Old Yorker

  • Hacksaw Ridge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mel Gibson (2016)

    Mel Gibson the director evidently likes to give his films stark, formidable titles – The Man Without a Face, Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto.  The climax of his fifth picture takes place on the Maeda Escarpment, a crucial location in the three-month Battle of Okinawa in 1945.  The escarpment is known by several names but it’s no surprise that Gibson opts for the cutting-edge Hacksaw Ridge.  (According to IMDB, his next project, currently ‘in development’, is Berserker.)    I’d never seen a film directed by Mel Gibson until now.   Each time Braveheart is on television, I think I ought to watch it but always chicken out at the prospect of hours of fighting.  There’s a large amount of fighting in Hacksaw Ridge too yet this is the biography of a pacifist.  Desmond Doss was born in 1919 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised there as a Seventh Day Adventist.   Following the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, Doss was compelled by moral and religious imperatives both to enlist and to refuse to carry arms.  He served as a combat medic with the 77th Infantry Division and, on the Maeda Escarpment, saved the lives of seventy-five wounded soldiers.  He became the first conscientious objector ever to receive the US Medal of Honor for actions above and beyond the call of duty.

    The BBFC certification for Hacksaw Ridge draws attention to ‘strong bloody violence, gory injury detail’ and Mel Gibson delivers on this threat very quickly.  The film opens with scenes of fighting at Okinawa before flashing back to Desmond’s childhood and youth prior to 1941.  When an anonymous man is injured in a traffic accident in Lynchburg and Desmond uses his belt as a tourniquet, we get an excellent view of blood spurting from the wound on the man’s upper leg.  It’s true this is a key moment in the story:  Desmond accompanies the man to hospital, falls in love at first sight with his future wife Dorothy Schutte, a nurse there, and, as a result of this infatuation, starts to develop an interest in medical work.   That close-up of the injured leg seems unwarranted, even so.  During the Hacksaw Ridge sequences, Gibson shows the experiences of the hero and his US infantry colleagues, whom we’ve met before in the scenes that describe Desmond’s basic military training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.  Gibson also shows the leader of a vanquished Japanese unit instructing one of his men to behead him, and that instruction being carried out.  We don’t know these Japanese as individuals in the story; we do already know of the tradition of ritual assisted suicide by defeated Japanese military leaders.  Why does Gibson include this death, other than to ring the changes on the other forms of execution we’ve been watching?

    Until the Battle of Okinawa is underway, Mel Gibson is going through the motions.  The mechanical screenplay is by Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan.  The boy Desmond (Darcy Bryce) throws a brick at and hits his brother Hal (Roman Guerriero).  Although no lasting damage is done, the realisation that he might have killed Hal and the encouragement of his devout Seventh Day Adventist mother Bertha (Rachel Griffiths) are enough to convert Desmond to lifelong non-violence.   Domestic ructions also demonstrate, however, that – as he will show in response to Pearl Harbor – the young man Desmond (Andrew Garfield) knows to do the right thing in the face of vicious aggressive action by another.  His father Tom (Hugo Weaving), a Great War veteran who takes refuge in alcohol from the lasting trauma of his own military experience, abuses his wife.    When a drunken Tom threatens Bertha with a gun, Desmond grabs the weapon from his father but doesn’t pull the trigger.  At army camp, his refusal to bear arms or to take part in training on Saturday (his Sabbath) results in Desmond’s being picked on by the drill sergeant (Vince Vaughn) and senior officers (including Sam Worthington); or being branded a coward, beaten up, ostracised by his fellow trainee soldiers.  (Luke Bracey and Luke Pegler register most strongly among this group.)  Whether hitting him or attempting to get him out of the army on psychiatric grounds, Desmond’s persecutors exhibit only aggressive hostility – there’s no suggestion of, for example, a sense of bafflement or of their feeling threatened by his extraordinary ethics.  (The psychological monochrome is meant to make it more impactful when his colleagues see Desmond’s courage under fire and the error of their ways.)

