“I see how peoples are set—against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”
—Erich Maria Remarque in ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’
HOW does one remember a war? How does one imagine violence for people who may not care to remember any kind of trespasses against life and humanity?
One has options: a tale that is so heroic it will provide a template for a generation of people who would love, defend and die for their country, or a story that is so small it diminishes the span of a war that altered boundaries and decimated empires.
There are other possibilities: enlist a million of soldiers slaying one another or conscript two individuals—regular foot soldiers—with their own tidy memories of loved ones left behind, and small towns and cozy homes barely felt. When these two soldiers heed the summon of their officers without even knowing what awaits them, they move from the bright meadows of wild expanse as they travel in an enclosed horizon of dug trenches.
This is the first World War. A different narrator has embraced a different set of filmic decisions in the film 1917. It is not an easy decision because wartime movies are a tired, dead genre. We are familiar with the signposts: the young man who is untested in gore keeps a locket or a photo of loved ones, and he will die in the next scene. Then there in the invincible dozen that will wipe out the entire army and win a war. Then there are the kind soldiers who will save women—beautiful women—and children; when the war is over, these nice-looking soldiers will be back to save the distraught women not from poverty, but from the scarcity caused by the same war that produced gentlemen-saviors.
My vote for the better film this year goes to 1917 because it subverts the form of wartime movies.
Beginning with the lushness of landscape: the horizon draws our sight to its exquisiteness because it is not the frame for men killing men. It is the anticipation of the lack of colors that will happen when men become intense warriors out to accomplish a task all in the name of war. Thus, 1917 establishes the war that will move us to madness and sadness through an unmoving scene of two young men against a luxuriant field of tall, safe grasses with sprouts of flowers here and there. Then the command is given. One man, Thomas Blake, extends his hand to his friend, Will Schofield, who stands up to be with his friend. It is spring in that place and friendship is warm, cozy. And yet, as they walk through the trenches, the side walls gradually rise. The two messengers are descending to hell.
The two comrades are given a life-or-death task. They are to cross through enemy lines with a sketchy assurance that the Germans have abandoned their trenches.
There is no sense in that mission; there is no logic in the act of Blake agreeing to do it. Schofield is lost why he agrees to be with his friend. They are sure to die, in a few minutes or after an hour. Blake has an impetus: he is going to warn a large group of soldiers not to continue the attack or else they will be slaughtered. Blake’s brother is one of the officers in that battalion. The other soldier has no incentive.
As they walk through barricades and craters created by bombs, they make us feel how dumb they are. How senseless. Those adjectives do not describe Blake and Schofield; they are perfect modifiers of a war that has no sense and possesses no logic.
There, in that space where logic is replaced by a vacuum, war operates. How dare us, therefore, question a landscape of hostilities where only two soldiers walk. How naive we are to think that beauty has no place in a vista of combat. Whoever said war stories should be shot in grimy black and gray resolutions must be thinking of the stock pictures we have confidently curated for many years.
If ever we do question the approach of this unusual war film, 1917, it is because it questions those realities canonized in previous war films.
It is 1917, and the war is still going on for years now. It is happening in France, a location that is adjacent to the other countries and empires whose boundaries, and reach, are being altered. If there is a strategy that we can find in this film, it is not the strategies of warfare, but the wisdom of allowing us the luxury to walk through bombed shelters, dead corpses, mutilated hands and heads only to surface again in verdant plains. Up above, planes fight each other in dogfights that do not even have the ferocity of the wildest dogs. But people die. Planes fall because it is war.
In ruins, one meets up with enemies resting in darkness. In the shadows also are found women and babies, and a quick reminder that, despite the war, soldiers have emotions and they can forego survival all for a helpless infant.
How does one write about a war that is not ancient, but, at the same time, is not current enough to be familiar to us?
Erich Maria Remarque wrote a book about World War I in 1929. The book tells us how the quiet in the warfront could be the most destructive silence in the world. Written from the viewpoint of a young German soldier, the book was adapted into a film in 1930. The famous attack where soldiers in the trenches wait for the running enemies to get near them so they could shoot them like wild animals is available online. It is an extended shot, which ends with the running soldiers jumping into the trenches and engaging the other soldiers in fistfights, knife-stabbing and other physical mayhem.
Sam Mendes brings back the silences of war. The silences come in many forms: in the pauses of characters where one does not know if the enemy would be kind; in the resignation of soldiers not to fate but to faith in the goodness of victory in war. These silences are also the fissures that should be there between muddy fields and swirling rivers dammed by dead men but are banished by the camera—our eyes—that bends over branches, slithers through cracks and enter any kind of consciousness available in a land without peace. All these in long takes.
The message (if we can call it that) of 1917 is delivered finally in the final scene where a lone tall tree goes bigger because a lone soldier walks slowly to it. As in the beginning of the film, the landscape is once more flourishing. Follow the technique of the film because a few minute walk (of film time) back from that lush landscape is war at its vilest; a look beyond the greenery—the future—is the prospect of more cruel wars.
World War I began in 1914 and ended in 1918. Twenty-one years later, World War II came. It would last from 1939 to 1945.
1917 is directed by Mendes from his screenplay written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns. It garnered 10 nominations in the 92nd Academy Awards, winning best cinematography for Roger Deakins; and two more awards for best sound mixing and best special effects. The film is produced by Dreamwork Pictures, Reliance Entertainment, New Republic Pictures, Mogambo, Neal Street Productions and Amblin Partners.