1917 (2019)
dir. Sam Mendes
Rated: R
image: ©2019 Universal Pictures
The most visceral cinematic experience of the year has arrived. Director Sam Mendes has used every technical flourish up his sleeve to conjure the astonishing World War I film 1917. If you were at all wowed by the virtuosity of the unbroken opening tracking shot of 2015’s Spectre – Mendes’s second James Bond outing – then 1917 won’t disappoint you. What Mendes achieved with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema in the first five minutes of Spectre, he manages to sustain for the entire 119-minute running time of 1917.
This time out, he’s working with Roger Deakins, master cinematographer and elder-statesperson of the profession. Deakins adds his gorgeous photography from films like No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to lithe, dumbfounding continuous camera movement. The combination makes 1917 an unforgettable piece of art.
There is undoubtedly no shortage of movie-making legerdemain – which digital trickery has only made easier – at work to make us believe that 1917 is one uninterrupted sequence of action from beginning to end. There is a long tradition in the movies of using this technique: from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in 1948 to the 2015 Academy Award Best Picture winner Birdman.
The freeing nature of digital cinema – where the filmmaker doesn’t have to worry about how much film stock the magazine can hold, but instead is only limited by the storage space on a memory card – has made actual one-shot films easier and more abundant in recent years. Two notable examples are Mike Figgis’s experimental film Timecode and the historical drama Russian Ark. Still, the simulated version of this kind of filmmaking, as is 1917, isn’t any less awe-inspiring.
Adding to the achievement of his movie is the sheer scope of Mendes’s story. While the plot is about as stripped down as it can get, the expanse of locations and highly technical action sequences around which Mendes and Deakins weave their endlessly moving camera is incredible.
1917 tells the story of Lance Corporals Schofield and Blake, two British soldiers with an impossible task. British Intelligence has learned of an impending ambush awaiting the front line in France at the hands of the German forces. The enemy are planning to fake a retreat in order to draw a battalion of 1,600 troops out into a massacre. Schofield and Blake must cross miles of war-scarred territory in a race against time to notify commanders at the front before it’s too late. In an echo of another great war film, Saving Private Ryan, and to add personal stakes for our heroes, Blake’s own brother is among the soldiers they are trying to save.
Mendes wrote the screenplay with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, a writer for both the screen and comic books. The director has a deeply personal connection to the story. He took the kernel of a tale related to him and expanded it for his film. As a child, Mendes’s grandfather, novelist and World War I veteran Alfred Mendes, told his grandson the story of a messenger with a critical piece of information to deliver. The story “fragment,” as he calls it, stuck with Mendes, and he turned it, with the help of Wilson-Cairns, into 1917.
With such skimpy source material, Mendes could have developed the story solely as a vehicle for his one-shot movie structure. The way Mendes handles this technique alone would still make 1917 an outstanding tour de force. But there’s more to his picture than that.
In Mendes’s capable hands, 1917 becomes a rumination on both the bloody, awful ugliness and stark, terrible beauty of war. One nighttime sequence that has the camera following characters running through the bombed-out ruins of buildings as a fire rages conjures contradictory feelings of awe and horror. Deakins’s painterly cinematography in this sequence put me in mind of the work of photographer Sebastião Salgado as detailed in Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s fantastic documentary The Salt of the Earth.
At one point in their harrowing journey, Schofield and Blake walk into an open field with a dogfight between two airplanes playing out over their heads. Mendes stages this scene as something out of The Wizard of Oz. There is a fantastical element to it that relates just how much war can turn the human experience upside down.
Mendes and his set design team also capture unique aspects to the particular war in which the movie is set. The utter desolation of the no-man’s land between the two opposing forces’ trench systems is as stripped and ugly as any of the footage you see in They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s documentary from 2018 about World War I. The horrific conditions of the trenches, too, are similarly realized in 1917. And in what must have been a (brilliant) use of CGI, a dying character’s color is drained right before our eyes as his life slowly slips away in a how-did-they-do-that moment of deeply moving storytelling.
The two leads of 1917 are both up to the task of carrying such a kinetic and action-heavy movie. George MacKay, whom I first saw in 2016’s Captain Fantastic, plays Schofield. Dean-Charles Chapman – Game of Thrones’s Tommen Baratheon – is Blake, and his character carries the extra weight of knowing his own brother will die if they fail their mission.
Both men run the gamut of human emotion over the course of the film. Terror, exhaustion, wonder, and gritty determination are just a few of the feelings MacKay and Chapman successfully convey to us over the course of their journey. At the same time, they both manage to never let us forget their characters are really just kids, being asked to deal with situations that would leave the most seasoned adults at a complete loss.
War is hell, as the extremely cliché saying goes. Sam Mendes reminds us of that fact with a freshness and immediacy that makes 1917 a primal, gut-wrenching experience.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- 1917 is probably the most thrilling cinematic experience of the year. Mendes, Wilson-Cairns, Deakins, and everyone else involved made an exceptional film. They bring the chaos of war (especially World War I) to life on the screen.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, and Andrew Scott all make brief but very effective cameo appearances in 1917.
- There are several instances of the camera doing 360° movements around characters. Considering everything going on within the world of the movie as the camera does these movements, it is astounding to think about the technical difficulty of pulling them off.
- Just as technically awesome is a sequence in which characters get swept away in a raging river.
- There is a moment within the first 15 minutes or so of the movie where a character sets off an explosion by walking into a trip wire. That is the moment when the movie kicks into high gear, and it never lets up for the next hour-and-45-minutes.
- Circumstances worked out so that this is the longest I’ve ever gone between seeing the movie and writing about it. It was almost two weeks between them. I have to say, I lucked out. 1917 was such a vivid experience for me that I had no trouble summoning it in my mind while writing about it.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Nothing interesting or out of the ordinary this time around. This was a press screening, and everyone was on their best behavior. It took place in an XD auditorium (Cinemark’s answer to IMAX, so, basically, a giant-ass screen), which was perfect for the movie.