By Preston Wilder
Mel Gibson may be nuts, but he can direct. In an age when checking your watch (or phone) is as much a part of multiplex-going as the post-credits teaser, Hacksaw Ridge runs 139 minutes and feels like half that. Much of this is down to narrative shape, the film structured as a half-dozen long, detailed sequences so it’s over before you know it; I kept expecting it to go back to the battlefield – having read fulsome praise of its ‘battle scenes’ – but in fact there’s only one battle scene, stretching into almost half the movie. The structure helps; but it’s also a question of the earnest, epiphanic feeling Gibson brings to it.
Mel loves martyrs (I wouldn’t be surprised if he views himself as a martyr, given his recent problems), in the Biblical sense of staying true to one’s beliefs and – crucially – taking the punishment. “I’m not gonna pretend to be something I’m not. I am what I am,” says Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a real-life figure who served in WW2 and became the first man to win the Congressional Medal of Honour (America’s highest military honour) without firing a shot. Doss refuses to fire, or even touch, a gun: he’s a patriot who enlists to serve his country, as a medic, but won’t take an enemy life – and he sticks to his guns (no pun intended) even in the face of his comrades’ open contempt, mental and physical bullying, and even a court-martial.
Doss, unsurprisingly, is a Jesus figure, cut from the same cloth as Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. “What is it You want of me?” he actually calls to the skies at one point. His pacifism is part of his Christianity, though also a function of his troubled childhood which made him abhor all kinds of violence; his dad was destroyed by war, WW1 having turned him into an abusive drunk and emotional basket case – so, in a sense, by defeating war (i.e. saving lives), Desmond can reclaim his father and redeem his own childhood. The inner turmoil, with Dad’s violence on one side and Desmond’s self-sacrifice on the other, is depicted in broad strokes, but that’s Gibson’s style: he’s a specialist in a kind of naïve art – one recalls Helena Bonham Carter’s sniffy real-life comment that he has “a very basic sense of humour, it’s a bit lavatorial and not very sophisticated” – which amasses a sledgehammer power through vivid images and sheer commitment, like a Spielberg with teeth.
Desmond’s own particular Calvary is Hacksaw Ridge, a vertical cliff on the island of Okinawa; soldiers climb to the top with rope ladders, only to be cut down by the concealed Japanese. The troops’ approach is like something from a horror movie, with rats gnawing at corpses and an ominous silence broken by the chaos of battle – though the much-acclaimed battle sequence seems a bit too much: sounds are amplified, bodies aren’t just pierced but explode in messy chunks, and the men are buffeted, as if caught in a hurricane. It may be entirely realistic, of course – even if combat isn’t like this, it probably feels a lot like this – but was there really so much charging and hand-to-hand combat in WW2? It’s like something out of the Middle Ages, or perhaps a videogame – or perhaps a deliberately hellish exaggeration, fitting with the film’s stark m.o.
Everything is a little bit crude here. Desmond’s girl-back-home is a fantasy figure who adores the gawky kid’s awkwardness and tells him “I will love you, no matter what”. The court-martial scene is resolved – very cheesily – by a last-minute intervention from Dad himself. The only nuance comes perhaps in the Army’s shabby treatment of Desmond which, like Pilate’s treatment of Jesus, is founded on realpolitik rather than sadism (their point seems to be that having an avowed non-fighter in the platoon is bad for morale and “not good for anybody”). Gibson isn’t the kind of filmmaker who’ll make soldiers look bad – except of course the Japs, who are “animals, stinkin’ animals”.
Hacksaw Ridge is approximately two-thirds ridiculous, one-third astonishing. It’s not the first American film about a pacifist war hero: Sergeant York was an Oscar winner and the biggest domestic hit of 1941 – but that film had Gary Cooper (as Alvin York) making up for his no-gun policy by tricking the enemy into surrender, whereas Pvt. Doss doesn’t really use his wits at any point. Instead he uses his passion (or Passion), rushing up and down Hacksaw Ridge saving the wounded like a man possessed – or, perhaps, a man who’s been touched by the Grace of God. “Forgive me,” say his comrades at the end, offering the belated tribute that’s a martyr’s sweetest reward – and no-one’s likely to ask Mel for forgiveness but he’s definitely back in the fold with this strange, emphatic, ultra-violent, artlessly memorable movie. He’s nuts, but I hope he directs a lot more movies.
DIRECTED BY Mel Gibson
STARRING Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Vince Vaughn
US 2016 139 mins
