Friday, January 17, 2020

Army of two


A technical juggernaut, 1917 nevertheless finds the soul beneath its spectacle and justifies itself, in every frame, as the death dream of a world lost in the trenches a century ago.

Directed by Sam Mendes
Written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and Sam Mendes

Spoiler alert: high

I daresay that all the Film People have fallen out of love with the long take: 1917 has gotten good, solid reviews, but it's not at all difficult to find a discussion of its construction—the digitially-stitched illusion of two hour-long back-to-back takes created by cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Dennis Gassner, editor Lee Smith, and director Sam Mendes (and I expect exactly in that order)—that wonders aloud just what it was all meant to accomplish, or compares its aesthetic to that of a video game, or decries it as morally repugnant because the author didn't like it and their readiest tool for describing things they don't like is to name it evil, or (and this is the commonest criticism) simply calls it a gimmick.  And hell, on that last count, they've got a point: the sheer challenge of it is blatantly the motivating force behind 1917's existence, Mendes' protestations of honoring his grandfather's war stories to the contrary.  But, if it is a gimmick, it's certainly in good company.  More than half of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture have been sold on the basis of their gimmicks, and at least 1917's gimmick—"a barely-blinking, quasi-real-time look at the Western Front during the First World War"—is a more engaging gimmick than its competitors', which range from "recreating Los Angeles in 1969," to "recreating Robert De Niro in 1991," to "recreating Robert De Niro in 1981," to "recreating Hitler, generally."  Man, do I hope 1917 wins.

As for its kinship to a video game, this appears to be based mostly on the quasi-real-timeness of it all, though it also depends on its action's tendency to revolve around one or two of its main characters moving through space from one location to another, which, of course, you will find almost solely in video games and rarely in any other visual medium, especially motion pictures.  Anyway, this critique tends to feed into that nasty old "morally repugnant" argument, which relies mostly on one's preexisting distaste for the slightest sensationalization of a war that ended—just let me check my calendar here—one hundred and one years ago.  That leaves the most important question, what 1917 actually does accomplish, formally speaking, and there seems to be a lot of misapprehensions about that, the first and most objectively incorrect of them being the contention that 1917 is designed to appear as one continuous take.  (Again, it's two.)  Moreover, it's prompted routine comparisons to the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan and to the entirety of Dunkirk, I assume because they're also famous war movies.  It implies certain goals that I'm not convinced 1917 has, particularly that its two long takes are meant to plant you bodily inside a visceral combat experience from which there is no escape.  But while 1917 is often violent, and danger lurks throughout (it's honestly a pretty soft "R" as war films go, arguably earning it mostly through swearing), it is not really what I think can or should be reasonably described as visceral.  And in this instance maybe even Mendes himself shares this misapprehension, possibly believing that he oversaw a more intense combat film than he did, or even a "combat film" at all.  But I doubt it; I imagine he knew what he was up to.

Still, comparisons to Dunkirk can be interesting, at least once past the superficial similarities (that is, they're both about Britain in a 20th century war, which is not in itself interesting).   The crazy thing is that they actually share an editor in Smith, and despite possessing essentially the most distinct editing philosophies that two films about the same general subject matter could possibly have, each film (and each film's editing) is deeply invested in pushing the horrors of war as far as is feasible within commercial narrative cinema towards a certain kind of full-on psychological abstraction.  Dunkirk, I suppose, is always going to look like the more radical (and more clinical) experiment of the two, using editing to fracture an enormous military event across a multitude of perspectives that are individually insignificant but become historically important as time breaks down against an escalating assault of brazenly non-linear cross-cutting.  1917 takes pretty much the precise opposite tack, conspicuously presenting itself as being scarcely "edited" at all, its long take (stitched-together or not) by definition being about as linear as linear could conceivably be, and allying its format to one extremely-conventional and screenwritery man-on-a-mission plot.  To this end,  1917 latches onto the journey of two British soldiers, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), as they are tasked to cross no man's land and deliver a stand-down order to Blake's brother's regiment, who are hours away from launching an attack against what its colonel believes are Germans fleeing in a rout but what, in truth, are merely Germans retreating to fortified positions from which they intend to slaughter anybody who follows.

You can see why it ought to be "visceral," though that's where the format comes in, and turns the film into something I did not expect it to be, a shockingly meditative fantasia that is, of course, "about" World War I, but not so much the physical, tactile experience of it as the emotional and intellectual fugue it brought on.   Deakins' camera follows the pair like a specter, and that's what 1917's aesthetic counter-intuitively offers, a haunted, phantasmal feeling of unreality.  1917 begins to explain how to watch and interpret it the moment it starts, when it opens with Blake and Schofield dozing in an edenic meadow, Blake being told to wake up and pick a man for a job, Blake arbitrarily choosing Schofield, and the film following along as the two enter the British trench system (somewhat simplified, I believe, for simplicity's sake).  Orders in hand, they go over the top and into an abandoned stretch of mud and wire and corpses that fails to resemble planet Earth in the slightest way.  The starkness of this contrast between Elysian field and Boschian hellscape is emphasized by the complete absence of any break between them.  It's emphasized further by how even the horizons themselves can't seem to contain this new phase's immensity.  There should be a break, and it feels wrong or even impossible that the actual distance between the shade of a tree and this endless plane of dead fecal dirt could be a ten minutes' walk.

