Pet projects are often all-or-nothing films, personal visions which translate from grey matter to silver screen either perfectly or disastrously. Passchendaele, which was written, directed and co-produced by Canadian Due South star Paul Gross, manages to circumvent this phenomenon as something of a mixed bag, but sadly it falls more into the latter category than the former.
Inspired by the true story of Gross’s grandfather, who fought in the eponymous First World War battle, Passchendaele follows Sgt. Michael Dunne (Gross) from a physically and emotionally scarring encounter in France to Calgary, where he reencounters an army nurse (Caroline Dhavernas) he fell for in a battlefield hospital, and then back to Ypres for the battle of Passchendaele, in order to protect her newly enlisted younger brother, David (Joe Dinicol). It is a war film wrapped in a love story, and while the two halves dovetail into one another, they don’t quite seem to have found their equilibrium.
Passchendaele
Directed by Paul Gross. |
As much as the major actors perform largely with sincerity and aplomb, their material is flawed. The cast of characters is populated predominantly by hollow clichés: the haunted veteran, the beautiful angel of mercy with skeletons in her closet, the surly and vindictive senior officer, and the physically disadvantaged youth driven by a need to prove himself a man, in war if nowhere else.
There are serious issued raised, to be sure, including the treatment of Germans and German descendants here at home and the aggressiveness of the army in recruiting those who might not necessarily be ready or fit for service. But the passion, the courage, the national cultural myths are not really in attendance.
The script, clever and profound one moment, is stilted and maudlin the next. Every time Gross (as director) draws us into the story with a clever twist or a genuinely emotional moment – and this does happen with some frequency – we soon find ourselves torn back out of the narrative by a horrible passage of dialogue or a brazen cliché; if you’ve ever wanted to see Jesus bearing the cross reenacted on a First World War battlefield, look no further than Passchendaele’s painfully trite, cringe-inducing climax. How the script got green-lighted with this kind of ham-handed, juvenile symbolism is anyone’s guess.
What does impress is the cinematography, the consistently high production values which see gritty battlefields rendered with as much detail and realism as we are used to from the likes of A Bridge Too Far and Band of Brothers. Calgary’s scenery, beautifully shot, is a welcome backdrop for the story, even if it puts the human element to shame.
Essentially, Passchendaele is to the war film what Bon Cop, Bad Cop was to the buddy-cop flick: a well-produced but thoroughly mediocre entry in an American-dominated genre, guilty of trying a great deal too hard to brand itself as Canadiana. We can at least thank our lucky stars (and national treasures) that the irksome bilingualism of Eric Canuel’s Colm Feore vehicle has been traded in for less nettlesome Canadian military uniforms.