When I saw the trailer for Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes’ new World War I film over the summer, it was clear that 1917 was gunning for a Best Picture nod. But as we head into the frenzy of awards season, it’s clear that the movie is a worthy contender. The Music City Film Critics Association (full disclosure: I’m a founding member) has nominated the film in seven categories — it’s tied with Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed gangland drama The Irishman. It also won trophies for Drama Motion Picture and Director of a Motion Picture at Sunday’s Golden Globes. The best news? Mendes’ latest deserves all the attention it has received, and it’s plainly one of the year’s best.
This movie is a technical wonder — a directorial masterwork of one-shot filmmaking paired with immersive production design that puts the audience in the trenches, on the front lines, in a race against time to prevent a tragedy in the making. Legendary cinematographer Richard Deakins captures every frame of this story as it moves through misty daylight into the chiaroscuro shadows in the corners of bombed-out bunkers, across wrecked cities in the middle of the night under the flickering light of floating flares.
Even though the movie’s action takes place over about 24 hours, the story feels like it is unfolding in real time, in one continuous tracking shot. The approach might have come across like a gimmick if not for the intensifying effect it has on 1917’s barebones story: Two British soldiers race to deliver a message to prevent 1,600 of their brothers-in-arms from charging into a deadly trap. Following the action ceaselessly, minute after minute, Deakins’ exquisite lensing transforms trudging through the mud in a maze of trenches into something mesmerizing. Mendes’ one-shot approach makes every grimace, sigh, stumble and grumble a meditation on physical movement and psychological motivation at their most elemental. 1917 spends a lot of time focused on the crushing monotony of war, but it marries the boring repetition of marching, running and crawling with an urgent plot, and the resulting tension is gripping.
The story is loosely inspired by the war stories that Mendes’ grandfather Alfred Mendes told the director when he was a boy. The elder Mendes joined the British Army in 1916 at age 19. He was awarded the Military Medal for Bravery when he volunteered to locate wounded soldiers scattered across an open and active German field of fire during the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium. Clearly much of 1917 is fictional, and the fact that one of the messengers has a brother in the first wave of the doomed attack is one of the notes that rings unnecessary and untrue here — it’s a bit like Gallipoli meets Saving Private Ryan, which detracts from the realism that is the film’s greatest strength. Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ script is this film’s weakest link, especially when it comes to dialogue: You might catch yourself thinking, “I like it better when they’re not talking.”
Luckily, 1917 mostly steers clear of chitchat in favor of running, crawling, shooting and stabbing. It’s not a hyperviolent war movie, but there’s a brutality to this mud-and-blood affair, and at its best, it reads like the slowest great action film of the past year.
