Sam Mendes (2019)
The timeframe of the action is barely more than twenty-four hours of the year in question. At the start, the screen indicates ‘6 April 1917’. The day and month then fade out. Early one morning, two young British soldiers, serving on the Western Front in northern France, are assigned an urgent mission. Aerial reconnaissance has established that the German army has not, as the British had previously supposed, simply abandoned this sector of the Front. Instead, the Germans have made a tactical withdrawal to a new position (the Hindenburg Line), where they’re preparing an artillery attack on advancing British forces. Field telephone lines have been cut. Tom Blake and Will Schofield, the two lance-corporals concerned, must therefore deliver a written message by hand to the commanding officer of the Devonshire Regiment, instructing him to call off the planned advance. The lives of 1,600 British soldiers – including Blake’s brother, serving as a lieutenant with the Devons – are at stake.
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is dedicated to his paternal grandfather Alfred, who fought in World War I (and subsequently became a novelist and short-story writer, and leading member of the ‘Beacon Group’ of writers, in his native Trinidad). The closing dedication to Alfred Mendes credits him with having ‘told us the stories’. There’s no indication beyond that of whether the events of the film reflect Alfred’s personal experience, or of how much the screenplay, which Sam Mendes wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is a piece of fiction[1]. 1917 is unarguably gripping. The tale it tells is, in terms of plot, simple and clear. The combination of more and less realistic elements makes the larger meanings of the film – decidedly commercial though it is – harder to get a handle on.
Mendes opens with a shot of a field of flowers – not poppies but still a kind of visual shorthand that helps give the audience (older generations of it, at least) their Great War bearings. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) receive their orders from General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who quotes a couplet to explain why the mission is being entrusted to just the two of them:
‘Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.’
The lines are by Rudyard Kipling, often regarded as a ‘jingo imperialist’ (George Orwell) but also the father of an eighteen-year-old son killed in the Battle of Loos in 1915. Blake and Schofield, as they cross no man’s land, pass through a cherry orchard. It brings to mind not Chekhov but A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, which first appeared nearly twenty years before the start of the Great War but whose military and transience-of-youth themes ensured that, by 1914, it was close to English hearts in the conflict that began that year. (Almost literally so: according to Wikipedia, ‘the book accompanied many young men into the trenches’.) Mendes seems intent on evoking the poignant pastoral side of Great War mythology, and suggesting the extent to which poetry has imprinted this on posterity’s memory.
Thanks to the likes of Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, that tradition is associated primarily with the commissioned officer class. In 1917, it’s Lance-Corporal Blake, no officer and no aesthete, who’s prompted by the sight of the orchard to talk about his mother’s cherry trees back home. While his tone is lightly nostalgic, his words express a practical knowledge – of the different types of cherry, of when they bloom. But Blake’s later words also carry vague symbolic weight. These trees, cut down by the ‘retreating’ Germans, have been in blossom but not yet in fruit. ‘Are they goners?’ asks Schofield. ‘They grow again when the stones rot,’ replies Blake, ‘you’ll have more trees than before’.
In the early stages, Mendes’s priority is to present a real picture of life and death on the Western Front. Strong naturalistic acting is helped by dialogue to match. As the soldiers hurry off to embark on their mission, their route to the start of the journey proper exposes plenty of grim sights in the trenches – on the margins of the frame, with Blake and Schofield at its centre, but no less shocking for that. (The effect is somewhat reminiscent of the camerawork in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015). This often replicated the protagonist’s point of view – his tunnel vision – and showed some of the atrocities of Auschwitz peripherally.)
Blake and Schofield are contrasted simply and effectively. The former is short and stocky, the latter tall and slim. Schofield, though not posh, is a social cut above Blake but they’re of equal rank and it’s Blake, because of his reputation for map-reading, who’s the one selected for the assignment and asked to choose a companion. Schofield has already won a military decoration, which he says he exchanged for a bottle of wine. Blake can’t understand that at all. Not far into the expedition, he saves his companion’s life and Schofield, with a hint of ambivalence, tells Blake that should ensure official recognition for him too. Blake is pleased by that but doesn’t live to see it happen. Not far beyond the hewn cherry trees, the pair reach an abandoned farmhouse and witness a dogfight in which two British planes bring down a German one. It crash lands perilously close to where the soldiers were standing. Schofield suggests putting the pilot of out of his misery but Blake insists on getting water for him. While Schofield’s back is turned at the farmyard pump, the pilot stabs Blake. Schofield shoots the German dead, too late to save Blake, who dies in his colleague’s arms.
By this stage, the hair-raising incidents are already starting to mount up – an explosion in the abandoned German trenches that nearly kills Schofield, the plane crash and its aftermath that does for Blake. His death is a turning point in the narrative, even so, and not only because Schofield becomes the sole focus of attention. 1917 is an action film throughout but it’s also a character study for as long as there are two protagonists to converse and interact. There are sharp, persuasive human details – such as Schofield saying he hates the prospect of army leave because it entails returning to the front once again. Once Schofield is alone, however, his and Blake’s daunting undertaking comes to look more like a Mission: Impossible. Schofield doesn’t actually run through a minefield but that’s what the drama in effect comprises – and he really does dodge a lot of bullets. When he reaches his destination the following morning, he has survived improbably many close shaves.
1917 is winning awards and critical plaudits but a glance through the dissenting reviews on Rotten Tomatoes reveals a recurring criticism – of its ‘video game aesthetics’. These aren’t a problem to someone like me, whose exposure to video games is limited to commercials or brief shots of computer screens in film or TV scenes where characters are playing them. I was glad to be part of another minority group too. In common with about 99.5% of the acting profession, Dean-Charles Chapman, who plays Tom Blake, turns out to be best known for his appearances in Game of Thrones, a closed book to me. Chapman has other credits and I’d seen him in Rowan Joffé’s Before I Go to Sleep and Andy Serkis’s Breathe (2017). I didn’t recognise him, though, and I think that helped: it made Chapman easily credible as the ordinary Tom(my) he plays here.
