is being
dispatched include his brother, a lieutenant.
Blake is outgoing and earnest, Schofield is a sarcastic cynic, and the
implication is that Blake has been chosen for this mission not because
he’s necessarily the best soldier to undertake it but because he’s
uniquely motivated to complete it—because he knows that, if he doesn’t
reach the colonel in time, his brother will be among sixteen hundred
soldiers who will be entrapped and massacred. The darker suggestion,
utterly unexplored, is that morale and commitment were issues in the
British Army at this latter stage of the Great War (the action begins on
April 6, 1917, and concludes the next morning), and that a soldier
without Blake’s personal motive for saving the two battalions might not
be trusted to put himself at risk to fulfill it.
What’s clear is that Schofield is dubious about the mission and
resentful of Blake for choosing him as his partner. Of course, because
“1917” is a film of patriotic bombast and heroic duty, Schofield’s mind
will be changed in the course of the action. It’s only one in a series
of painfully blatant dramatic reversals that wouldn’t be out of place in
any of the comic-book movies that are so readily contrasted with
“authentic” cinema. (For example, while Schofield has the cynicism
knocked out of him, Blake—in another overlap with “Saving Private
Ryan”—has to confront the painful consequences of his own warm-heartedly
humane idealism.) The script is filled with melodramatic coincidences
that grossly trivialize the life-and-death action by reducing it to
sentiment: Schofield fills his canteen with fresh milk that he finds in
a pail at a recently deserted farm, and eventually feeds an abandoned
baby with it; Blake’s reminiscence of the blanket of cherry blossoms
that covers his family’s garden is echoed in Schofield’s discovery of
cherry blossoms scattered on a river, which serves as a reminder of his
duty and a spark of motivation; an ugly but inconsequential swarm of
rats in one part of a battlefield presages a single fateful encounter
with a rat in another.
Whereas Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” presents an entire army
mobilizing to save the life of one soldier, Mendes’s “1917” depicts two
ordinary, obscure, and low-ranking soldiers thrust into a mission to
potentially save sixteen hundred, and, by implication, the entire
British Army, and change the course of the war. This is a classic idea,
one that comes packed with an elegant irony. (For instance, it’s the
idea at work in John Ford’s brief and brilliant Civil War episode in
“How the West Was Won,” depicting the fateful encounter of two foot
soldiers and two Union generals.) And it’s that very irony which Mendes
replaces with a lumbering portentousness. He endows Blake and Schofield
with no comparable sense of their own mission, their own
disproportionate moment. The script (written by Mendes and Krysty
Wilson-Cairns) is imagination-free, which is to say that it endows the
characters with no inner lives whatsoever. Have Blake and Schofield ever
killed before in hand-to-hand combat? How far along are they in their
military experience? What have they experienced of the war? For that
matter, who are they? What do they think? Where are they from? What did
they do before the war? What are their ambitions beyond survival?
What’s especially revealing about Mendes’s superficial and externalized
practice in “1917” is that he’s not averse to presenting his characters’
inner visions and states of mind. In “American Beauty,” he famously
showed the middle-aged male protagonist’s sexual fantasy of a naked
teen-age girl being covered in a sprinkling of rose petals. While Mendes
didn’t shrink from displaying the vivid imagination of a suburban
horndog, he’s unwilling to face the imagination of the valorous
combatants of “1917.” It’s as if whatever might be on the minds of his
protagonists in the course of their dangerous journey toward the front
lines, whether fear or lust, frivolity or hatred, would get in the way
of the unbroken solemnity and earnestness with which he approaches the
subject of the Great War. (On the other hand, he may fear unleashing his
characters’ imagination, because, when, in “American Beauty,” he let his
own imagination loose, the result was a cinematic ickiness of historic
dimensions.)
Instead, Mendes shuts down Blake and Schofield and envelops them in a
silence of the mind in order not to probe or care what they think. What
he substitutes for their inner lives are sequences that exist solely
because they make for striking images (a big fire at night, a run
through a crowd of soldiers going over a trench wall). These shotlike
compositions that arise from the flow of long takes come at the expense
of plot and character, as in a scene of hand-to-hand combat that’s
framed in the distance without regard to its mortal stakes and intense
physicality. Once more, violence is moved offstage and prettified. The
movie’s long takes, far from intensifying the experience of war,
trivialize it; the effect isn’t one of artistic imagination expanded by
technique but of convention showily tweaked. Its visual prose resembles
a mass-market novel with the punctuation removed.
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