‘Testament of Youth’ is painfully beautiful
The true story of novelist Vera Brittain opens with the wild celebrations of Armistice Day 1918 — the end of World War I — and then flashes back four years to her idyllic life in Staffordshire with younger brother Edward.
They were bright young things indeed, then — 21 and 19, respectively —both champing at the bit to enter life’s fray and not miss out on the grand adventures of their day. For proto-feminist Vera, it was an Oxford education. For gentle Edward, it was the forthcoming conflict in Europe.
Their doting parents were opposed to both prospects. But, always in service of each other, the boy persuaded them to let the girl go to school, and the girl persuaded them to let the boy go to war.
Something worse than disillusionment awaited them both, as Vera chronicled in her superb 1933 autobiography, “Testament of Youth” — one of the great comingof-age memoirs of young love and the despair and futility of war — and as director James Kent replicates in this sad beautiful film rendering of it.
Alicia Vikander plays strongwilled Vera, with Taron Egerton as brother Edward, children of a wellto-do musical family who owned paper mills in the Newcastle area. “I’m not marrying — now or ever!” she declares, rejecting the reticent romancing of Edward’s poetic pal Roland Leighton (Kit Harington). Her mind was like “a spring-tide in full flood — rich, shining, vigorous,” said a friend. Her literary voice was both strong and whimsical. In the autobiography, she describes her birth as something that happened “precipitately but safely during my father’s absence at a pantomime in Hanley.” Mr. Brittain had his priorities. The prospect of turning that 600page book into a two-hour film had to have been daunting (a previous six-part BBC miniseries didn’t quite manage it), but screenwriter Juliette Towhidi does a serviceable job of it. Vera’s — and our — first glimpses of Oxford’s hallowed halls are magical, enhanced by Amanda Richardson’s portrayal of the girl’s
stern mentor and by Roland’s dogged efforts to see her there (“fully chaperoned, of course”). But soon enough, he’ll be going off to the front and she’ll be frantically scanning page after page of “Fallen in Combat” notices in the newspapers.
The film gets progressively grimmer as she leaves Oxford to become a triage nurse in France, enduring the same horrendous rain and mud as the dead and near-dead soldiers she washes, consoling the dying German prisoners along with the Brits.
Roland’s tragic poem “Villanelle” — sent to her from the front — sums it up. (Note to readers: You should find and read it.) But by the time he comes home on brief leave, he has seen too many brains blown out. When she asks if he has written any new poems, he scoffs: “Poetry! Oh, for God’s sake!” She says she will marry him when he comes back for Christmas.
She will get a horrible phone call, instead.
The film contains no battle scenes per se, no bloody heroics, just haunting (often silent) images of life and death in the trenches — men reduced to filthy remnants of flesh, virtually indistinguishable from one another. There’s an unforgettable recreation of the famous reverse-zoom dollyback crane shot in “Gone With the Wind” — the human carnage at a Flanders field hospital mirroring the Confederate dead in Atlanta.
Ms. Vikander is excellent. With her beautifully androgynous features and serious, deep-pond brown eyes, she gives quizzical hints of a smile but rarely fully commits to one, even as she smolders in an intensely innocent, nonsexual way. Mr. Harington (“Game of Thrones”) is fine as Roland, although the focus on their love affair is more cinematic than factual: In real life, passionate poetry was probably as far as they really got. Vera would leave her postwar husband to live with novelist Winifred Holtby for most of her life.
The needless, hideous “Great War” was beyond heartbreaking, as are many of this impressive film’s 129 lugubrious minutes. Toward its end, Vera well expresses her profoundly traumatized pacifism in an impassioned speech that would be as unpopular now as it was then.
The boys couldn’t “miss out.” They happily trooped off to a war their elders said would end in a few weeks or months. “All of us are surrounded by ghosts,” she says.
A 12th-century Ukrainian women’s lament says it even better:
Had I known that he would leave me,
I would not have loved him so.
Had I known that he would perish,
I would not have let him go.
Opens today at the Harris Theater, Downtown.