Directed by: Mel Gibson
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Teresa Palmer, Vince Vaughn, Hugo Weaving
Rated R, 139 minutes
Mel Gibson is no stranger to epics, having already gone to medieval Scotland, the Bible, and the Mayans for inspiration, so I’m surprised he took this long to make his World War II epic. The moralizing “Hacksaw Ridge,” while reasserting that Gibson is still a master of crafting thrilling battle scenes, struggles to land its philosophical punches, so it comes off as a self-congratulatory show of military heroics, albeit one with terrific production value.
The movie, based on a true story, chronicles the military service of army medic Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield, “The Amazing Spider-Man”). In the first half of the film, we see his upbringing and home life, marked by his courtship of local nurse Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer, “Warm Bodies”) and an unsteady relationship with his father (Hugo Weaving, “The Matrix”), a man tormented by memories from World War I. As the war heats up and his countrymen enlist, Doss realizes he cannot sit idly by. Despite his father’s disapproval and Dorothy’s protests, he enlists.
There’s just one problem: Doss, a Seventh-Day Adventist, cannot bring himself to actually hold a weapon. How can his army superiors, like the gruff Sgt. Howell (Vince Vaughn, “Dodgeball”), train him if he won’t fire a gun? Doss, however, is determined to serve as a medic, a job for which he needs no weapon. So, in that capacity, he eventually ships off to Okinawa. There, to everyone’s astonishment, he becomes a hero, saving dozens of his fellow soldiers on the battlefield known as Hacksaw Ridge.
This is a strange movie, in that half of it is flawless; the second half contains the best battle sequences since “Saving Private Ryan,” nerve-wracking and edited to perfection. Unfortunately, that leaves the entire first half of the movie, which features some of the corniest cinematic Americana since, well, “Saving Private Ryan.” This half is full of recognizable but uninspired moments, from Desmond and Dorothy’s generic movie theater date, to Sarge calling one of his men a maggot, to a dumbfounding scene in which a young Desmond discovers religion by staring at a poster of the Ten Commandments. Ah, the subtle language of film!
Amid the war movie clichés and plot points that are obviously just vehicles meant to get us to the good stuff, the story deals at length with tough moral questions. Is violence justified when committed against forces of evil? How much involvement in a war effort is justifiable for someone who doesn’t believe in violence? The struggle for Doss, a moral stick in the mud, becomes that of reconciling his nonviolent lifestyle with his duty to support his regiment, whose other members are doing the dirty, thankless work of war.
Strong actors might enliven these themes, but this cast lacks the chops; Gibson remains a technical director, not an actor’s director. Garfield’s Doss is aggressively dense, to the point that he’s far less endearing than the movie would have us believe. Weaving, as his father, delivers the film’s best performance, a grave jowl-shaking that almost sells the role’s mid-movie change of heart. Meanwhile, Palmer puts up with a throwaway part, and Vaughn, better at leading dodgeball teams than army units, does not inspire confidence.
That said, once the fighting gets going, the characterizations—and the moral compass—that guide the first half are completely abandoned. The guiding principle of the latter half is a simple premise: What would an unarmed soldier do in the thick of battle? This is a true story, so the facts provide the answers, but little of what we’ve learned over the first half plays a part in the second half.
Granted, that second half is undeniably, viscerally exciting. But the fact remains that the film fails to live up to its own moral standards, leaving us with a contradictory message. Consider the name “Hacksaw Ridge”; it’s as if the movie, in its very title, admits that the discussions of morality and violence are mere posturing. Gibson and company know you’re only there to see the bloody bits, and “Hacksaw Ridge” has some great bloody bits. And by pretending to abhor violence, the film only draws more attention to it, making this movie one of the most effective, and thereby unsettling, glorifications of violence ever produced.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 2/10/17.