CAUTION!!: Spoilers abound!
Paul Gross's years-in-the-making personal project "Passchendaele" has
finally been released.
First of all: A Canadian Army combat movie -- finally. I've been
waiting a long time for one, and now, at last, I have one. (Seriously,
film and TV producers in Canada have never before done a real military
combat film; budget restrictions have always held them back. I've long
been envious of the Australians who have managed to make several war
movies while Canadians made nothing. And, no, sorry, the CBC's
mini-series "Dieppe" doesn't count; that production was too low-budget
to properly show any decent battle action.)
Passchendaele is about two hours long, with 20 to 30 minutes of combat
at the start and 35 minutes at the end, and a huge part in the middle
set in Alberta.
The long sequence set in Canada actually isn't tedious to sit through,
or anything, but that doesn't change the fact that there's too much of
it. The recreation of Calgary in 1917 is convincing and the shots of
the southwestern Alberta foothills are breathtaking, but the romance is
over-written, with both characters having far too many troubles and
secrets that will keep them apart to be believable. I suppose some
people might say that this movie is like an old-fa****oned romance from
decades ago, but others might say that it's just corny and stupid. I
was almost rolling my eyes at all the Grand Tragedy that Paul piles on
in the script.
I mean, look at the list: Sgt. Michael Dunne (Paul Gross) has Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder (although they didn't call it that back then)
because of his war experiences. Nurse Sarah Mann is of German ancestry,
so almost everyone looks on her and her brother David with suspicion.
But, they couldn't just have been ethnic Germans; no, to top that off,
their father was an immigrant from Germany who went back to Germany to
join the German army and was killed in the Battle of Vimy Ridge, so they
have that to shame them as they try to be good Canadians. And, David
Mann is an asthmatic weakling, desperate to join the army to prove his
worth. And, Sarah's a drug addict. Jeez, Paul could you load up the
Tragedy List any more heavily?
The war scenes are excellent. Paul uses the shakey camera style made
popular by "Saving Private Ryan" and used in many movies since but with
less of the sepia tone. The first scene is simple, with four Canadians
versus approximately four Germans in a town square, and the end sequence
is a sprawling cataclysm, with hundreds of soldiers cra****ng together in
a huge blasted wasteland. There are several shots that will make the
squeamish go "Ew!" and one very impressive shot where the camera pans
back and back and back to reveal a seemingly endless vista of shell
craters and tiny soldiers.
There might be a complaint that the dialogue at several places in the
movie makes too much of a point of mentioning that Canadians were just
awesome in battle, but I'll forgive Paul because this is the first and
possibly the only big-budget filmed drama where anyone will get to make
that point.
There are two things in the movie that some viewers might wonder about:
- Storm Troopers. I'd heard about this long ago. The term "Storm
Trooper" was first coined in World War One by the Germans as their name
for the Canadians because apparently the Canadians were, indeed, awesome
in battle. So, Paul didn't just make that up for the movie.
- The Crucified Soldier. Anyone who knows Canadian World War One lore
will be familiar with this. Near Ypres, Belgium, in 1915, Germans
allegedly crucified a Canadian soldier on a barn door. The story was
widely told back then, and there's even a sculpture about it called
"Canada's Golgotha". But, it's long since been debunked as just
propaganda nonsense, and no such thing ever really happened.
I liked the bit about how wet matches are worse than shrapnel. It's
kind of funny and it's also a good look at the psychology of the weary
frontline soldier. The little things mean so much.
I have to say that I thought that Adam Harrington, playing Colonel
Ormond (the guy in the command bunker who gives Dunne command of a
platoon) rivalled Paul, himself, for charisma. As soon as I saw him, I
wondered, "Hey, who's that guy?"
Considering that the initial motivation for Paul to make this movie was
his grandfather being haunted by the young German soldier he bayonetted,
it's not that big a factor in the movie. Yes, Paul's character, Michael
Dunne, is shown bayonetting a helpless German in the first scene, and
it's the source of most of Dunne's psychological problems after that,
but that incident doesn't carry the movie. Also, the movie doesn't
actually tell the story of the Battle of Passchendale. We get a glimpse
of a map and there's a cursory thirty-second explanation of the battle
plan, but there's no context, no appearance of the real-life historical
figures. But, the story of the battle, or of the bayonetting, isn't
really the story that Paul is telling, is it.
I think Paul takes his storytelling cue from the name of the town:
Passchendaele. Passion Valley, or the Valley of the Passion -- no doubt
a reference to the Passion of Christ and the springboard for the main
naratives and several images: the romantic passion of Michael and
Sarah; the passion of David to prove himself; the Biblical passion of
the suffering of the armies; the accidental crucifixion of a soldier on
an ersatz cross; the agony of another soldier as he carries that same
cross. Paul is aiming for a grand metaphor; some times he succeeds, and
some times it's a bit overblown. (Michael Dunne bears at least two
metaphorical crosses -- his guilt about bayonetting the helpless enemy
soldier, and his self-appointed job to take care of Sarah's brother.)
The overall look of the movie: Battle scenes look great and Paul
doesn't seem to have gone the cheap route on anything. Calgary scenes
look less great; they don't look cheap, mind you, but they do seem
reminiscent of any number of CBC-TV productions filmed on the Prairies,
so they're okay, but only just okay.
The bottom line: The movie is a qualified success. I liked it, but with
reservations. It's too much a chick flick, with far too much time spent
with the romance in Canada. I'd totally buy a DVD of it because the
battle scenes are that good, but there aren't really enough of them. I
guess Paul was trying to have it both ways -- a weapy romance to appeal
to the women, and war scenes so the men can go, "Wooo-eee! They blowed
up good! Blowed up *real* good!". There should have been more war
scenes -- should have been more historical details about the battle.
In the theatre, when the closing credits rolled, a few people
immediately got up and left as some are wont to do, but most of them
stayed in their seats and watched most of the credits. I guess that
means that they liked the movie. I know that at least one showing on
Saturday night of the opening weekend in Saskatoon was sold out and the
showing I went to on the following Sunday afternoon was pretty full,
too. The box office for "Passchendaele" hasn't set any records, but it
seems that people have been going to see it.
For further reading about Canadians in World War One, you cold try the
fictitious novel "The Wars" by Timothy Findlay; this also has a TV movie
based on it starring Brent Carver (from the "Due South" ep "I Coulda
Been A Defendant) but it's never been available on either tape or DVD.
You could also try "Generals Die In Bed" by Charles Yale Harrison, a
terse and nasty autobiographical account of an American who joined the
Canadian Army to fight in the war.
Ed
--
-- Reality is not enough; we need nonsense, too. Drifting into a world
of fantasy is not an escape from reality but a significant education
about the nature of life. And reality is not an escape from nonsense.
Our education goes on everywhere. - Edmund Miller
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