1917
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Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) cross no-man’s-land in 1917
One of the books I read in my grad school World War I class was called Eye-Deep in Hell. The book was a break from our reading about strategy and troop movements and the cultural and political substructure of the war and took us instead into the experience of combat. It answers, in enormous and thoroughly documented detail, the question I’ve mentioned on this blog many, many times before in regard to war and the past—What was it like? The horrors of the Western Front as described in that book piled up line by line, paragraph by paragraph, first shocking, then paining or nauseating, and finally numbing the reader.
1917 is the best realization of that experience that I’ve ever seen on film.
The short version
The film begins with two young English lance corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), at rest behind the lines. Their rest proves short-lived. When Blake’s sergeant tells him to pick a man and follow him, Blake chooses his pal Schofield. Rather than being assigned light duty or sent on some other errand, Blake and Schofield meet their commanding officer, General Erinmore (Colin Firth). The general personally briefs them for a special mission—a British battalion on the other side of a German salient is scheduled to make an attack across no-man’s-land at dawn the following morning, an attempt to exploit a German withdrawal and force them to continue retreating. Aerial reconnaissance has revealed that the Germans have fallen back to an impregnable new line of defense, meaning that unless the British attack is called off the men going over the top will be annihilated. But the Germans have cut all telegraph and telephone lines to the doomed unit and so the message must be delivered on foot—as soon as possible.
Why send Blake? His elder brother is a lieutenant in the battalion. Fail to deliver the message calling off the attack and he and 1,600 others will be killed. They have about eight hours.
With this simple setup and these high stakes—both military and personal—Blake and Schofield set off. They move up through the labyrinthine lines of trenches and, when they reach the front line, strike out into what used to be no-man’s-land. From there they must work their way through the abandoned German trenches (which are depressingly better designed and built than their own), the emptied countryside beyond, a bombed out village, and finally into the freshly dug trenches of the battalion as it prepares to attack. Much goes wrong.
I don’t want to say much more about it because I want everyone who can to go see it, and to see with the uncertainty that the characters live with moment by moment.
In which I gush over technical matters
1917 is technically brilliant—the most well-made movie I’ve seen all year, a masterpiece of what cinema is capable of. The director, Sam Mendes, and the cinematographer, the great Roger Deakins, have used all their visual and dramatic skills to craft a magnificent, overwhelmingly powerful movie. It’s breathtaking, one of the very few films which I’d describe with the overused word “immersive.” The film is awash in the kind of detail you find in books like Eye-Deep in Hell—the sucking mud, the stagnant water in the craters, the banks of sandbags and miles of telephone wire, the omnipresent rats boldly feeding on corpses. The men wear bulky, filthy uniforms and stagger under heavy packs, often needing to help each other up, and when they lose their breath and pant we understand why.
The film’s depiction of no-man’s-land is particularly harrowing. It’s a barren waste pocked by shell-holes and strewn with dense tangles of barbed wire, dotted all over with the rotting corpses of both men and animals. Blake and Schofield slip and stumble through the muck and up and down the artillery-scarred terrain. 1917 doesn’t just show you what it was like, it makes you feel what it was like. It’s all there but the smell.
In addition to the exceptional production design, Deakins’s camerawork helps create this sense of immersion. It’s well known by now that the film is a single continuous shot lasting its almost two-hour running time. There is, in fact, one cut—blackness as a character is knocked unconscious—and the film is not really a single shot but multiple long takes stitched together digitally. But thanks to meticulous planning and seamless editing, for most of the film the impression is of a continuous, unbroken shot. I’ve never seen it done better.
I wanted to laud this in a little detail because I usually dislike gimmicks like this. In other films that are either “one shot” or simply include lots of long shots—“oners”—I find the result off-putting, especially as the “hidden” cuts are usually plainly obvious and the camera continuously glides and shifts and pivots to mimic the effect of traditional shot-reverse shot editing. Here, the camera lingers even as it and the characters move, and Deakins and Mendes often allow the characters themselves to change the composition rather than whipping the camera around. (Compare “the Spielberg oner.”) The style is always under tight control.
The greatest virtue of Mendes’s direction and Deakins’s cinematography in 1917 is their willingness to embrace stillness. Many times throughout the film the camera reaches a carefully composed point and settles, allowing important scenes to pass with our observation unbroken. It’s a painterly or theatrical effect, and is most powerfully used in a scene featuring a surprising—and agonizingly slow—death. It’s brilliantly done.
