RUTHFULLY YOURS

We are used to seeing science fiction films that have lots of action, weird-looking aliens and some hair-raising danger. Arrival is a quiet film that uses language as the most significant inter-planetary bridge we possess. In it, Amy Adams plays a world-famous linguist called upon by the government to act as intermediary between humans and whatever inhabits the elongated oval hovercrafts that have landed in 12 different parts of our world. Jeremy Renner is the physicist/mathematician who partners with her in this endeavor and subsequently, in an equally important one. Since most of this movie consists of unraveling and understanding the proper sequence of events and their significance to each other, it’s important not to give away the plot.

Having said that, I can say that too much of the movie exists in a zone that becomes more soporific than spellbinding – this is not 2001 with its balletic sequence that mesmerizes accompanied by a melodic soundtrack. The sleek oval aircraft, looking like the most graceful carriers, contain creatures whose sound belches and reverberates as if we were underwater and whose attempts to communicate are insistently repetitive. In one dramatic scene, our intrepid heroine enters the interior of the craft unprotected by the requisite space-movie outer gear. What follows is a slo-mo unfolding and volumizing of her hair that looks more like a Clairol commercial than a close encounter; the actual impact of this scene is only grasped in retrospect when we understand the ramification of her personal life vis a vis this experience.

Unfortunately, it is easier to untangle Amy’s ponytail than the threads of the plot and I would bet that no five people would render it the same way. Though this may work well with a novel where you can re-read an earlier portion, it’s more difficult with a film in which you must rely on memory and on the director’s tricky flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout. There was an unusual amount of audience mobility which I attribute to a lack of comprehension of what was happening onscreen, especially since it is being shown at multiplexes instead of art theaters. Part of me applauds the decision to make this movie but the honest part admits that it became more boring than it should have and more confusing than elusive. Ironically, the skills of the linguist were of little help in extrapolating meaning from experience.

Impassioned patriotism and religious conviction constitute the core of “Hacksaw Ridge,” a stirring—and surpassingly violent—dramatization of the life of Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor. As an unarmed combat medic in World War II, Cpl. Doss saved the lives of at least 75 fellow infantrymen during a horrific battle on the Japanese-held island of Okinawa. He’s played by Andrew Garfield, whose extraordinary performance turns inner torment into ardent resolve, and a desperate heroism seldom seen on screen.

The film was directed by Mel Gibson. It’s his first in that capacity in a decade, and at least two films in one, perhaps three. In a beautifully textured, extensively fictionalized preface— Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan share credit for the script—Desmond struggles, as a child growing up in small-town Virginia, with his own violent urges focused mainly on the drunken, abusive father he loathes and adores. In basic training he’s persecuted for his pacifist refusal to carry a weapon; the sequence is long, derivative and weakened by floridly literary writing for a drill sergeant played by Vince Vaughn. In subsequent battle scenes, as powerful as they are shocking, Desmond’s faith takes him only so far. He’s terrified by the danger, all but overwhelmed by the carnage, yet he carries on, lowering the wounded to safety at the foot of a steep escarpment and repeating, as a litany, “Please, Lord, help me get one more.”

Through it all there’s also a sense of Mr. Gibson struggling to confront the dynamics of his turbulent career: the penchant for graphic violence that has both distinguished and afflicted such films as “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto”; the enthrallment with martyrdom that informed “Braveheart” (one fleeting shot finds Desmond, wounded himself, suspended on a litter at the face of the ridge in what could be seen as a state of grace); and, unavoidably, given the dramatic inventions of the preface, the fraught relationship he has had, sometimes in public, with his own father. Remarkably, “Hacksaw Ridge” coalesces into a memorable whole. The movie was shot in Australia by Simon Duggan, and the mostly Australian, uniformly excellent cast includes Teresa Palmer as Desmond’s girlfriend and then wife, Dorothy; Hugo Weaving as Tom, Desmond’s father; Rachel Griffiths as his mother, Bertha, as well as Sam Worthington and Richard Roxburgh as officers in Desmond’s beleaguered rifle company.

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.)

You will forget every past ugly incident involving Mel Gibson, every promise you made to protest his anti-semitism by boycotting his films as you sit stunned and shaken throughout the last half hour of Hacksaw Ridge The recreation of one of the horrendous battles for Okinawa is the closest thing in memory to an on-going visceral gut-punch that makes you feel the brutality, madness and devastating grief for countless soldiers fighting and dying for their country. Seeing this movie and then watching a news report of renewed fighting in Mosul points out the chasm between our sanitized sound-bite reports and the real experience of war. Perhaps if part of our requirement as citizens was the obligation to watch this film every week that we have soldiers in battle or in hot zones abroad, we might have the requisite respect for our veterans and a re-shuffling of our national priorities for who deserves the most acknowledgment and assistance first.

