As a purely technical exercise in depicting the First World War, 1917 (and its seemingly unbroken single take) is successful but offers no insight into the characters it depicts or the events it recreates.
UK
3*
Director:
Sam Mendes
Screenwriters:
Sam Mendes
Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Director of Photography:
Roger Deakins
Running time: 120 minutes
One of the most infamous examples of a camera movement is the push-in of Kapò, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film about the Second World War. When a young Jewish woman in a concentration camp throws herself on an electrified fence and dies instantaneously, the camera dollies in see her corpse up close. The shot is grotesque and was justly condemned at the time by Jacques Rivette and subsequently by Serge Daney and many others. While showing something that everyone can agree is horrific, the camera seeks to beautify the moment for no purpose whatsoever.
Sam Mendes’s film about a single mission in the First World War, entitled 1917, does not commit quite the same atrocity, but it does use the camera to reach for beauty when that is precisely what a director should avoid if seeking to examine the human cost of war in any serious way. We follow along with two very young British lance corporals, William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), when they are sent across no man’s land to warn some 1,600 soldiers they are walking into a trap and should call off a planned attack. The director’s choice of a seemingly unbroken take, whose aim is clearly to immerse the viewer in the experience of war, is not without merit, but the execution makes it clear how shallow his reasoning was.
The single take appears to be the film’s raison d’être because it certainly isn’t the plot. Such a shot is often used to emphasise both the passage of time and the unity of action. We are meant to see development or interaction in a much more personal way as the point of view is generally tied to a single character. While The Lady in the Lake is the well-known but rather unrefined archetype, the best example is unquestionably the close focus of László Nemes’s Son of Saul.
In 1917, the camera starts with the two young men and ultimately settles on just one, who appears to mature over the course of around 18 hours of ominous calm, brutal warfare, bloody injury, a near-death experience and worse. But the camera has no particular point of view. While it starts as a humanlike observer alongside Schofield and Blake, it doesn’t take long before it flies low over a lake or high above a roaring river while the characters have to trudge around it or struggle to keep their head above water.
The notion of being immersed in the action also suggests that the viewer gets to experience the events (more or less, given the relative safety of the movie theatre) in the same way. But 1917 is so chock-full of Thomas Newman’s music, whose volume is dialled up all the way, that it is often impossible to focus on anything other than the mood being communicated: fear, happiness, danger, etc. The climactic battle scene is little more than soldiers running across a field as bombs explode to punctuate the heroic boom of Newman’s score. A scene in a medic’s tent after the battle is filled with bleeding injured soldiers, but they are mostly whimpering, and any loud screaming is drowned out by the music on the soundtrack.
Mendes is not showing us the war as it is. He is showing us the war as a work of art and uses a continuous tracking shot to do so. In addition, the camera and the lens stay squeaky clean for the duration of the running time, despite the explosions, the water, the dust and the mud that at least one of the characters has to wade through. This approach is simply unacceptable. The fact that the shot is, in fact, stitched together from multiple smaller shots, with some of the stitches easily noticeable, does not mitigate this problem, as the film’s ultimate goal is still, quite clearly, to look pretty rather than convey the visceral experience of being down in the tranches, not flying above them.
But what is particularly irksome is the camera’s inhuman movements, as when Schofield plunges down a waterfall while the camera is not only suspended above him but tracks backwards high up in the air. Or when the same character charges down a trench packed with soldiers, and the camera, instead of following closely behind to show us the chaos at close range, rises up out of the trench and follows smoothly above the soldiers’ heads. These are pretty shots, but they undercut the very role of the camera here, which is to serve as an invisible soldier.
The story itself is as thin as a rail, and the two major characters have little to no complexity. One long scene is wasted in a French town so that 1917 can implicitly hint at Schofield’s past, which is a secret it could have kept to itself until the final moments, when this implicitness is made explicit, in case we had missed the earlier scene.
This was a purely technical exercise aimed at further developing the skills Mendes had already showcased in the opening scene of Spectre. However, unlike, say, Alfonso Cuarón (and, specifically, DoP Emmanuel Lubezki), who has mastered the use of the unbroken take, the result here feels vapid and inconsequential, devoid of significance because it contains so little and says even less.