Canadian epic wins some battles loses others
Passchendaele director Paul Gross probes his audience like a trench raider. The director acquits himself admirably in battle; the film’s noble intentions able performances beautiful costuming and sets score direct hits. The movie’s pacing and cliché turns however make easy cannon fodder.
Gross’s film is in good company. U.S. genre style bible Saving Private Ryan inspired international filmmakers to shoot (relatively) big-budget epics of their own — stories largely untouched by the American film industry. Kang Je-gyu’s Tae Guk Gi (South Korea) Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory (France) and even Shinichiro Sawai’s Mongol-historic Ghengis Khan (Japan) are a few examples. Where these films succeed ( Days of Glory ) they create a language and style separate from that of the Hollywood battlefield. Where they fail ( Ghengis Khan) they’re overblown and melodramatic. Some alternately are flawed ( Tae Guk Gi) yet present a compelling entertaining spectacle. Passchendaele fits in this latter category.
Gross plays Sergeant Michael Dunne a decorated First World War soldier injured in heavy fighting at the Western Front. He’s an everyman soldier in a romantic drama that’s also about the domestic wartime dynamic and the nation-building mythology of the Great War. This overly ambitious story plays out both in the front lines and in Calgary. Convalescing in Cowtown with a head full of post-traumatic stress Dunne falls for his nurse Sarah (Caroline Dhavernas) who has her own demons. Dunne takes a military recruiting job but is inevitably drawn back to the war in large part to protect Sarah’s younger brother David (Joe Dinicol).
Admirably the film lingers in Calgary providing context and character development as well as giving the love story a solid start. The strategy works and the re-created 1917 city streets and summertime foothills look stellar but the film starts to drag. Here the music becomes cloying where it should be minimal and the camera whips about in an attempt to inject drama.
Once this war film gets back to the war however it finds its real strength. The front lines are raw realistic and the scenes shot with minimal reliance on computer-generated imagery. Gross does a transcendent job turning the Alberta prairie where the scenes were shot into a cold wet muddy jagged hell on Earth.
Passchendaele has its ups and downs. Its sometimes heavy-handed dialogue and clichéd imagery (a wild horse atop a hill festooned with military graves) compete with scenes that really work — like for example the opening battle which was inspired by the wartime experience of Gross’s grandfather. With dark brevity it says a novel’s worth about the nature of war.
It may not be a brilliant epic but it’s a worthy one for its telling on a suitably grand scale of one of Canada’s big stories.