Sarah's Key (France, 2011)
Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frederic Pierrot

It's well-nigh impossible to make a film about the Holocaust without either lecturing the audience or slipping into inappropriate sentimentality. The best examples of this genre (if such a term is appropriate) are character-driven pieces like The Pianist and Life is Beautiful. These films focus on the utterly human reactions of individuals caught up in Europe's darkest hour, and steadfastly refuse to sugar-coat the brutality for the sake of holding an audience.

Sarah's Key is an engrossing and compelling addition to the Holocaust film canon, which showcases both the qualities and the pitfalls of the genre. For the majority of its running time, it is an enticing and often moving drama which finds characters in the present day interacting meaningfully with their collective past. But all its hard work doesn't entirely pay off, thanks to a melodramatic final act which tarnishes the result.To give credit where it's due, Sarah's Key succeeds in the most important area, namely in its rendering or recreation of the Holocaust. The film explores an aspect of the Final Solution which has not been previously addressed on film, and it approaches the subject with courage and determination. The scenes at the Velodrome d'Hiver, where thousands of French Jews were rounded up and housed without food or sanitation, are suitably unpleasant and very tough to watch, particularly the shots of human excrement or a woman falling from the ceiling.Gilles Paquet-Brenner's camerawork is well-judged in these scenes and is surprisingly accomplished for a first-time director. During the scenes in the Vel d'Hiv, he uses long aerial shots to show the isolation of Sarah's family before they are sent to the camps, showing the squallor and hideous conditions without hammering the point home. In the camps his hand-held work is more frenetic: when the mothers are separated from their children, his camera darts all over the place to capture the sense of panic on both sides. This approach makes us feel as confused as the characters would be, and these scenes lack some of the staged quality that hampered Schindler's List.The film also benefits from a fantastic performance by the young actress playing Sarah. Melusine Mayance is a bewitching screen presence, and she conveys the innocence of the character without looking like she has been directed to do so. Like her counterpart Saoirse Ronan, she has wisdom beyond her years but is not an adult in a child's body, forced to act like a child. If she continues to deliver on the strength of this performance, she will be breaking audience's hearts for decades to come.Among its war film counterparts, Sarah's Key is on one level closest to The Pianist. Apart from Kristin Scott Thomas' links to Roman Polanski (they worked together on Bitter Moon), both films are primarily about survival. Both Sarah Starzynski and Wladyslaw Szpilman are not heroic in the traditional or conventional sense. They endure the Holocaust by neither fighting the authorities head-on nor rolling over and praying for death to come. In the truck on the way to the camp, an old man shows Sarah a ring full of poison, and says: "No-one can choose when I die."

The film shows Sarah's transition from innocence to adulthood and a new life in America, via the heartbreaking discovery of her brother's death. Having hidden her baby brother in a secret room when the French police arrive, Sarah is sustained by the hope and belief that he is still alive. This hope drives her every action, from asking the brunette lady with forged papers to let him out to tunnelling under the wire to get out of the camp. The death of her brother haunts Sarah, preventing her from ever feeling happy or free from her past. When she moves to America, her future husband calls her the most beautiful and saddest woman he could imagine, and eventually her grief cancels out whatever hope she had left.Both of the protagonists in Sarah's Key - Sarah and the journalist investigating her - experience large amounts of guilt over what happened. While Sarah's guilt is intensely personal (a literal skeleton in the closet), Julia's is part of a national or continental guilt that such awful events were allowed to happen. One man she meets works hard to put names to all the photographs of the Vel d'Hiv victims, commenting that it is painful but the right thing to do. Because this guilt is conveyed through naturalistic conversation, with the camera as observer rather than interrogator, we don't feel like we are being constantly made to hang our collective heads in shame.One particular aspect of the events at Vel d'Hiv reinforces the film's message of those closest to the horror turning a blind eye, or even encouraging what was going on. When the Jews are rounded up in 1942, we see a number of native French observers cheering and jeering from the rooftops. The Jews are depicted as inferior not just to the Aryan race, but to native Frenchmen, with even those who have lived in France for decades being degraded and derided. It's a fitting means to distinguish between race and nationality, concepts which became ideologically fused under Nazism.

