OUT-SLAUGHTERING PRIVATE RYAN
Gibson’s return strikes dubious balance as a war movie celebrating pacifism
There’s a scene in Saving Private Ryan — you know it even if you haven’t seen it — that depicts the hell that is war, when the Allied forces stormed the beaches of France on June 6, 1944. That film is now 18 years old, and yet war movies ever since have had to measure themselves against it, and often come up wanting.
Hacksaw Ridge is the latest, and by no means the best. It’s the first film in 10 years from director Mel Gibson, who knows a thing or two about violence. His Passion of the Christ (2004) showed the brutality of crucifixion, while Apocalypto (2006) presented Mayan-on-Mayan violence, circa AD 1500.
He’s been in exile since then for a variety of anti-Semitic, misogynistic and homophobic statements, but Hacksaw Ridge marks his return to the Hollywood fold. And wait a minute, ’cause you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The movie includes more than 20 minutes of intense, closequarters fighting, featuring grenades, flame-throwers, machineguns, rifles, pistols, bayonets and daggers. Heads, arms and legs are blown off; intestines are spilled; and for a brief time it even rains blood. It definitely out-Ryans ol’ Saving Private, but the goal is questionable: There comes a point when most viewers will avert their eyes (and hence stop being viewers) just for a respite. I’ve seen zombie movies with fewer double-tap headshots.
Ironically, the non-violent parts of the movie contain pretty standard period-piece production values and scoring, as though Gibson wasn’t sure what to do off the battlefield. Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of Desmond Doss, a U.S. Seventh-day Adventist and avowed pacifist who signed up to serve in the Second World War — as a field medic, and on the condition that he not be required to carry, or even touch, a weapon.
We see young Desmond growing up in rural Virginia, fighting with his brother and subsequently renouncing violence before moving on to grown-up Desmond, now 23 and played by Andrew Garfield. He falls for nurse Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer) and locks horns with his dad (Hugo Weaving), who lost a brother and too many friends in the Great War. Then he enlists. This is where his troubles start. Boot camp Sergeant Howell (Vince Vaughn as the nearest thing this film has to comic relief ) berates him. Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) wants to get rid of him. His fellow soldiers turn on him. The brass denies him leave — on his wedding day! The army threatens to court-martial him.
Ah, but Desmond has his faith, his Bible (given to him as a parting gift by Dorothy) and the courage of his convictions. He refers to himself as a conscientious co-operator rather than a conscientious objector, and stoically accepts whatever punishments are inflicted on him by others, for they know not what they do.
And so, against all odds, we find Private Doss where the opening moments of the film showed him — up on Hacksaw Ridge, part of the Japanese Ryukyu Islands, in May 1945, with the Battle of Okinawa in full swing all around him. His courage under fire would earn him the Medal of Honor, the first of only three ever presented to conscientious objectors, and making Hacksaw Ridge both a rip-roaring war movie and a celebration of pacifism.
It’s an odd paradox, and the movie more than once groans under the weight of it. Oddly, it invents an incident with Desmond’s father and a gun that cements the young man’s pacifism. (In real life, Desmond’s father and uncle once got into a fight with a pistol. The trauma of this almost-Cain-and-Abel incident made the boy vow never to touch a gun.)
And it ignores Capt. Statman, a Jewish officer who tried to convince Desmond that keeping the Sabbath in the army was impractical — though perhaps that was merely a can Gibson chose to avoid opening.
There’s no doubt this is an Important and Historic story, and Garfield deserves credit for somehow creating a living, breathing embodiment out of a walking contradiction, the pacifist soldier. But Gibson pulls too many punches in the early scenes — Vaughn’s capitulation from screaming drill sergeant to caring comrade is particularly suspect — and then strives to make up for it by piling on the violence at the end. If we take the average, we come up with a not-bad result and a film that is, alas, all too average.