    Hacksaw Ridge hits a low point of shallow melodrama in the episode that sees Desmond Doss tried by a military court for insubordination in refusing to carry a firearm.  Desmond’s father suddenly smartens up his act and calls in a favour from his commanding officer in World War I, now a brigadier general.  Outside the room in which his son’s case is being heard, Tom suggests that Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), now Desmond’s fiancée, take in the brigadier general’s letter, which confirms that the refusal to carry a firearm is protected by Act of Congress.  Dorothy says only military personnel can be admitted so the father barges his way in.  Although he was suggesting just a screen moment ago that Dorothy rather than he hand over the letter, Tom Doss now insists on delivering it with a determined I-fought-for-my-country-is-this-how-my-country-repays-me number to the tribunal.

    The action then leaps forward to Hacksaw Ridge.  We get no sense of how Desmond’s relationships with the rest of the platoon have developed in the intervening three years.  (Even before his heroics on the Maeda Escarpment, the real Desmond Doss was awarded a Bronze Star for helping wounded soldiers in 1944 on Guam and the Philippines.)   Mel Gibson, impatient to get to the battle scenes, now lets rip, with bravura editing (by John Gilbert) and an impressive, sometimes imaginative use of sound.  (As well as the continuing explosions, we get, for example, the unnerving ping of one particular bullet hitting one particular metal helmet.)  The warfare on Hacksaw Ridge is a three-act drama in itself.   First, the US forces scale the sheer cliff face of the escarpment to get to the Japanese dug in on the ridge; in the combat that follows, both sides sustain heavy losses.  This is followed by the next day’s Japanese counterattack to drive the Americans off Hacksaw Ridge, which sees Desmond’s repeated, single-handed lifesaving:  he carries soldier after wounded soldier to the cliff edge and rappels them down to safety.  A final American assault takes place on the following day.  It’s Desmond’s Sabbath but he joins his fellow soldiers – whose mascot he has now become – on the mission, to care for more wounded.  Desmond himself is injured by a grenade but is successfully lowered down the cliff, holding on tight to the Bible that Dorothy gave him.

    Act one contains some extraordinary images:  aerial shots of men climbing the network of rope ladders on the side of the cliff; one soldier using the dismembered corpse of another as a shield.  This is a powerful description of the horrific effects of war – a succession of human beings are blown or shot to pieces – yet it seems protracted and designed more to demonstrate Mel Gibson’s flair for filming warfare than to make us feel the terrible relentlessness of the bloodshed.  The relentlessness of Gibson’s coercive direction, however, is emotionally persuasive.   I was always uncomfortable that Hacksaw Ridge was showing (off) as much mayhem as possible to promote its protagonist’s pacifism.  I was aware of – and wanted to resist – the techniques being used to move me (Rupert Gregson-Williams’s effective score among them).  But I was moved, nevertheless, in the rescue scenes – and I could understand why some people in the Richmond Odeon applauded when the wounded Desmond was safely lowered to the ground.  Gibson and his cinematographer Simon Duggan keep up the visual inventiveness – for example, in a sequence in which Desmond hides a wounded soldier from view by virtually burying him:  a single eye watches from inside a mound of earth as the Japanese soldiers walk around it.  Some of the religious imagery is overblown, though; it may correspond to Mel Gibson’s own outlook but it seems contrary to Desmond Doss’s firm but unassuming faith.

