Directed by: Sam Mendes
Starring: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch
Rated R, 119 minutes
The first and most important aspect of “1917” is that it’s made to look like it was filmed in one take. This isn’t a new conceit; seventy years ago, Hitchcock did the same thing with “Rope,” and more recently, filmmakers like Alfonso Cuarón have made the long take a signature move. It’s a technique designed to impress and astound, not just for the superhuman planning it requires, but also because its execution is threatened constantly by minor hiccups—prop malfunctions, line flubs, missed marks—that wouldn’t matter under other circumstances.
“1917,” directed and co-written by Sam Mendes (“Skyfall”) and based on his grandfather’s experiences in World War I, acknowledges the long take’s long history, its complexity and unavoidable gimmickry, and does it justice. It wasn’t actually filmed in one long take (neither was “Rope,” for that matter), but through precise camera work and seamless editing, it reads as one, following two young British soldiers as they deliver an urgent message from one regiment to another. Like Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film “Dunkirk,” it begins with a straightforward task and devotes itself entirely to completing it; unlike “Dunkirk,” whose technical bravura reflected a chest-beating machismo, “1917” is heavy and bitter, the weight of its unbroken take becoming, eventually, the unbearable weight of war itself.
The movie is not so much directed as choreographed, its two central characters traveling in real time through a murky, muddy hellscape dotted with dead bodies, bullet casings, and weakly blooming flowers. Their task is to stop a regiment of 1,600 men from marching into a German trap, forcing them to journey through no man’s land to find the other regiment’s colonel before the following sunrise. Yet for a premise dependent both thematically and technically on the soldiers being in the right place at the right time, everything they encounter is deeply wrong. The pail of fresh milk left behind at an abandoned barn; the rat that sets off a trip-wire explosion; the young girl squatting in a dark hovel, looking after an infant whose parents have disappeared. With its every exhausting illustration of lives interrupted and reduced to shambles, the journey drags them—and us—into a state of weariness.
That weariness gradually takes its toll on the two soldiers. Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, “Game of Thrones”), whose brother is stationed in the other regiment, trudges on defiantly, wilfully ignoring his fear until the horrors of their mission confront him directly. Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay, “Captain Fantastic”), more stoic and experienced than his partner, tells in one scene how he earned a medal in battle and later sold it for a bottle of wine. “I was thirsty,” he explains, like there’s nothing simpler in the world. Given what they witness as they creep through deserted battlefields and skeletal husks of towns, we can’t fault him for not wanting a keepsake. They move slower and slower as time goes on, weighed down by a world that seems impossibly cruel yet is somehow the same one where they’ve always lived.
Mendes injects this infernal journey with a poetic sensibility, lingering on choice images that repeat themselves in subtly shifting ways. Schofield, for example, is subjected to a brutal string of injuries to his left hand: it catches on barbed wire; it sinks into deep mud; it plunges, accidentally, into the rotting chest cavity of a dead soldier. Lone animals appear before them like omens: a rat, a crow, a single cow. The trenches become emblematic, too, these long, claustrophobic labyrinths in which we repeatedly get lost. Mendes paints war not as a single form of pain or confusion, but rather a whole panorama of suffering that even the bonds of brotherhood and honor cannot abide.
In this way, “1917” calls to mind another World War I epic, Lewis Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front.” That movie, made barely a decade after the war, famously ends with a man reaching out to a butterfly, only to die before he can touch it. But where “All Quiet” saw proud young men reaching for an ideal and coming up tragically short, “1917” rejects militant patriotism as an illusion, its characters all unwittingly swallowed up by the monolith of war. “War is hell” isn’t a new sentiment, but “1917” takes care to show us who lives through that hell, and what it leaves behind.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/24/20.