Both the success and the failure of Sarah's Key are contained in the narrative's framing device - that is, the cutting back and forth between Sarah and Julia's stories. On the one hand, such an approach makes perfect sense when looking at something as harrowing as the Holocaust. Kristin Scott Thomas represents the audience as present-day observers, historically removed from the events by both her age and her family background. The film admirably admits that, even with the sheer amount of information available, we cannot come close to recreating the Holocaust on screen. Unless we experienced it personally (as Polanski did), we have to view things from a distance, pursuing the truth without ever feeling the need to judge.On the other hand, the constant switching between the stories does start to become jarring as Julia's situation changes. Sarah's story is consistently more engaging and involving than the events in the present day, and while it never feels like we are watching two different films, we find ourselves longing for Julia's sections of the story to be hurried along. Some of the editing choices are borderline crass - for instance, Julia appears on the site of Vel d'Hiv just after Sarah is taken away.

The other problem with Sarah's Key is its increasing reliance on melodrama which comprises the integrity of both sides of the story. Some of the first traits are seen in Sarah's section, where one of the French camp guards not only spares her life but helps her escape. The film is trying to be as nuanced as Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, showing that not all French collaborators were Nazi puppets. But the scene still feels contrived to the point of being totally facile.This becomes a greater problem in the present-day sections. After it emerges that Sarah is no longer alive, the loose ends flail and fray as the film searches for some kind of cathartic ending. Arguably having her still alive, to be discovered by Julia in the final scene, would have been more predictable and less rewarding. But the ending as it is feels inconclusive in a non-rewarding way, and the coda with the voice-over feels tacked-on.Sarah's Key is a flawed but admirable attempt to explore a difficult subject matter from an original angle. Kristin Scott Thomas turns in another fine performances, with a flawless American accent and unique subtlety in her facial expressions. The film is ultimately compromised by its later sections, which do undermine or cheapen a lot of what has gone before. But it is still a solid debut effort which suggests future promise for both its young performers and its director.

Rating:
Verdict: Moving, memorable but sadly melodramatic

Battle of Britain (UK, 1969)
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Starring Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson

