So. Mel Gibson. Its suspiciously nose-thumbing
defenestration scene and arguably on-the-nose cinematic rhapsodies of masochism
notwithstanding, I thought “Braveheart” was a pretty impressive directorial
effort on Gibson’s part. Watching some of the battle scenes, I thought, “Hey,
this guy’s done his homework—it’s clear he’s watched a lot of Kurosawa, and
learned from it.” And I thought a lot of other noobish film critic type things,
too. That was in 1995, when I was younger, more naïve, more full of hope. One
thing I hoped for was that Gibson would direct something like a proper
follow-up to “Braveheart.” But he didn’t. No.
Rather, he directed the very, um, vivid “The Passion of the
Christ,” which betrayed no Kurosawa influence that I could detect; that was in
2004, a very good year to be Mel Gibson, largely because of that film’s box
office success and cultural ubiquity. 2006’s “Apocalypto” was a movie that only
a man with an incredible and unexpected box office success such as “The Passion of the Christ” could
have gotten made: a shudderingly violent epic of the end of Mayan civilization
with all the dialogue in the Yucatec Maya language. To tell you the truth, that
movie didn’t work out too well with me either. All those beheadings—I got a lot
more grindhouse than Kurosawa out of that one. And 2006 turned out to be a bad
year to be Mel Gibson, as his DUI arrest and separation from his then-wife were
just the first in a series of events and actions by Gibson that would seriously
tarnish his reputation within the film industry and particularly the media that
cover it. I just saw a piece that refers to Gibson’s coming to Venice with his
latest directorial effort, the World War II drama “Hacksaw Ridge,” as part of
Gibson’s “Forgiveness Tour.”
Well I’m not gonna get into that. I’m a serious critic, and
I’m going to review the work, not the man. Also, I hear Gibson is staying at my
hotel. Good grief. I’ve already shared a water taxi on this trip with one
director whose film I’ve trashed, and I’m not about to push my luck.
But seriously: “Hacksaw Ridge” is a not-inconsiderable
achievement for Gibson, a war film so stolid in is values—both aesthetic and
the other kind—that it marks the actor/director as fully ready and able to take
up the banner of Hollywood’s Last Classicist whenever Clint Eastwood decides to
give it up. Based on the true story of one Desmond Doss, a young fellow from
the Blue Ridge Mountains who enlisted in the army during World War II not to
fight, but to be a medic, and furthermore held to his pacifist beliefs so
strictly that he refused to carry or even touch a weapon, it tells an affecting
tale with conviction. Conviction that carries it over and through its cornball
touches, and there are many of those.
Andrew Garfield plays Desmond, seen early on as a boy
rough-housing with his brother. A mishap when the fighting gets too rough puts
the horror of violence into Desmond, as does a later incident involving his
alcoholic WWI vet father (Hugo Weaving) that’s only revealed in flashback a
good deal later on. The grown up Desmond is a goofily grinning good boy who
falls hard for local nurse Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) after putting a tourniquet
on an injured buddy and escorting him to the hospital, because that’s just the
kind of guy this devout Seventh-day Adventist is. The courtship of Dorothy and
Desmond sees Gibson evoking The Charm of The Widescreen American Pastorale with
great élan. Of course it can’t last, as a newsreel full of Nazis reminds us,
and so Desmond enlists, although he’s going to do basic training by his own
rules. He’s read up on the “Manual of Practical Anatomy” enough that he knows
he’ll make a good medic, and at first his platoon seems like an amiable enough
lot. It is filled, in fact, with every multi-ethnic cliché from every bad World
War II film ever. “I’m Grease Nolan, out of Red Hook,” one character actually
says, with an accent that would raise Leo Gorcey from the grave just so he
could die again. There’s a Polish guy, a guy with a Clark Gable mustache
nicknamed Hollywood, and more and more. Then Vince Vaughn shows up as the drill
sergeant and does something resembling a mild Don Rickles routine. This was
entirely tolerable to me—there are times when quaint doesn’t bother me, and the
movie maintains its solid visual construction throughout. One thing I
appreciate about Gibson as a director is that he knows there are worse things
you can do with a movie camera than put it on a tripod.
The funny stuff stops when Desmond refuses to pick up a
rifle, and Vaughn and several of his higher-ups determine that he’s gotta go.
So begins a kind of Stations of the Cross for Doss, wherein he faces the scorn
and derision of his peers, and is eventually put up for court-martial. The way
this matter is resolved is worth experiencing relatively cold, although anyone
who’s seen the trailer of this film knows it was resolved in Doss’ favor: he
was permitted to go into battle without a weapon.
And so, to Okinawa, and a place called “Hacksaw Ridge,”
where the Japanese have been systematically and brutally wiping out every
American battalion that goes up the cliff to try and take it. “If we take
Okinawa, we can take Japan,” one soldier says optimistically. Gibson’s
direction of the battle scenes is … well, intense. The carnage is relentless.
Veterans of the Second World War have recollected talking to a soldier next to
them figuring out what to do next in a battle to discover that the person
they’d said one word to was a corpse before the second word was uttered. Gibson
depicts this, and more, with a steadiness that’s deceptive. He gets across a
“war is hell” message, over and over. But the movie’s battle scenes can still
be oddly rousing, as when the troops rally after taking out a couple of sniper
bunkers and actually manage to hold on to the field for an evening, not knowing
that further swarms of Japanese soldiers are waiting in tunnels for the next
morning. It’s after this next battle that Doss performs his most amazing act of
valor, staying on the field after a retreat to get as many men down from the
cliff side as he is able.
I gotta say, Doss’ story is a helluva thing, and Gibson
tells it with a plain admiration. As an evocation of the horrors of a specific
war, it doesn’t get as hardcore as Eugene Sledge’s amazing battle memoir “With
The Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa,” but any movie that could convincingly
portray the depredations described in that book might well drive any of its
viewers mad.
To read the rest of Glenn Kenny’s coverage from the 2016 Venice Film Festival, click here.
