War glamorized

Rating: 7/10 (21 February 2017)

There's a certain charm about true stories adapted for cinema. Because, while the fiction lacks absolute constraints, giving the screenwriters more liberty and allowing for some laziness, true stories must remain true - and at the same time must be told captivatingly to keep you thrilled. Finding the right balance between the naked truth and the gloss of creative imagination to make the truth shine is a real art.
However, some true stories don't tell us much besides what happened, omitting the "how" part. Such stories are basically legends, no matter how ancient or contemporary. And in this case, it's up to the movie creators to recreate the how, often not based on bare facts but on their own perception. And that, in my opinion, is what happened to Hacksaw Ridge thanks to Mel Gibson.
Hollywood has made quite a few war movies, genres varying from dashing black humor like Inglorious Basterds to eerie surrealism like Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. Yet what Hacksaw Ridge reminded me of first was Malick's The Thin Red Line. Stylistically very unlike, both these movies still tell a story about the same war. And it only makes it more obvious how different are Malick's and Gibson's takes on that story.
Malick's war was a useless and ugly thing, a notion that fills everyone's minds, transcends the boundaries between people's personalities and unifies people on both sides of the front line. It's a stain that lies upon you no matter which side you fight for, and corrupts you from within, to the point when there's no good and evil anymore and everything is a single grey mess and everyone is an equal part of it.
But Gibson's vision is different. This man has been long known for his fascination with pain and violence, from the explicit focus on his own character's torture in Braveheart to the gory details of Jesus' fate in The Passion of the Christ. This man's obsession with showing pain and death on screen may raise questions about his morals or sanity, but at least he's being thorough and consistent with it.
And Hacksaw Ridge was yet another proof of that. With all the beautiful healthy faces put in the middle of the carnage of war, with blood, guts and brain pieces splashing out of gun wounds like little fountains, with cartridge cases ejected from rifles and machine guns like some confetti, Gibson creates a hymn to the war, as if it was a holy gift, cleansing the unworthy and leaving the pure intact. And in the middle of that hymn, is the figure of Desmond Doss, portrayed by Andrew Garfield in a way Saint Sebastian would be jealous of, with his face glowing with some perverse naivety and conscious righteousness. The hybrid erotism and holiness of Gibson's vision of Doss are further enforced by two landmark scenes of the film: the scene with Garfield alone on that ridge, pulling the ropes and letting them loose, with his lean figure against the dark smoky sky, sensualized to the point you'd rather expect from the likes of 50 Shades of Grey, and the scene of Doss slowly sliding down the ridge in a stretcher, with a strong parallel to some divine experience you simply can't help coming to think of.
Still, at the end of the day Hacksaw Ridge is a story of a real person who has performed an unbelievable feat in a middle of a true bloodbath, has done something that nobody ever expected of him. And that achievement is a fact that no director's vision could distort or negate. We'll never know for sure where the real Desmond Doss was taking his courage and strength from, and, to be honest, it's the kind of spiritual privacy a person is entitled to. But, private or not, I would still prefer the fact-based stories to follow their roots instead of becoming a victim of a storyteller's inflamed imagination. And while Hacksaw Ridge literally smells of Mel Gibson's own personal beliefs and tastes, apparently it's that rare case when the spirit of a story is so strong that, no matter how hard you twist it or bend it to your own will, it remains true to itself where it really matters.