Don't miss it, but...

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2017)

A lot was terrific. The lead was consistently great (Sorry, I don't bother with most new names anymore), loved his backwoods face, nice touches and plenty of clubs over the head in re: war and sacrifice. Variously brutally objective or unashamedly nostalgic about the White, Christian American myth, nice rendering of Depression-era, rural Virginia, bible and brotherhood motifs, the feather, a rifle puking smoking cartridges three inches from my eye, the dad's cemetery scenes. I almost gasped at some sets and exteriors seen through Mel and his cameraman's storytelling eyes: the Appalachians, that Dantesque trek into Hell, the rope ladder, those infernos, fathers and sons, that beautiful scene of budding romance in the movie theater amid flashes of swastikas, the mother's wisdom, the flashbacks with the pistol: all so well done. The incident with the brick, yeah, that was me gasping. Sixty years ago when I was a little kid my barber had a totally burnt head. At the clinic in town Doss paused to let him by.
Minuses? Thought Worthington was great, loved his Arthur Kennedy face, agony written all over, and well played when the script didn't let him down. May I nit pick? The worst age make up I've seen in a long time. Visible latex around the eyes.
The real 'noise' started when Doss went off to basic. #1: Mel's choices of actors for and direction of soldiers: the ethnics, OK, but the WASPy boys...huh-uh. OK, the mean one and the dorky one were fine. Those were not Greatest Generation faces, mate. Those were post-modern, Heinz 57. Too homogenized. Too....Millennial! The Hollywood guy? Those were Planet Fitness and protein shake muscles. Men were never built that way in the Forties. And that face? Compare it to Flynn, Gable or Cooper. OK, maybe Tyrone Power. The younger officers: the same, except for his drill sergeant.
The first two scenes in the barracks: very stagey, mannered performances and my-big-break-out-of-drama-school amateurish, the background boys looking exactly that, the writing stagey (theatrical), unrealistic and stilted. Good fight scenes.
But then, the scene when the sarge tells him to give up and, after that, as one by one the officers up the chain, for various reasons and backed up by rueful horns and strings, betray an underlying sympathy for him, OMG, I thought they were going to kiss him sometimes! After the court martial they were all 1980s, Alan Alda-sensitive guys. Doss melted every heart? I doubt it. Men didn't act like that. They had no reference to even know how to act like that. Too soft, too "touch me-feel me." And if they felt it, they wouldn't have shown it so overtly. That's Melodrama, not Cinema. They should never have been directed to wear it on their sleeves until The End. And here's where the structure got in the way. It had to happen abruptly because in 'Act Two' it's the end of the war, 1945, and he's obviously long won their respect, which leads us to the finale. But that's what I wanted to see! We're cheated out of how he won it with these out-of-character switcheroos.
An interesting lesson I think: you can't be true to a story like this and play it with modern sensibilities, because our modern sensibilities have been largely defined and articulated by Hollywood, a specifically Method Hollywood, an approach to interpersonal exchange that only just began to influence our culture, speech, informality after the War. But I'm showing my age. No one but a Boomer would know what I was talking about.
The score: I really thought Mel was above this kind of blatant audience manipulation. Hated it. It didn't trust the story, the actors or the audience. Every heart-tugging trick in the book. That juxtaposition of pseudo-church music and choirs with blood and entrails! No! I wanted something else! Abbott and Costello! Yma Sumac! I don't know, or Nothing! The triteness of the music actually distanced me from the reality Mel was going for. I really wanna slap some of these composers. It's all John Williams' fault, btw. He's almost ruined Lo Spielberg for me at times. Yes, the battle scenes were horrifically, excellently shot and edited. The accompaniment? Oh, here we go: more minor horns descending and an all male chorus's durging, punctuated with slo- mo...please: my nerves.
But, then again, when they said they had to go back the third time, I may have come the closest ever to knowing what utter despair is. If anyone with a hypodermic ever says to me "This is gonna make it OK," I'll know they're taking me out. And something odd: after a while I actually became inured to the slaughter and watched it with a kind of perverse and unflinching curiosity about the many ways the human body can be exploded.
I'm typing with my right arm raised: Henceforth, whenever I hear or see yet another reference to The Wizard of OZ in any work of art, I'm walking out. Is The Wizard of OZ the only myth that unites American culture? THAT IS PATHETIC! Regardless, there was no TV in 1945. There were no DVDs. No one had seen The Wizard of OZ since its cool reception in the summer of 1939. The guy the sarge said "You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy" to, as they pulled themselves up to Calvary, would either have thought the guy'd lost his mind or wanted his back rubbed.
Wait a sec...Is this movie a kind of cancellation of Brokeback Mountain? Just a joke.
In a nutshell: Best intentions in the world, a needed-to-be-told story of the cost of American Individualism that is great when the action tells it, with a great leading man, quite a lot of bad soldier dialogue, beautiful camera, design and editing work, not a big budget for actors and writers or makeup, and a score to make sure we don't think it's a comedy.