If you’ve been following the Oscars race, you’ve no doubt noticed Sam Mendes’ 1917 pushing its way to the front of the pack. Just this past weekend, the film won the top prize at the Producers Guild of America awards, which often indicates what will go on to win big at the Oscars. As usual, the discourse is hostile; while many critics have praised the film’s technical achievements, others insist there is a hollowness at the center of its spectacle. While 1917 is certainly not my personal pick for best film of the year, I would not say that it lacks emotional depth. For me, this film’s best moments are the small ones.
(Spoilers ahead)
Right at the top, I want to make something clear: I am not a war movie person. Name the three best war movies of all time — I can almost guarantee you I haven’t seen any of them. I have a very difficult time following plots that involve strategic military operations of any kind. When someone on screen pulls out a map to explain a plan of attack, my eyes glaze over. I say all of this not to disqualify my own opinion, but to explain where I’m coming from when I say that watching a well-choreographed war scene is not at all my jam.
On its surface, that is most of what 1917 is: one long, well-choreographed war scene. The film’s “gimmick,” if you want to call it that, is that it looks like a single shot (with one notable cut-to-black near the middle of the film). While 1917 was actually stitched together with takes up to nine minutes long, the amount of choreography, rehearsal, and careful planning that went into achieving this effect is truly impressive, and if you want to learn more about the process, I highly recommend checking out this ‘making of’ featurette.
All of that said, when I came out of the movie, one of my first questions was: why did this need to look like a single take? In the featurette, writer/director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins both explain their intention to put the audience right there with the soldiers to give the film that urgent, real-time feeling. The single-shot method certainly succeeds in creating a claustrophobia even in wide open spaces, trapping the viewer in the frame with no possibility of escape. It’s hard to know how different this story might have felt using the exact same script and timing but with a less restrictive hold on the camera; at the very least,1917 would not be suffering the same amount of criticism for putting the physical aspects of filmmaking ahead of emotional elements.
And that’s the question: is there enough depth to 1917 for it to stand the test of time? Does the story itself merit the attention the film is getting this awards season, or are people simply so wowed by the spectacle that they’re willing to look past a certain shallowness? I don’t think this movie has anything particularly new to say about war, but that comes with the territory. There’s been so much media produced about war that it seems we might genuinely be running out of fresh perspectives — especially when it’s World War I, and we’re following two white British soldiers. It’s frustrating to see these old war stories being told again and again on such a large scale when stories by and about women and people of color aren’t even being greenlit, and to see the films that do make it through being routinely pushed to the fringes during awards season to make way for films like 1917.
In spite of all of this, I do think 1917 makes an argument for its existence. If it were truly all sound and fury signifying nothing, I’d be pretty frustrated with its frontrunner status, but I do think this film has more going for it than some are giving it credit for. The story’s heart is with the soldiers at its center, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman). Both actors are terrific, and though MacKay does much of the heavy lifting in the latter half of the movie, the strength of Chapman’s performance is proven in the way Blake continues to hover over the story even after he’s gone, all the way through to the film’s final moments.
Blake’s death scene is a powerful reminder of not just the mindless atrocity of war, but also the mundanity of it: bleeding to death halfway through a mission that shouldn’t have even brought him face to face with an enemy. The conversation Schofield and Blake have in Blake’s final moments is at once tender and restrained. “Tell my mother I wasn’t scared,” Blake says, even though he’s clearly terrified. Once Blake has stopped breathing, Schofield calmly removes his friend’s identification for safekeeping. He looks at the photo Blake kept of his family, and gently tucks it back into his friend’s uniform. Then he moves on, because he has no choice, and because a body is just a body.
This is one small moment of several that stood out to me, mostly because I expected 1917 to be a nonstop camera trick of explosions and gunshot wounds and surprise appearances by famous British actors. This movie gives a surprising amount of weight to quiet, meditative character beats, framing them with the same loving attention to detail as many of its larger set pieces. There is one shot in particular of Schofield floating in the river when cherry blossoms begin to fall like snow around him, a call-back to one of his last conversations with Blake and a reminder that everything is cyclical, for better or for worse. It’s the kind of image that takes your breath away, even if its meaning is simple.
1917 ropes us in with its technical conceit, but Sam Mendes manages to balance its sweeping scale with so many little touches that ground it in the personal. We can’t know what this movie would be without its technical mastery, but I think that’s okay. It’s all in service of telling the story — one based on Mendes’ grandfather’s individual experience, but familiar to us because there are so many more like it. This movie may not be emotionally groundbreaking, but it most certainly has a heart, and it shows us that heart with more subtlety and grace than its critics would have you believe. So, when it comes to best picture, I’m not rooting for 1917 to win, but I’m also not rooting for it to lose… and that’s more than I can say for some other films in the running.
shoutout to richard madden for absolutely killing it for his five minutes of screentime