Passchendaele – death in the mud
Anybody here seen Passchendaele, the Canadian movie about this epic World War I battle, one of three fought for the little Belgian town which cost a total of 600,000 lives? The film opened across Canada Friday night and my partner Deborah and I saw it at the Varsity theatre in Toronto on Saturday.
The Passchendaele battles summon up the horror and futility of World War I trench warefare and the mass slaughter of men who died from machine gun fire, bayonets or artillery shells trying to take or retake a few miles of godforsaken land. The battles went on through most of 1917 with much of the worst fighting taking place in the rain-drenched summer when men died as frequently from drowning in water-filled shell holes or from disease, as from enemy bullets.
The film Passchendaele deals with the Second Battle, in which the 10th Batallion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force — “the Fighting 10th” from Calgary — captured the village and went on a few days later to take the strategically important Hill 52. Hundreds of thousands of British, French and New Zealand troops had earlier tried to take Passchendaele, and had failed. The Canadians took 16,000 casualties.
The making of the movie is an epic in itself. The Canadian actor, writer and director, Paul Gross, spent a decade raising the $20 million needed for the film. He wrote the screenplay, directed the film, and plays the lead role of Sgt. Michael Dunne who Gross modelled on his grandfather, who had taken part in the battle. There’s also a book based on the screenplay:
Passchendaele opens with a horrific scene, based an actual incident involving Gross’ grandfather. It then switches to Calgary when Dunne is invalided home and plunges into a romance with his nurse. This may sound formulaic, and I thought it was until I realized I was watching the movie with too literal an eye. My father served with the Canadian Mounted Rifles and took part in the capture of Vimy Ridge.( He was a very young soldier and I was not born until he was well into middle age.)
At this point in the film, I realized I had to give Passchendaele the benefit one gives any movie — to suspend disbelief and allow oneself to be caught up in the story. From that point on, Passchendaele became for me an engrossing, fascinating study of human reaction to the pressures and emotions of a brutal, dirty war. It is reviewed here.
It’s not a great movie, but it’s well worth seeing. If it has any shortcoming, it is perhaps that too much of it bears the stamp of just one man. Gross is a fine actor, a sensitive writer, and a discerning director. But one man shouldn’t try to do it all. Passchendaele needed a good editor.
Seeing this movie just after the federal election — in which four out of ten failed to exercise their democratic right to cast a ballot — makes one wonder whether Canadians appreciate the liberty for which our parents and grandparents gave their lives.
I think most of us do. In their own way, those who did not vote were also expressing a choice. I think they felt so ill-served by all our party leaders they could vote confidence in none of them. The level of political discourse has become so banal, its tone so demeaning (strikingly more so in the United States than in Canada) that one is repelled and discomfited by the tenor of the campaigns. Our politicians are failing us, not the people.
Passchendaele, by the way, was recaptured by the Germans after a few months. They held it until the end of the war on November 11, 1918.