That's the unsubtle but insidious power of 1917, the whole thing being designed to abandon its audience on an alien world as a way of getting at the experience of war.  Uncanniness is our constant companion throughout, even when they finally do cross the previous German frontier.  (There is substantial semiotic work done by their escape to the green fields on the other side—themselves defined by an absence of humans and their decoration with the innumerable corpses of animals—coming only at the expense of a dangerous subterranean shortcut.)  If anything, 1917 only gets more unsettling, and unsettled, as it goes along—it feels more like a post-apocalyptic fever dream than a war procedural.  In its most temporally-untethered moment, it crosses from day into night and into a hellfire-lit darkness.  Here, it arrives at its photographic and thematic centerpiece, a ruined city rendered a transcendent dreamscape, flares casting shadows that move with an existence seemingly of their own, like ghosts dancing in a titanic cemetery.  Right before this is where that aforementioned one cut to black comes in, and I almost wish they'd used another trick to compress the time: the presence of the camera has never seemed strongly dependent on the conscious existence of our heroes—quite the opposite.

The most dislocating thing I think 1917 does is that it's not about the person you think it is, and it's a little insensible to try to talk about it without spoiling it, because the single nastiest move it makes is putting an end to Blake at least an hour before you'd imagine either one of its protagonists are going to die, especially the one marked as its hero.  (That it ends him in the most random, irrational way it could is presumably no accident, either.)  The specific insights that Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns' screenplay bring to bear upon this scenario—Schofield, heretofore resentful of Blake dragooning him into a foolhardy mission and cynical about the whole affair, now manfully takes up his dead comrade's quest with renewed purpose—are, I suppose, not new insights.  It once again comes down to the usual cliche that wars are fought not for nations or ideals but for the soldier next to you.  Still, I don't imagine it's less true or meaningful on that account.  (This screenplay only genuinely falters by continually and blatantly setting up several cruel potential ironic reversals that it has no intention of paying off, which honestly makes it feel more cowardly than it would have if it hadn't brought up the possibility of a gut-punch in the first place; it manages just enough well-placed nihilism to point out that, as long as the war continues, nobody has truly been saved.)  Even so, the disquiet that Blake's early demise casts over the rest of the film never dissipates, and 1917 is mood and atmosphere above everything else.

So the other very important thing that the long take does is that, to a great extent, it represents a cinematic object that has surrendered (or at least pretends to have surrendered) cinema's most notable ability, that is, to control its own duration.  It's where the differences with Dunkirk are the most palpable.  If, in Dunkirk, human violence was capable of shattering the causal connections between events (and communal heroism was capable of reconnecting them), 1917 emphasizes time's indifference to such matters: it allows us no choice but to sit with Blake as he bleeds out and stops breathing, and no choice afterwards but to spend several minutes watching his friend do nothing but actively try not to openly weep.  1917 exists to demonstrate time as time is lived, but never gives up its hallucinatory quality, conjuring liminal feelings of being right on the edge of where time, subjectively, stops—death.  (It is meaningful, I think, that the film begins and ends with Schofield in repose; it is meaningful, too, the way that the uniformly wraithlike figures Schofield encounters, helpful or harmful or neither, appear and vanish with hardly any warning, seeming to have no substance at all that survives the camera being taken off them—admittedly this is the most "video gamey" thing about the whole endeavor, but it worked for me.)  That's the function of Thomas Newman's great score, too, which is emotionally overbearing in really terrific, well-calibrated ways, but is just as often pointing toward an awe-struck wonder over being alive to witness such otherworldly beauty within war's terrors.  1917 captures not revulsion, which is what anti-war films almost invariably strive for; it captures fear and trembling, religious terror.

That 1917 accomplishes its slow-burn nightmare within the most "realistic" framing device it could have possibly used is the insane contradiction at the heart of it.  And, somehow, it never feels cold or forced or exploitative: 1917 naturally invites you to love it more for its rarefied aesthetic and technological qualities, but MacKay offers a hell of a central performance, humane in small and infinitely credible ways.

Still, it is the tech that really blows you away: Deakins is the kind of cinematographer that hasn't needed to prove that he's basically the best in the business for years, which seems to have left him competing only against the limits of the artform itself.  (The idea that anybody else was actually nominated for a cinematography Oscar this year is almost silly.)  From the command of light in the night scenes to the choreography of a thousand extras, down to the way the weightless movement of the camera grants the entire exercise the tint of the surreal, it's a staggering achievement, for him and Mendes alike.  It's hard to argue, even if you think it was a mountain they climbed only because it was there, that 1917 is not somebody's career peak.  But I expected 1917 to be a grisly adventure, and it has elements of that in it, though the way it paces out adrenal moments, some arriving by entirely unexpected means, tends to leave one unhardened and defenseless against them.  More than that, it finds ways to convey the absurdity of war without merely reminding us that bleeding is bad and that intestines are supposed to be on the inside.  Though it reminds us of that on occasion, too.

Score: 10/10

No comments:

Post a Comment