The war film is a most contentious genre. For decades theorists have locked horns to dispute its role or purpose in popular culture. Some have argued that war films are an essential part of a nation's identity, and when done properly can be as much of a mark of respect as many more traditional memorials. Others have likened the whole genre to propaganda: by bringing people up in a culture where war is primarily portrayed through entertainment, they come to believe that war is an essential part of human life, and are therefore more willing to give their lives in what might seem a futile cause.Battle of Britain is an interesting talking point in this debate, coming between the initial jingoistic wave of British post-war filmmaking and the resulting revisionism and anti-war efforts of the later-20th century. While patriotic in both intention and execution, it is not as troubling as The Bridge on the River Kwai in its glamorised depiction of the British stiff upper lip. But unlike David Lean's film it is found dramatically wanting, being well-meaning but disappointingly dull.It's difficult to judge war films in terms of historical accuracy because they are in the end dramatic constructions. While especially true of Lean's film, this even applies to documentaries like The World at War: the individual choices of what footage to include, and in what order, have a big influence on the nature and stance of the finished product. Certain older films could be written off because we now know a lot more about given conflicts through declassified secrets - an argument Peter Jackson has made towards remaking The Dambusters. But more information does not necessarily equal better drama: Saving Private Ryan may have the most accurate depiction of D-Day, but that is not enough to stop it slipping into melodrama.Battle of Britain earns initial brownie points because of its unprecedented access to war-era equipment and personnel. The production employed a large number of decorated airmen to serve as historical consultants, and worked closely with the RAF to track down surviving Spitfires and Hurricanes to assemble a squadron for filming. It took 3 years for producer Harry Saltzman to round up 100 aircraft, of which only 31 were airworthy, to make up what was nicknamed "the world's 35th largest air force".The flying sequences are thereby enhanced by the knowledge that we are watching real planes jockeying for position, rather than models on a rolling backdrop. But even without that knowledge, these scenes are spectacular. Guy Hamilton, who previously directed Goldfinger, structures the key moments like the showdowns in the Bond series, cutting between elaborate wide shots and intense close-ups of the pilots. Even if the blood on screen is a little day-glo, the deaths are sudden and surprising, just as they should be.In a further plus point, the German characters in the film are not only played by German actors but speak in German all through the film, something which was unprecedented in this genre. Not only do the filmmakers want things to be accurate, but they have the confidence and conviction to get the audience to read subtitles for sizeable parts of the action. There is a level of respect for both the audience and the historical figures which you wouldn't get from English actors delivering their lines in a pantomime German accent - or doing what Alec Guinness did in The Bunker and simply dressing like a Nazi without changing anything else.This level of respect for the antagonists belies another quality of Battle of Britain. Although it sticks very closely to the orthodox view of history, it is not as jingoistic as it could have been: it doesn't spend its running time constantly shouting about how Blighty beat Gerry single-handedly with men to spare. One of the film's big selling points is its acknowledgement of the role that foreign pilots played in ending the battle. The film concludes with Sir Winston Churchill's famous quote - "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" - followed by a comprehensive breakdown of the casualties by nationality.In its production values and treatment of the subject matter, Battle of Britain is a very noble piece of filmmaking. But all of this is in vain because it lacks the one ingredient which is desperately needed: drama. For all the meticulous preparation and research, and all the respect shown to both sides in the conflict, the film quickly gets bogged down because we can't connect with the characters emotionally, and simply admiring their courage isn't enough.One of the film's biggest problems is its all-star cast. There is an extraordinary breadth of talent on offer, from relative newcomers like Michael Caine and Edward Fox to more established talents like Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. But once the novelty of seeing these talents together has worn off, we realise that there is very little in the way of character focus or development: unlike Saving Private Ryan, there is no strong central performance on which to hang the story.The film paints such a broad and episodic picture of the battle that we are given no real indication of whom we should be following. To some extent this is fair play: no-one can choose when their friends get killed. But because there are so many plot points going on at any one time, when people do meet a sticky end it comes more as an annoying diversion than a nasty shock. Even during the bombing of RAF Duxford (when a working hangar was accidentally destroyed by the film crew), you spend more time admiring the pyrotechnics than worrying about the people underneath them.Because there is no central character among "the few" on whom we can focus, Battle of Britain ends up squandering most of its talented cast. Robert Shaw, one of the most intense and charismatic actors of his day, has surprisingly little to do besides barking orders to his men and telling the mechanics to hurry up. Caine turns up about 20 minutes in, acts a little stroppy, and the next thing we know he's been shot down. Even Olivier is on autopilot, as if he had been told in advance that The World at War was being made, and was using this film as an elaborate form of practice.In order for this kind of film to be compelling, we have to believe that the characters are genuinely in danger, not only on a national scale but in terms of their relationships with each other. But beyond the occasional scene of men arguing with their wives, there is nothing in Battle of Britain which creates this level of tension. It often feels like hanging out with a bunch of actors in the bar after a day's shooting, with them having a jolly good time reminiscing while we sit there looking confused.Because of its shortcomings in character and storytelling, Battle of Britain becomes less of a film than a re-enactment of newsreel footage with the (perceived) benefit of colour. Some sections of the film are so silly that they feel like propaganda - the worst being Edward Fox bailing out, crash-landing on someone's greenhouse, and being promptly offered a cigarette by the young boy standing nearby. Ron Goodwin's soundtrack is very stirring, but the film often relies on it so greatly that it becomes ridiculous. Without his stirring strings or bombastic brass, whole sections would consist of nothing more than cars driving very slowly, or people walking nowhere in particular.Battle of Britain is an admirable but ultimately insipid effort to put the Battle of Britain on the big screen. It was made with all the best intentions and immense technical skill, but it lacks directorial and narrative vision. It pales in comparison with Lean's work in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and for all its similar faults A Bridge Too Far is a much better film. It's completely inoffensive and thoroughly watchable, but also total tosh and very bland.

Rating:
Verdict: Well-meaning but ultimately dull

Apocalypse Now (USA, 1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper

When it comes to reviewing films, there are two kinds of masterpieces. One is the film in which every single scene is immaculately perfect, and your emotional involvement supports and compliments this perfection. The other, more contentious kind is a film which on paper is riddled with faults, but the experience of watching it is so intoxicating that all such faults can be forgiven or forgotten.With war films, the first camp is defined by Full Metal Jacket and the second by Apocalypse Now. Where Stanley Kubrick's film is meticulously constructed and judged to clinical precision, Francis Ford Coppola's is simultaneously a bloated, meandering mess and one of the greatest films of all time. Full Metal Jacket is the more accessible and perhaps more rewarding, but on the big screen Apocalypse Now is nothing short of knockout, as all the elements of Coppola's epic collide in a full-on and frightening story of darkness, madness and war.As with so many great films, the production history of Apocalypse Now leads us to believe that things should have turned out very differently. John Milius, who had written much of Clint Eastwood's dialogue in Dirty Harry, drafted a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness by the middle of 1969. Originally titled The Psychedelic Soldier, George Lucas was set to direct before being hired to helm American Graffiti. In 1974 the project came to Coppola, who had just seen both The Conversation and The Godfather Part II nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