    Even outside a war film, Andrew Garfield is an unusual leading man.  His long-necked slenderness, innocent eyes and expression make him deerlike.  He naturally suggests a sweet and eccentric nature.  Those qualities were repressed (and Garfield’s performance was unmemorable) in Silence but Mel Gibson exploits them thoroughly, and eventually very successfully.  Garfield is charming and occasionally funny in the Lynchburg scenes, and convincingly inside Desmond Doss’s mind when he politely but firmly justifies his position to his military superiors.  You nevertheless feel that Desmond’s difference-from-the-rest is being presented too obviously:  Garfield speaks mostly in a little, half-whispering voice.   In the last hour of the film, things change.  Garfield’s distinctive temperament not only makes Desmond’s heroism seem especially remarkable and Hacksaw Ridge affecting; it’s also a counterpoint to the strong-arming direction – and a big reason why you end up not resenting the film’s manipulative side.   At the end, Mel Gibson shows news film of the real Desmond Doss receiving his Medal of Honor and footage of an interview with him in old age (he died in 2006 at the age of eighty-seven).  It’s to Andrew Garfield’s credit that these inserts don’t eclipse the character he’s created.  They feel continuous with it.

    31 January 2017

  • Denial

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mick Jackson (2016)

    ‘David against Goliath’ is how David Irving, in Mick Jackson’s Denial, describes the prospect of the real-life libel trial that the film dramatises.   In her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University, named Irving, among others, as a Holocaust denier.  Three years later, he sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books.  The libel suit was eventually heard, in a judge-only trial, in London, in the early weeks of 2000.  In Denial, Irving makes his biblical analogy with a smug grin that’s as unappealing as everything else about him; but on this point, if on no other, it’s hard to say that he’s wrong.  Irving appears at the trial as litigant in person, conducting his own case.   The legal team for Deborah Lipstadt is headed by Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya (Julius’s recent clients had included Diana, Princess of Wales); the lead defence barrister is the high-profile Richard Rampton QC (the McLibel case, etc).   The long tradition of David v Goliath oppositions – and against-the-odds legal victories – in screen courtroom drama makes the viewer all the more aware of what a peculiar contest is taking place here.  The considerable forces of the establishment are the good guys.  The plucky maverick is the villain of the piece.

    Although Mick Jackson’s filmography includes plenty of docudrama (more for television than for cinema) and David Hare has written the screenplay (based on Lipstadt’s History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier), Denial seems not just an unimaginative movie but a well-nigh pointless exercise.  The Penguin-Lipstadt lawyers, anxious that David Irving might work a jury to his advantage, request that the case be heard by a judge alone.  They submit that the technical arguments involved are too complex for a jury; Irving accedes to their request on the same grounds.  Mick Jackson and David Hare get across the point that in English law the burden of proof in a libel case rests with the defendant; that, in Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt, the latter therefore had to show that Irving knowingly distorted the available factual material in order to claim that the Holocaust never occurred.  But Jackson and Hare are nervous of getting into too much detail – they’re as worried it’ll send the viewer to sleep as the lawyers were nervous it would go over the jurors’ heads.  The worry is understandable but it prompts the question of whether this material is more suitable for documentary than dramatic treatment on screen:  videos of Irving’s racist and anti-Semitic speeches, played by the defence to the judge, have a stronger emotional impact on the viewer than anything else that occurs in court in Denial.

    Mick Jackson occasionally tries to force a moment of high drama.  During the summing up by Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson), Mr Justice Charles Gray (Alex Jennings) intervenes:  if Irving is a committed anti-Semite, the judge asks, isn’t it possible that the factual errors in his publications – errors which are the basis of the defence case – are, although reflections of Irving’s prejudice, ‘honest’ errors nevertheless?  Sharp intake of breath from Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz); Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) is ashen-faced; even Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) falters at first as he responds to the question.  He then recovers his poise and insists that the defence has established that Irving consistently and knowingly played fast and loose with historical record in order to justify his arguments.  Rampton’s answer seems persuasive and the judge to acknowledge this, albeit in a properly non-committal way.  Even so, there’s an out-of-court follow-up:  back in the US, Deborah Lipstadt reiterates alarm at the implication of the judge’s intervention – to an Emory colleague who’s just about the only American, apart from her dog, that Lipstadt speaks to outside the lecture hall.  (The colleague is played by Nikki Amuka-Bird, so good in the recent adaptation of Zadie Smith’s NW on BBC.)  This outburst and the suspense as to which way the judgment will go seem phony attempts to conventionalise Denial.  The fact surely is that the defence in this trial succeeded largely thanks to the analysis, carried out over a two-year period after the bringing of the libel suit, of Irving’s published work by the distinguished Cambridge historian Richards Evans, the leading defence witness.  The painstaking work by Evans (played in the film by John Sessions) and his research assistants is essentially undramatic:  it reveals not a single smoking gun but a sustained tendentious pattern of selectiveness and misrepresentation.

