Passchendaele

The biggest budgeted movie ever to hail from the Canadian provinces, Passchendaele is an admiral stab at wrestling some of the kudos of WWI military intervention back to the 16,000 countrymen who admirably served therein.

Director and writer Paul Gross (Constable Benton Fraser from Due South) was inspired by his grandfather's death-bed confession of bayoneting a young German solider in the forehead and this scene is recaptured graphically in the opening salvo that bravely introduces a platoon of soldiers that one thinks we'll follow throughout the film only to savagely butcher them at the hands of a German machine gun post and throw into question just who will survive the war based on the anonymity of the actors playing the roles.

Gross has a good eye for detail and elicits strong performances from his supporting cast. He himself plays the lead character Michael Dunne (his grandfather's name) with a good balance of pathos of heroism and the film treads a fine line between life at home in Calgary and the battlefields of France and Belgium with aplomb. The film sensitively addresses a dark time in British military leadership, especially since the decision to use the colonies for cannon fodder rather than British soldiers is damning.

The action book-ends the proceedings and whilst it does take a little while to regain its momentum after the visceral opening (similar to Saving Private Ryan in that regard), perhaps the only true mis-step is the cloying closing number which, whilst commendably meant seems a little contrived and twee. Yet this is hardly a major criticism and whilst the Americans will even baulk at the suggestion that they didn't "win the war", the battle of Passchendaele was bloody and pointless and the film is a fitting epitaph to those that died heroically for such a cause.



Released on DVD on 25th January 2010 by High Fliers.

Written by Simon Cole.