George MacKay didn’t have that advantage. Being twenty-seven (five years older than Chapman) mightn’t have helped either but MacKay’s pale, skinny face and boyish features help him pass for younger. Although he doesn’t have much scope for building character once Schofield is going it alone, MacKay copes admirably throughout. As well as being a convincingly quick runner, he takes what verbal opportunities come his way. A night-time encounter with a young French woman (Claire Duburcq), hiding out with an orphaned toddler, isn’t, in most respects, one of the film’s better sequences. The dialogue stumbles in this episode – the two characters’ command of each other’s language is quite random. It’s too pat that Schofield, despite his exhausting ordeal, still hasn’t drunk the milk he filled his canteen with back on the farm with Blake, and offers it to the infant who needs it badly. MacKay rescues the scene with Schofield’s recital to the child and the young woman of Edward Lear’s The Jumblies. Schofield is aware his audience doesn’t have a clue what he’s on about. MacKay makes the film’s audience aware of what the poem might mean, from his own childhood, to Schofield. It’s a reminder of what he said about dreading a painfully temporary return home. It’s another illustration – more explicit, and in a very different register – of verse, for Great War soldiers, as a route to remembrance of things past, or lost.
Older familiar faces in minor roles are more of a problem. The correspondence of eminence as actors and military rank verges on comical; the way these bigger names pop up at regular intervals is mechanical and gives the lance-corporals’ progress an oddly road-movie quality. General Colin Firth hands the baton to Daniel Mays (sergeant), followed by Andrew Scott (who rather overdoes his bitterly cynical lieutenant). By far the best of the group is Mark Strong (as a captain who combines practical sense with emotional intelligence). Adrian Scarborough (major, good as usual) briefly paves the way for Benedict Cumberbatch (the colonel who eventually receives the crucial message to stand down the lines of Devons who’ve not already gone over the top). In nearly the film’s last scene, Schofield finds Lieutenant Joseph Blake (Richard Madden), and the meeting is anti-climactic. Just before he died, Tom Blake told Schofield his brother ‘looks like me but a bit older’. Tom may just have preferred to imagine he was as good-looking as Joseph but the latter’s appearance is a disappointment even so. Richard Madden’s uneasy cameo doesn’t remotely suggest that the man he’s playing and Tom might have been brothers.
It’s now odds against many people sitting down to watch 1917 unaware of its major visual selling point. Roger Deakins’s long takes are designed to make the film appear as one continuous shot. How distracting this advance information proves to be will depend to some extent on the viewer’s own technical knowledge. I have none so didn’t keep wondering ‘How did they do that?’ but I did sometimes ask myself why they did. The film more than held my attention and finally moved me. It may well be that the unrelenting, immersive effects of the camerawork had a lot to do with this – I can’t say. It would be a pity, though, to concentrate on Deakins’s feat of trompe l’oeil to the exclusion of other aspects of his cinematography. The earth colours and white, sunless skies that predominate are strongly expressive. Their transformation into the surreal, infernal darkness Schofield wakes to, after knocking himself out, is startling. The hero’s run through ruined buildings that immediately follows this awakening may well count as a video-game moment but it’s vividly nightmarish too. Schofield’s sprint along the line of advancing Devons to complete his mission is extraordinarily kinetic.
Thomas Newman and Sam Mendes go all the way back to American Beauty. Newman’s score for 1917 is thoughtful and varied and Mendes often makes good use of it, although the music pays diminishing dividends as it features more and more. This is particularly so in the closing scene. It’s only in the preceding sequence, with Joseph Blake, that Schofield has spoken his first name. He walks away from the elder Blake, sits under a tree and takes from his pocket photographs of his wife and child at home[2]. (The Jumblies isn’t a memory only of Schofield’s own childhood.) Silence on the soundtrack might have been a more potent accompaniment to this revelation – and a more imaginative expression of Schofield’s exhaustion on completion of his mission.
This isn’t a low-budget film ($90m, not quite yet recouped in ticket sales nearly a month after release in North America). Sam Mendes could hardly afford to ignore audience expectations. But he goes too far in the direction of exciting incident, submerging the personally important origins of his material and muffling the mythical aspect of his approach to it. I was almost shocked by the trailer for 1917, which announced the film as ‘from the director of Skyfall‘, rather than American Beauty, but it’s fair enough, and not only because the much more recent Skyfall was a box-office smash. His experience of 007 movie-making is palpable in Mendes’s direction of 1917. That’s not a minor flaw but it would be unfair to suggest that his emotionally penetrating side disappears entirely as Mendes ramps up the action thrills. Schofield’s heroism is always humanly real; he’s always believably vulnerable. Close to journey’s end, he must swim a river and is forced to clamber over the corpses of other men to get onto the bank. He does what he has to do then bursts into sobs.
16 January 2020
[1] According to the online article at https://atomtickets.com/movie-news/a-story-sam-mendes-grandfather-told-him-inspired-1917/, the essential story is autobiographical, as recorded in Alfred Mendes’s published memoirs. His delivery of a crucial message to British troops in Belgium, in October 1917, earned him the Military Medal.
[2] Two daughters, according to Wikipedia, though I didn’t pick this up. Schofield’s family doesn’t, by the way, reflect the circumstances of Sam Mendes’s grandfather at the time. Alfred Mendes didn’t marry until 1919.