    In one of the videos played in court, Irving (Timothy Spall) claims that all but 5% of the thinking public finds claims about the Holocaust (claims, that is, from those who believe it happened) ‘boring’.  As usual, you find yourself disagreeing with him but 5% is probably a big overestimate of the audience for Denial that is sympathetic to Irving and/or doesn’t regard him as not just unpleasant but a monomaniac bore.  Preaching to the converted is putting it extremely mildly.  Deborah Lipstadt won’t debate the Holocaust with Irving – their first clash in Denial occurs when he attends a public lecture she’s giving and makes his presence felt, in a big way, in the Q&A that follows.  At a press conference with Penguin after the judge has found in their favour, Lipstadt asserts, however, that she considers freedom of speech sacrosanct – and that her branding Irving a Holocaust denier was an attempt not to deny him free speech but to take him to task for abusing it.   With Donald Trump in the White House, this ‘abuse of free speech’ element of the material has a resonance the makers of Denial wouldn’t have expected but that unhappy accident isn’t enough to validate the film.

    Deborah Lipstadt is repeatedly and increasingly frustrated with the rules of the English libel game:  she’s enraged when Anthony Julius decides against putting her in the witness box, appalled that no Holocaust survivors will be invited to give evidence either.  Richard Rampton attempts to placate her with a description of his tried-and-tested tactical recipe for success in a libel case:  ‘Stay seated.  Button your lip.  Win’.  Rachel Weisz the actress must have been able to empathise with Deborah Lipstadt the frustrated witness:  Weisz is given little to do beyond (a) you-cannot-be-serious expostulations about English libel law and the Julius/Rampton trial strategy, and (b) expressions of passionate outrage on behalf of Holocaust victims.  (Both (a) and (b) are planted in David Hare’s script to pop up at regular intervals.)  Timothy Spall’s first appearance – as the sinister, mad-eyed Irving emerges from the shadows to gatecrash Lipstadt’s lecture – doesn’t bode well.  Overall, though, Spall does a creditable job:  he resists the temptation of simply commenting on the deeply unpleasant man he’s incarnating.   Although Spall is slightly younger than Irving was at the time of the trial, the actor’s considerable recent weight loss makes him look older and more vulnerable than the real, bullish thing.  This has the effect of reinforcing Irving’s underdog quality.

    A movie like this – too commercially conscious to settle for a quasi-documentary style but too thinly textured to work as drama – puts heavy demands on its lead actors:  they’re kept on a histrionically tight leash and expected to compel the audience at the same time.  In the circumstances, Tom Wilkinson does an admirable job of conveying the tension between Richard Rampton’s professional responsibility to stick to his brief and his personal feelings about the Holocaust and David Irving.  Andrew Scott’s natural eccentricity and wit give him a few good moments as Anthony Julius.   It’s no surprise, though, that those with relatively small roles, as junior members of the defence legal and research teams, create more believable people:  Caren Pistorius, Jack Lowden, Max Befort, Will Attenborough – and, especially, Jackie Clune, an older actress new to me.  The cast also includes Harriet Walter, in a cameo as an Auschwitz survivor, and Mark Gatiss, as the Dutch Holocaust scholar Robert Jan van Pelt.  Since I tend to complain about Alex Jennings, it’s only fair to report that, as the judge, he gives a well-judged performance, especially in that eleventh-hour intervention bit.

    30 January 2017

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