RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is much more than a war movie. Titled after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa on the Japanese bluff known as Hacksaw Ridge, it tells the true-life story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector who nevertheless saved dozens of fellow soldiers’ lives while serving as a battlefield medic during the final days of World War II. Doss received a Medal of Honor from President Truman, but, ironically, the movie is the work of a famously Christian filmmaker who was publicly excoriated by the mainstream (i.e., secular) media, which lashed out against his 2004 The Passion of the Christ (discussed in my 2014 NRO article “The Year the Culture Broke”).

With Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson openly responds to what has now become a routine character-assassination attempt by the media; he envisions the Battle of Okinawa as a test of morality and religious faith. Doss, a Virginia-born Seventh-day Adventist (portrayed by Andrew Garfield), claimed conscientious-objector status based on his personal Christian pacifism. Gibson shows how that pacifism derived from Doss’s background: Having grown up as a violence-addicted son of a bitterly traumatized WWI veteran (Hugo Weaving), Doss as an adult becomes a devout pacifist who clashes with military tradition to win his right to service. What he encountered in fulfilling his faith and duty is movingly depicted in the film, but it’s the emotional undercurrent that makes Hacksaw Ridge extraordinary.

Gibson disposes of the “anti-war film” cliché with a full-throttle War Is Hell scenario. His scenes of carnage and savagery have nearly surreal intensity. The black-gray, smoke-and-flames imagery of rugged terrain, bodies charred and mutilated in deadly piles, plus head-banging artillery noises and painful human howls express fascination and revulsion. It is a conscientiously masculine vision — male aggression chastened by a sense of horror. Obviously, this is not documentary horror remembered from actual wartime experience. Rather, Gibson vents the ambivalence he probably acquired as a thinking macho (being both a star of violent ’80s and ’90s spectacles and a perceptive, ambitious artiste). Hacksaw Ridge is sensitized by a wounded man’s humility and a thinking man’s sincerity. Thus, the film’s vision of Hell on Earth has peculiar authority.

It’s clear that Gibson is fully conscious of man’s inhumanity to man, maybe more than anyone else in Hollywood. He didn’t have to actually participate in combat to learn about human savagery; the mainstream media taught him that. But alongside the film’s dramatization of Doss’s family life and his courtship of Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the lovely, bold-spirited nurse he married, Hacksaw Ridge anatomizes military aggression and its complex links to masculine character. Garfield’s Doss uncannily recalls Anthony Perkins’s pacifist performance in Friendly Persuasion. Other, variously wounded American GIs are memorably etched by Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, and Luke Bracey as men who sacrifice themselves while dealing with personal issues. (These conflicts are fleetly dramatized by screenwriters Robert Schenkken and Andrew Knight.)

Hacksaw Ridge provides a long-awaited cultural rejoinder to the violence in Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s culture-shaking tribute to WWII martyrdom. But Spielberg’s film needn’t be the definitive WWII movie, and neither should Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Clint Eastwood’s diptych Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jimo, or Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Gibson forsakes the self-righteousness of those films and provides the substance — the reproof of violence — absent from all those movies that are so shamelessly geeked-up by the boyish excitement of fighting and death. (Doss’s father complains that his mother teaches “the world is a soft and gentle place” while he also upbraids his son’s timidity: “You’ve got to sit and think and pray about everything. Look at you!”) The original Mad Max finally grows up when Doss daringly rescues wounded Americans from the Japanese onslaught: “Please, God, help me get one more.”

It’s odd to see a contemporary film that depicts war without partisan second-guessing or political rebuke. Hacksaw Ridge has a patriotic valiance and dauntless candor that recall Sergeant York, the 1941 Gary Cooper film. But that was from a different era, less hostile to the idea of American military effort. Gibson defies today’s secular hostility by proffering Doss’s principled certitude.

Hacksaw Ridge is not an official history of WWII; its visionary, emotional force recalls the essence of cinematic heroism. Gibson’s battle scenes evoke D. W. Griffith’s great “War’s Peace” tableau in The Birth of a Nation and turns its sorrow, sarcasm, and heartfelt pacifism into a War Is Hell epic. A montage contrasting Japanese seppuku with American faith is even-handed history and spiritually profound. For thoughtful viewers, Hacksaw Ridge will loom larger than Doss’s story; it’s also Gibson’s personal Hell on Earth reprisal to the war on his Christian convictions.