THE TRUE TORMENT OF WAR
It lacks the visual effects of War Horse. But with its grippingly authentic portrayal of men about to meet the enemy amid a looming sense of disaster, it brilliantly evokes...
Journey’s End Cert: 12A 1hr 47mins
There’s no doubt we are on familiar muddy, sandbag-lined and barbedwire-entangled ground with the First World War drama Journey’s End, but the new film version of the Twenties play still manages to have a power and poignancy that will break all but the hardest of hearts.
And that’s because, while it clearly has nothing like the budget or visual effects that Steven Spielberg lavished on War Horse, it does have two very important things going for it: perfect timing and a deeply moving authenticity.
We are just weeks away from the 100th anniversary of the Spring Offensive, the German counter-attack of 1918 that might have changed the outcome of the war and is absolutely central to events here. As for authenticity, the film is based on the oftrevived play written by RC Sherriff, who fought in the war himself and was wounded at Passchendaele in 1917.
This was a man who knew the horror of which he wrote and, even all these decades later, that first-hand experience still comes horrifyingly through. Indeed, when he wrote the play in 1928, Sherriff set the template for the many WWI dramas to come.
It’s the centenary, however, that gives the film its contemporary power, providing a significant moment to reflect on the bravery and sacrifice of an entire generation. Part of that generation comes in the form of Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), a fresh-faced young man just out of public school, who is so keen to get to the front line that he marches into the general’s office and begs for it.
It helps that the general is his uncle. Despite the older man’s grave misgivings – the front has been awash with rumours of a counter-attack for weeks – he grants his nephew his wish. Raleigh arrives in the trenches, just as C Company moves in for its monthly six-day stint at the front. Will the German attack come while Captain Stanhope and his men are in residence?
Everything Raleigh thought he knew about war is soon proved wrong.
The trenches are filthy, foulsmelling and rat-infested. As for his fellow officers, they’re a million miles from the brave and gallant warriors he was expecting. Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) is feigning illness in an attempt to be sent home, the working-class Trotter (Stephen Graham) is simply counting the days, while the war-weary Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), a boyhood hero of Raleigh’s from school, is glugging down the whisky like there’s no tomorrow. Which, of course, there might not be. For any of them.
The film is directed by Saul Dibb, best known for his 2014 adaptation of Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française. But it’s one that, as soon as Toby Jones appears as the servant-cook Mason and we all instantly think ‘Baldrick!’, I worry may be ignored or taken less seriously.
Which would be a real shame, as there is
some fine acting on display. Claflin, so good in last year’s WWII drama Their Finest, gives an entirely different performance here, as the brooding, broken and yet still dutiful Stanhope, a man who was decorated for bravery at Vimy Ridge but, a year later, won’t go home on leave because he doesn’t want people to see ‘how shot I am’. Excellent, too, is Paul Bettany as the older officer Osborne, who is fondly referred to as ‘uncle’ by his younger colleagues. He’s about the only sane one there but, vitally, also Stanhope’s friend and confidant.
Inevitably, there is a sense of looming disaster from the outset, a sense that only multiplies when the top brass – safely behind the lines – decide the only thing that will clarify German intentions is a raiding party to capture an informer.
Mounting it under the cover of darkness would obviously be the sensible thing to do, but that might upset the colonel’s dinner. So a daytime raid it is; it’s the sort of less-than-cunning plan that surely even Baldrick would see through.
Rarely can a simple ‘Cheerio’ have been more powerful or pitiful. It echoes down the decades.