Passchendaele

Passchendaele is part unabashed romance and part horrific and quite graphic war story.

In film World War One has been a neglected war compared to the more morally unambiguous Second World War and the more recent Vietnam War. And films that aren't about American participation are just as neglected. Passchendaele fills that void.

The movie moves quickly and switches between home life and battlefield with surprising ease and effect. I was not bored for a moment of this movie. The movie will make you care about these people when they are at home living their lives and then fear for them at war. While the battle scenes are quite brutal, they are not sensational or exploitive, since to have made them sensational or exploitive would defeat the great effort this movie takes in showing how men had to cope with life after the war and the memories of what they lived through.

Undoubtedly there will be cynics who will decry some moments as contrived or melodramatic, but these are the small-minded who have missed the real emotion of this film. The movie is great entertainment, but there is something going on beneath the surface. This is the first time I can recall a film where the main character is someone who has been both emotionally damaged by the war, but does not succumb to it. I suspect there must be many men coming out of the war who were damaged, but quietly lived with that damage their entire lives. For that depiction alone, this is a great movie.

The movie is not without humour and it has one of the funniest seduction lines I've ever heard uttered by a woman in a movie.

The movie is entertaining, but there's a lot going on and much I haven't mentioned as I don't want to click the spoiler warning. There are scenes I'm still thinking about, which doesn't happen with every movie I see.

At last a genuine Canadian movie... Calgary is Calgary... The Americans didn't win the battle, didn't even turn up anywhere... There were no Stars and Stripes in every office. Okay, the plot --- a sort of WW1 Saving Private Ryan effort set against the bloody Belgian battle --- is a little far fetched. But the scenes --- both in 1916 Calgary and in the mud and horror of the battlefield --- are as good as those in any WW1 movie I've seen. There are believable characters well portrayed both in the script and by the actors. The effects are superb. The lighting and cinematography are sensitive and creative. And how very impressive that Paul Gross was a triple threat man. He wrote it, he directed it and he starred in it. That totals 300% This is as good as they come.

In 1917, in the World War I, the veteran Sergeant Michael Dunne (Paul Gross) is wounded in the front and is nursed by Nurse Sarah Mann (Caroline Dhavernas). He is diagnosed neurasthenic and returns to his hometown Calgary to work in the recruitment. Michael fall in love for Sarah, but is not corresponded. When Sarah's asthmatic brother David (Joe Dinicol) forces his enlistment to be recognized by the father of his girlfriend Cassie Walker (Meredith Bailey), Sarah believes Michael is the responsible and blames him for the engagement of her brother in the army. Michael enlists using his mother last name to protect David and they are sent to the no man's land in the front of the Battle of Passchendaele.

"Passchendaele" is a good romance in times of war. The marketing is totally wrong since the romance prevails over the war genre. The cinematography is extremely beautiful, highlighting the magnificent landscapes and scenarios. The gorgeous and sweet Caroline Dhavernas recalls Lara Flynn Boyle and has a great performance. The characters could be better developed and there are some parts that do not work well, like the annoying David Mann, who does not deserve the sacrifice of Michael; the last scene with the analogy to Jesus Christ is awful and unnecessary. But in general, "Passchendaele" is an above average movie. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "A Batalha de Passchendaele" ("The Battle of Passchendaele")

Wow. Great flick!

Besides being an admitted movie addict, I'm also a retired professional soldier and a combat veteran who's served in multiple theaters of conflict.

I usually find myself quietly disappointed with war movies in general, and their vain, highly stylized, cliché-laden attempts to realistically portray infantry warfare, and high-intensity warfare's effects on soldiers. Film-makers invariably seem to fall far short in their attempts to capture the essence of what war can be (or was) like, and what exposure to it can do to the people involved, both mentally and physically.

To his great credit, I think that in Passchendaele Paul Gross seems to have actually managed to capture a reasonably authentic glimpse into both the nature of such hellish environments and the men caught up in them.

The acting was superb. The performances were so convincing that the notion that I was just sitting watching a movie didn't even occur to me until the credits began to roll by, I was so totally engrossed.

This film was easily one of the best that I've seen in quite some time.

I'll definitely be keeping my eyes open for any future films by Paul Gross. Passchendaele stands as an extremely impressive testimonial to his obvious talents.

There was great hoopla around "Passchendaele" in 2008, with the hope that it would bring in great audiences when released. However, the box office take in its native Canada was only average, and it faired worse in the international market - the only foreign market it played in theaters was with a (brief) British release, and in the United States the DVD label that picked it up was a small DVD company that specialized in releasing public domain movies.

Seeing the movie, it's easy to see why not that many people were attracted to it. The first half of the movie is pretty awful. I know the intent of this first half was to illustrate war on the home front - which you don't often see in war movies - but it fails in its intentions. The dialogue is downright awful at times, the characters are very familiar, and it's REAL slow going. Even worse is that despite the expense put into the movie, the look and feel of the movie here is like one found with a cheapo drama broadcast on the CBC television network.

The second half of the movie - moving to the Passchendaele battlefields - is a bit more successful than the first half. The battlefield and the battlefield fighting come across as gritty and authentic, and the movie finally has a theatrical feeling to it. However, the movie still suffers from bad dialogue, throwing in ridiculous symbolism as well. Worse of all, the struggle for Passchendaele doesn't last that long - all of a sudden, we're told Passchendaele has been taken. Huh?

Had writer/director/actor Paul Gross had set the movie entirely on the battlefield AND had someone smart working with him to correct the shortcomings of his screenplay, we might have had something here. But as it is, the movie ends up being a big disappointment. What's worse is that this movie's mostly bad reception means that it will probably be a long, long time before some other Canadian tries to make a "big" movie that will attract a large domestic audience - if ever.