WASHINGTON – The World War I film “1917” arrives at Christmas but isn’t filled with comfort or joy. For most of its two hours, young British soldiers confront various horrors, including climbing hills on a battlefield comprised of corpses and dirt.
While not a conventional holiday film by any stretch (“It’s no ‘Die Hard,’ ” quips co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns), “1917” (in theaters Christmas Day in New York and Los Angeles, nationwide Jan. 10) speaks to a season known for emotion and togetherness.
“When it comes to Christmas, everybody has a desire to go home,” Wilson-Cairns says. “One of the central themes in this film is wanting to go home and everything that home means. We tried to reduce it to sort of the very basic, which is the people you love. And even though this is a war movie, what it’s really about to me is, what lengths will you go to save someone you love?”
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Heading into Oscar season with momentum (three Golden Globes nominations, including best drama), “1917” follows Lance Cpls. Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) on a life-or-death mission to deliver a message and save 1,600 fellow military men – one of them Blake’s older brother (Richard Madden).
“1917” reaches toward more than being a conventional war flick. “It’s not a combat film, there’s not a lot of bloodshed. Nor is it a particularly nationalistic film,” says director/co-writer Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”). “We’re trying to make a movie about the human experience of war rather than a history lesson.”
In a busy period of awards-ready fare and pop culture blockbusters, here’s why “1917” stands out as a must-watch this holiday:
The story is inspired by the director’s grandfather’s war stories.
Mendes’ grandfather Alfred was a messenger in the British Army who served in World War I from 1916 to 1918, and while “1917” isn’t about him specifically, the seed of it came from a story Mendes was told as a boy of 10 or 11.
“We’re all born in peacetime,” says Mendes, 54. “When you meet a family member who’s actually been (to war), it is such a shock. When I was that age, I didn’t even know the war existed. It was my first awareness of not only that war but any war and it always stuck with me. So this is in many ways dedicated to him.”
The film feels like a single take.
Mendes and Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins designed “1917” to be filmed as one continuous shot in a real-time tick-tock thriller, with the camera acting as an invisible third character that seamlessly follows Schofield and Blake during heart-to-heart conversations as well as terrifying survival situations.
For example, when the two soldiers move across the silent carnage of No Man’s Land, “you want to see the characters small in the vastness of that awful panorama of death,” Mendes says. “And you want an audience to have the time for their eyes to wander. Is that a body? Do they see it? Do we see it? It’s that sense of bearing witness to something rather than shoving it in their face.”
Chapman appreciates the immersion: “It is, for two hours nonstop, no escape, just like life. It becomes the audience actually living and experiencing everything rather than having a nice cutaway.”
One soldier is new to the fight, the other has seen too much.
The two main characters are friends but also opposites. Blake is right in the middle of a war zone, though he has lost none of his boyish optimism. “With Blake, it was finding the balance of being in enemy territory, but being able to tell a funny story to Scofield at the same time. That’s who he is,” Chapman says.
The mission is Blake’s first real experience in war, and he’s taking it all in, while Schofield keeps his eyes straight, always moving forward, after having witnessed things that have shaken him emotionally and physically. “He has probably stopped writing home for the fear of what might happen to him, for the fear of there being a last letter that isn’t in his control,” MacKay says. “So he’s probably gone, ‘I love you so much that I just can’t speak to you right now.’ “
The film ultimately tackles the randomness of life.
The stories that Mendes’ grandfather told were about coincidence and chance, and he imparted those tales to his actors. “He was standing next to his mate and his mate would just get hit by a shell. He completely disappeared and it was just by chance that it wasn’t him,” Chapman says.
But Mendes also includes many instances of important happenstance in “1917”: For example, a hungry rat at the wrong place at the wrong time leads to an explosive cave-in for the main characters, while a rare act of wartime kindness leads to tragedy.
“We were looking all the time for those little ways to subvert the expected. Lawrence of Arabia, he survives everything, and then he just goes over a pothole on his motorbike and dies. It’s utterly random. It makes no sense,” Mendes says. “These men are walking with the dead all the time, and the line between the living and the dead is so slender.”
