The meaning of life, part III: Fighting each other

1917

Crit

Not sure I align with my Famous Movie Critic Friend Whose Opinion I Trust More Than Manohla Dargis's (henceforth, let's just call him FMC) in judging this the best film of 2019, but I'm certainly closer to him than to Dargis and her N.Y. Times colleague A. O. Scott, whose noses must have been strained by the force with which they were upturned.

Where I think this film is great--is, in fact, the best war movie I've ever seen--is in its depiction of the war between the fighting, especially in its concentration on how nature, in the form of rats, flies, and water among the less visible forces, works as quickly as possible to reclaim the victims. The widely praised simulation of a single 110-minute shot is impressive but unavoidably gimmicky, demanding that you devote some of your attention to finding the seams (which are eminently findable), and the bookend Big Movie Star cameos are pretty close to insulting.

But George MacKay, as Lance Corporal Schofield, who is onscreen for what seems like about 107 of those minutes, imbues the film with the humanity that the gimmicks don't serve: stripped successively of (spoiler alert!) comrade, of bayonet, of helmet, finally of the one thing a soldier cannot be stripped of and still be a soldier, his rifle, he contracts into an indomitable man with a mission. MacKay, whose familiar face I just this moment identified as that of eldest son and emotional linchpin Bodevan in Captain Fantastic, has a chance to be a big enough star someday to be given a cheesy cameo in a film maybe as good as this one.

• Why all the horror trailers? In addition to a nasty-looking The Invisible Man with Elisabeth Moss and an unnecessary (but forgivable for giving Millicent Simmonds another gig en route to being recognized as an actor, not just that young deaf actress) A Quiet Place Part II, one that I'd already seen: The Turning, a reboot of Henry James's "A Turn of the Screw." And the rest, which I'd seen, were yet more literary adaptations: Emma (psyched; do any of you YUPpers think Anya Taylor-Joy could play Hannah Kolb in a movie?), and The Call of the Wild (ugh--animatronic animals, including the dog, really?).