I’ve already emphasized the detailed recreation of the trenches and the sensory effect it has, but the visual splendor of 1917 shouldn’t be overlooked. Deakins’s work, especially in the austere landscapes through the middle of the film, as Blake and Schofield walk through the empty countryside behind the former German lines, reminds me not a little of Dunkirk, but employed to even better effect. The visuals throughout—from the muddy, cluttered trenches at the beginning through the wreck of no-man’s-land and the darkness of the German lines, to the vast emptiness behind, the nightmare world of flare-lit rubble in a French village, and finally the shallow new trenches dug into chalky ground facing the German lines—are striking, both in their detail and their spareness, and are perfectly calculated to support the mood of the characters as they leave the established, busy, and familiar behind for unknown danger.
Writing, cast, and characters
That points as well to the writing. 1917 is thematically rich despite being so straightforward, and everything in the film is carefully set up. It’s easy to miss because of the film’s amazing technical achievements, but the story is well crafted and brilliantly structured.
The best evidence of this care is how much Mendes and his co-writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, are able to make us care about two men we get to know in real time. We learn very little about them—at first. Blake is chipper, talkative, blithe. We intuit that he’s younger, or at least less experienced, than Schofield, and talks freely about home and family in a way Schofield pointedly does not. Schofield has been previously decorated—we never find out why—but is more taciturn and bitter. He says early on that it would be easier simply not to go home on leave since coming back to the trenches is so painful. He is more clearly haunted by what he’s been through, and George MacKay’s expressive, hollowed out face conveys more of the war than any dialogue could. The two men’s fear as they approach and then enter no-man’s-land is palpable, and things only get worse from there.
Other, more recognizable actors pop up in one-scene roles—Colin Firth as the general who sends Blake and Schofield on their mission, Andrew Scott as an officer who has given up on everything, Mark Strong as another, more gentlemanly sort who helps them along the way, Benedict Cumberbatch as the haughty colonel meant to receive the general’s message, Richard Madden as Blake’s brother—but Blake and Schofield are the stars and Chapman and MacKay are excellent. You can feel their camaraderie, even when they bicker, and you see it in a simple but moving image repeated several times—Blake bending wordlessly to give Schofield a hand, helping him to his feet, and the pair moving on.
Neither man—particularly Schofield—would think of themselves as heroes, but they do undeniably heroic things in the course of their mission. They do so because of the situation they’ve been thrust into, a situation they didn’t ask for—as Schofield makes plain after one near miss—but also because of their love for one another, their families, and the men like them who could be killed if they fail.
The reality of war
The two stars are also, crucially, very young looking, a good reminder than wars tend to be fought by men in their teens or early twenties. This boyish looking pair and thousands of their fellows live through conditions most of us could never imagine, and 1917’s invitation to see, to consider, and to live through those things with this pair—to feel compassion, literally “suffering with”—is one of its greatest strengths.
I’ve already talked about all the detail that went into 1917—the impeccable recreations of the trenches, the attention to clothing and gear—and how that helps us feel what it was like, but the thing that really sells the film’s vision of what it was like is the actors—both the stars and the hundreds of extras. The overwhelming impression of the soldiers of the Great War that one takes away from 1917 is one of unutterable weariness. The film begins and ends with characters stopping for some much-needed rest, Blake complains constantly of being hungry and even rifles through abandoned German supplies for food, and Schofield is so tired that at one point he drifts to sleep in a river. And any time the camera takes us through the trenches, anyone who is not actively at work—marching forward or to the rear, bringing in the wounded, shoring up the walls of the trench—is sitting, either asleep or staring blankly at the curiosity Blake and Schofield present as they pass through. We see men sleeping, smoking, eating, all haggard, all slouched into the most relaxed position available to them. The world of 1917 is a world of endless movement and exhaustion, which may make it one of the most realistic war films ever made.
The film also does not shy away from the sheer waste of World War I. The bodies in no-man’s-land—some of which have been there so long that the living have given them jocular nicknames—are the most obvious example, but the wastage accumulates in other ways. As the dreaded assault on the new German line approaches we see a communications trench lined with dozens of stretchers, ready for the inevitable, and even the civilians suffer. In the concluding scene of a nightmarish sequence beginning at night and stretching into the dawn, one of our protagonists literally swims through the bloated corpses of civilians that have washed up in an eddy in a river.
It’s harrowing, and the camera never looks away. Blake and Schofield can’t escape it and neither can we.
Conclusion
1917 is an excellent example of what cinema can do when all its component parts are worked by masters. Its writing, acting, and camerawork are all perfectly integrated, with each supporting the others. It’s a masterpiece. See it on the big screen if you can.
But more importantly, the story and experience the filmmakers have used their skill and craft to tell is unforgettable. 1917 takes us into a lost world and makes us see and feel and remember it in the way it deserves—as an unspeakably wasteful, frustrating, tragic, wearying horror, but a horror in which good, ordinary men like Blake and Schofield showed the greatest kind of love for their friends, which is also the greatest kind of heroism.
