A war hero without a gun
In the opening moments of “Hacksaw Ridge,” Mel Gibson’s first return to the director’s chair since 2006, the camera lingers on eight napalm-charred corpses, laid side by side, burned beyond recognition.
“I think it’s a love story, and not a war film,” says Gibson in a joint interview with the film’s star Andrew Garfield in Los Angeles.
Only the director of “Braveheart” could say that with a straight face; there are few romantic films that feature severed limbs, bullets busting through helmets and soldiers so thoroughly soaked in blood and dirt that they begin to become indistinguishable. But the violence serves important roles here: to contrast the brutality of war with the compassion of one particular hero, Desmond Doss.
“He’s able to be above war,” Gibson says of his protagonist, played by Garfield. “He commits acts of love, which is the beauty of the story. It’s the pinnacle of heroism.”
“Hacksaw Ridge” tells the true story of Doss, a Seventhday Adventist who enlists during World War II. With his religion barring its adherents from bearing arms, Doss served as a medic, never handling a weapon and focusing on saving life rather than taking it. In one battle, he carried 75 wounded soldiers to a cliff’s edge and lowered them via ropes to safety below, earning the first Medal of Honor awarded to a noncombatant.
Onscreen, the story creates a dichotomy between the peaceful beliefs of Doss and the ultraviolence of World War II, particularly in the Central Pacific theater. As Garfield runs through the battlefield, ducking and diving into trenches, he — and the audience — sees blood gushing from severed limbs, bodies burnt and wounds severe enough to test the stomach of many moviegoers.
“The brutality and the visceral nature, the sensory experience of warfare for the film was necessary to me,” Gibson says, “to emphasize the kind of situation where an ordinary man can do extraordinary things under hellish circumstances and transcend the monstrosity of war.”
It’s easy for film scholars to get into back-and-forths about violence in war pictures; French New Wave director Francois Truffaut is famously (and possibly apocryphally) credited as saying, “There’s no such thing as an antiwar film,” while Steven Spielberg is on record arguing the opposite. “Every war movie, good or bad, is an antiwar movie,” the director of “Saving Private Ryan” once told Newsweek.
“The way we did it, I think it jolts people, it shocks them, and that’s an unpleasant experience for people,” Gibson says. “It hits them — it’s like a punch in the face.”
While Gibson’s affinity for blood is on full display in films like “The Passion of the Christ,” working with that amount of blood was unprecedented for Garfield. The superhero violence of a movie like “The Amazing SpiderMan” bears little resemblance to the hyperrealism of Gibson’s war scenes.
But although the shoot was done with little CGI or other outside effects, Garfield still had a model in how to react to such bloodshed.
“In order to do what he did, he had to have this relationship with a wound,” Garfield says, referring to Doss. “A wound that might make me retch or vomit (was) something he felt totally capable of dealing with. … There’s no hesitation, no squeamishness, just, ‘I know what to do here — how do I know what to do here?’ ”
The violence was not the only obstacle Garfield had to contend with: The physical work required during the rescues in particular was grueling. Like Doss, the actor does not have a large physique, and carrying much larger men over his shoulders was nothing that a brief boot camp could solve.
“This guy did that with 75 dudes at the top of that rough, rugged terrain, and he was the size of me, carrying guys the size of Mel,” Garfield said. “It’s not possible. I got through my third guy, and was just like, ‘I need help.’ ”
For Gibson, one would imagine that filming action scenes would put him back where he was 10 years ago, with the Mayan epic “Apocalypto,” the last film he directed. But he notes one major difference between then and now.
“This is like other films I’ve done, thematically, but it’s an evolved theme,” Gibson says. “It really focuses on the noncombatant, the message of love, (and) that it can flower in the worst place possible.”