Both expert and inept

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2010)

I've just finished watching this film twice. Initially as my first ever viewing of it, and then again with the commentary track on. So it's quite fresh in my mind. And, with the benefit of the commentary, I don't think there's a lot that I missed.
I'm still wrestling with my reaction to the film. There was much in the film that was skillfully done and rewarding. Some moving and thought-provoking themes. Some superb camera work. Some fine performances. Some memorable sequences. A lot of good movie making.
And yet, on the whole, I find myself dissatisfied. Because as expertly done as many aspects of the film are, there are others where it is simply dismal. Its structure is a fiasco. Its plot a jumbled mess. Events which are played very significantly turn out to have no significance at all, and merely peter out. Key events are simply left out of the story, leaving us to wonder what happened. The movie breaks up essentially into three sections which have little to do with each other.
The problem is, the movie lacks a tight, coherent plot, and is more a sequence of somewhat related events. It's sloppy and all over the map. And it's easy to see why: Renoir's inspiration for the film was a collection of war stories recollected to him by an officer he met after the war. And that's exactly how the movie comes off, as a hodge-podge of ideas and stories thrown together, without enough effort made to sculpt the thing into a cohesive whole. Heck, Renoir didn't even know how to end it or what to name it until the very end, underscoring the fact that even *he* wasn't quite sure what he was making. What ended up on the screen is apparently vastly different than the first draft of the screenplay, which didn't even have some of the key characters, and was supposed to be about the various escape exploits of the protagonist. By the time we're done, we get only one actual escape for our hero, plus minor participation in a stillborn attempt.
So you can wax on all you want about the great care and detail that went into every scene and camera shot, about the messages and the themes, about the acting, the sets, whatever you want. And I agree that, in looking at the details, at looking at the movie in a reductionistic way, it's a beautiful work of art. But a movie is about more than its parts. It's also about how those parts fit together to make a whole. And looked at holistically, I'm sorry, La Grande Illusion is a disappointment. The story rambles and just does not hold together.
And I'm still *bugged* that we have no idea why Our Hero ends up in solitary confinement.