1917’s Parlor Trick
It can’t be denied that Sam Mendes’ Oscar-nominated film 1917 is not only a technical feat, but a feast for the senses when seen on the big screen. That, for me, is where the success of the film ends. After the novelty of the single-shot parlor trick wears off — for me, somewhere around the point where the main character is shot in the helmet and blacks out — what we are left with is several hours of action with no substance. To repurpose Macbeth: “Out, out, brief movie! This plot is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his [two] hour[s] upon the screen, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
That’s the main problem with 1917. There is no depth to it; there’s a macguffin (“get to your brother before his battalion makes an ill-advised attack”) that propels the movie forward, but usually macguffins are employed to allow for the development of characters or themes. In 1917, neither are developed. The characters (what are their names again? There’s the guy with the brother and there’s the other guy he seems to have kicked at random?) remain shells, and when the soldier with the brother died, it made no impact. There was no investment in him; and while usually this mini-climax would be accentuated with a scene break, which would allow the audience that breath or two to process their emotions, the single-shot parlor trick rolls on, and a whole convoy of troops somehow sneaks up on us. All the characters are sketches, the equivalent of stick figures with a one-line description written under them. You have the “anxious general,” “wise general with cane,” “cocksure Cumberbatch,” “conciliatory subaltern,” “two-timing Germans,” “woman with baby.” All these characters are paraded in front of the single-shot and then whisked off just as quickly as they appeared, leaving us to shout, “Wait, wait. What’s his deal?” Compare this to Saving Private Ryan, that war movie all war movies will always be measured by. Ryan is so powerful not solely because of the first scene with the beach landing (though it still is truly epic), but rather because by the end of the movie, we are fully emotionally invested in the characters of Captain Miller’s rescue squad (see, we know Tom Hanks’ characters name, because he’s actually alive with a backstory and motivations and hopes for the future — the characters of 1917 barely have vocal chords) as well as Private Ryan, who has a small sliver of screen time.
How is it that Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old has more pathos than 1917? This is because Mendes misunderstands where the horror of war has its seed. I would contend that there is one scene that summarizes what Mendes believes war is. Early in the movie, the two characters are walking across no-mans’ land when one (not the guy with a brother, the other guy), slips while taking cover in a crater and plunges his cut hand into the body cavity of a dead German. Out of the cavity crawls a rat, and in the theater you could almost hear an audience-wide groan. This is gore, and it is a truism that gore shocks the senses. But gore is forgotten, gore does not have pathos. Pathos is won when a director or writer presents the viewer with a relatable character, in whom the audience can see bits of a reflection of themselves or someone they may know, and then subject that character to the horrors and depravities of war. The pathos is won in the character development, the emotional shifts over the arc of the plot. 1917 has no character arc: no one is developed. It would be like (to return to where we started this digression) the play Macbeth beginning with the title character weeping to us, “She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word.” Then we could look at each other and ask, who the fuck is this guy?
Consider the death of Paul Baumer as depicted in the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, seen below, and compare that to the senselessness of 1917’s violence. And while it is fair to say, “But war is senseless,” this thesis alone does not make for a deep movie.
In the preface of the German print version of All Quiet, Remarque provides this reminder:
“Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis, vor allem aber kein Erlebnis sein, denn der Tod ist kein Erlebnis fur den, der ihm gegenübersteht. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Kriege zerstört wurde; — auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam.”
[“This book is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”]
Mendes forgot what Remarque knew and told us: war stories are not about war per se, they are about the people caught up in it.