Ostensibly a bio-pic of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who signed up to be a medic in World War II, the movie begins as an old-fashioned forties film about a Virginia country boy whose violent home-life becomes a pivotal catalyst for his personal redemption. There is a brutal alcoholic father with a military backstory who terrorizes his loving wife and beats his sons, encouraging them to fight each other until the moment when one realizes how close he came to being a killer. We then fast-forward to Desmond as a young man who has become a Seventh-Day Adventist determined to do his patriotic duty by enlisting in the army while refusing to carry a weapon or work on the Sabbath. There is his innocent and passionate first love for a beautiful nurse who agrees to wait for his return. There is the requisite bullying by his fellow soldiers and by a sadistic sergeant (an excellent Vince Vaughan) and a court martial with unexpected drama until we reach the heart of the film – the experience of war. It will not surprise you to read that this is transformative for everyone but you will be moved beyond expectation by the various way in which this happens

Hacksaw Ridge is a film that commemorates heroism in defense of principles as well as valor in battle. It is a paean to the elevation of principles in personal conduct as well as military behavior, to the reality of human fallibility and its converse – the spiritual value of earned forgiveness. Andrew Garfield’s performance as Desmond Doss is so real that you will feel his heart race and his eyes tear before either happens. Mel Gibson has been an excellent actor and filmmaker before but he has achieved a new rung of significance and accomplishment with this remarkable film that will get under your skin and haunt you powerfully and deservedly.

Debra Lipstadt’s scholarly analysis of the Holocaust and its ugly denial industry in her prize-winning 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, spurred a libel suit by one of the chief soi-dixit ‘historians‘ of anti-Semitic and Nazi-affiliate lineage, the rancid David Irving.

The Irving v. Penguin Press Ltd trial caused a sensation not only in its natal Great Britain, but occasioned intense interest and shudders too in the United States, where Lipstadt lives and writes.

Historians, ethicists, and scholars alike feared the verdict, which could have cast a cruel shadow over future such cases and the reliability of history itself, were it to go in a direction that did not accord acknowledgment of the horrors to future investigators, remaining survivors and their offspring.

Though there is only fact and history behind all Holocaust witness, there is now, as Lipstadt chronicles, a growing shelf of denial that threatens to increase as Endlösung witnesses die out. The thesis of the book’s author is that such denial is simply pure anti-Semitic diatribe scarcely varnished by the not-even-gossamer of truth, veracity or historicity.

Irving sought to diminish and denigrate the claim of six million dead, the genocidal intent on the part of the Nazis, and indeed the very existence of gas chambers in the infamous death camps kitted out by the Germans and their brethren haters.

It is painful to experience the trial at the start, where the barristers determine that testimony at trial from survivors and even Lipstadt herself would be deleterious to winning, rather than a help, to the defense. This runs contrary to what most people instinctively want, so the film generates a tension of continuous “Unfair!” that adds to the fine legal arguments on both sides that stretch the tension taut for the defendant. Richard Evans’ brief played a major role in convicting Irving.

The climactic images of an American flag rippling against darkness and fire in the brilliant new film Deepwater Horizon recall many a war film, or indeed the writing of The Star Spangled Banner itself, near Fort McHenry as the War of 1812 raged. But this is not a war film. Or is it?

The civilians who populate the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Louisiana are military-like types — practical engineers, men who solve problems in real time under immense pressure, some of it literal and lethal. They make their living with their hands, wear casual clothing, drink bad coffee out of paper cups, and power America.

In short, these are manly men, played by manly actors like Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell, as two of the many technically savvy guys who keep America’s oil flowing. As we flick on a light switch or pump gas into our cars, rarely do we think about how our carbon-based energy system works, or the ingenuity, skill, and courage of those who bring us cheap, abundant fuel. Deepwater Horizon urges us to spare a thought for these people, most of them men, who make the country work, often at huge risk to themselves. Until the world figures out a way to operate on puppy dog dreams and unicorn sighs, carbon-based fuels will remain the foundation of our existence, the sine qua non without which earth-mother poets, sullen America-hating vegan performance artists, and the private jets that shuttle Al Gore to ecological conferences would find it difficult to operate.

Eleven men died in the explosion of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 26, 2010, and dozens more were lucky to escape with their lives. And yet the media simply shrugged at the human toll of this event and rushed off to cover the damage to marine life in the resulting oil spill of 210 million gallons. Today, the media reaction looks like a bit of an overreaction –nature has a way of erasing even man’s biggest mistakes, and life in the Gulf of Mexico has largely bounced back — but such topics are outside the scope of the movie.