Paying the bitter price of war on the home front
Testament Of Youth (12A) Verdict: Worthy but genteel adaptation
American Sniper (15) Verdict: Rousing, but over-patriotic
VERA BRITTAIN’S searingly powerful memoir about World War I, a howl of anguish on behalf of a generation of bereaved women, has been adapted before for the screen: the BBC made an acclaimed five-part serial in 1979.
The film opens on Armistice Day 1918, with Vera (Alicia Vikander) immune to the raucous celebrations around her. We are then whisked back to learn the reason why, not that there are any grim portents in the carefree summer of 1914, when Vera’s only cause for despair is the reluctance of her conservative, industrialist father (Dominic West) to let her go to Oxford University.
It is her beloved brother Edward (Taron Egerton) who persuades her father to relent, and she returns the favour, if favour it is, by urging their father to let Edward volunteer.
By then she is in love with Edward’s former school friend, dashing Roland Leighton (Kit Harington), who ends up on the Western Front, while Vera comes to realise the battle that had been so important to her, for a university education, is trivialised by the battles in Flanders.
She becomes a nurse, not returning to Oxford until after the war, but still traumatised by grief. There, her friend Winifred Holtby (Alexandra Roach), who would go on to an illustrious literary career, observes she is not alone: ‘All of us are surrounded by ghosts, now we need to learn to live with them.’
It is one of the most affecting lines in a film which is just a little too genteel, yet a timely reminder, amid the centenary sepia through which we view World War I, that all those lives lost were real, vibrant, ordinary ones.
AMERICAN SNIPER is a very different kind of war picture, though it too focuses in part on the tribulations of the relatives left behind.
It tells the remarkable story of Chris Kyle (the excellent Bradley Cooper, pictured, nominated yesterday for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance, and bulked up almost beyond recognition), a Texas rodeo rider who became a Navy Seal and was credited with 160 kills in Iraq, making him the most lethal sharpshooter in U.S. military history.
One senses that director Clint Eastwood sees in Kyle a kindred spirit, another man who believes in the U.S. as the greatest nation on earth, without equivocation or irony. As a result, the film feels a little like being punched repeatedly by the Statue of Liberty. Based on Kyle’s autobiography, it has lots of stirringly realistic, harrowing combat scenes. The film is rousingly done, but, at 132 minutes, too long.
Eastwood should arguably have focused more on what happened to Kyle when he got home (as his wife, Sienna Miller is terrific), and had to come to t erms with civilian life.
In many ways that is the most fascinating and moving element of the story.