Shooting for the re-titled Apocalypse Now began in March 1976 and was scheduled to last for five months. Soon after shooting began, Harvey Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen and in May the entire set was destroyed by Typhoon Olga. When filming resumed a month later, Marlon Brando turned up heavily overweight and completely bald; Coppola compensated by dressing him in black, shooting him in shadow and using a body double in the wide shots. While shooting the ending in 1977, Sheen suffered a heart attack and had to walk a quarter of mile to get medical attention. By the time Coppola finished editing the film for release in August 1979, Apocalypse Now was two years late and three times over budget.If you attempted to write down all the things that are wrong with Apocalypse Now, it wouldn't take you long to get quite a big list. For a start, the film is too long - or at least, it feels too long. The story of Captain Willard travelling up the Nung River unfolds at a very leisurely pace, with every section of the river having some major significance in terms of plot or mood. There is no montage or time-lapse footage of the boat rapidly reaching the Cambodian border, and the longer it goes on the less sure you feel that Coppola actually knew where the story was going.There is a very fine line in screenwriting between poetic and ponderous, and Apocalypse Now crawls along this line like the snail on the edge of a straight razor. The actual scenes of Brando reading poetry in the temple are dull; the fact that we can't always make out what he's saying annoys us at first, but after a few lines we couldn't care less. By the time you have reached the temple, you are more or less certain that there will be some kind of brutal final confrontation between Willard and Kurtz, so that even as you sit there soaking up T. S. Eliot, you wish that things would get a move on.Then there is the problem of characters. Martin Sheen is absolutely terrific as Captain Willard, and in spite of his incoherence Marlon Brando manages to match him in the last truly good performance of his career. But as is the way with epics, a lot of the supporting cast don't get even half the screen time they deserve. When you've got a film featuring Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper, you expect them to be on screen a lot. But only Duvall gets the screen time and the character depth he needs, with the other two becoming largely superfluous.Finally, there are aspects of Apocalypse Now which reek of the indulgence present in New Hollywood and 1970s filmmaking in general. This is typified by Coppola's self-referential cameo as the director of a war documentary; Sheen walks into his shot at the river mouth, and he shouts: "Don't look at the camera! Keep on fighting!". If Coppola was making a point about the psychological role of a director, it's handled a lot more clumsily and self-importantly than Peeping Tom. Add in the sequence of a live cow actually being butchered and you have more than enough reason to dismiss this film.So far, Apocalypse Now would seem like the Vietnam equivalent of Gone With the Wind: commendable for its scale and ambition, but over-long with too many characters and several questionable scenes. And yet, for all the truth in what I have said, none of it really matters. For Apocalypse Now is not a film to be dissected but to be experienced; it will burn its way into your synapses in a mixture of horror and wonder. Watching it is less like making a Swiss watch than walking into a cloud of hallucinogenic vapours. If you refuse to go with it, you won't get it, but if you do, it'll be one hell of a trip.Instead of recreating the experience of Vietnam with a deliberate and calculated sense of hindsight, Apocalypse Now seeks to put the audience in the same place as the soldiers so they can decide how war felt and why men behaved the way they did. Because the script was written during the war, there is no attempt made by Coppola to lecture the audience one way or the other. There are no easy answers to the questions of right and wrong, and the film's slow, meandering tone is vital for us to soak up as much information as we can. Whatever our conclusions, we feel like we've been through hell with these characters, and been changed irrevocably by the horrors of war.So much of Apocalypse Now is about the chaos of war, and so it's appropriate (at least to some extent) that the film should feel out of control. The relaxed discussions at the beginning, in which Willard's mission is laid out, give us some kind of grounding so that we know where he will end up. But the film is populated by profound and moving insights into the inherent anarchy and absurdity of war. These range from Robert Duvall's insistence on surfing at the beach to the post near the Cambodian border where the troops are fighting without a commanding officer. These scenes produce reactions ranging from laughter to sadness to genuine fright, and often all three at once.Apocalypse Now keeps adding more and more literary aspects to its central story, like someone throwing books into a library that had just been set on fire. The final showdown between Willard and Kurtz is an inventive restaging of The Golden Bough, in which the murderer kills the mad king and becomes king himself. Much of Martin Sheen's dialogue is culled from Michael Herr's Dispatches, which would later be used by Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket. And Kurtz takes on aspects of both Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' and Genghis Khan, whom Coppola studied while the sets were rebuilt.

At the heart of Apocalypse Now is the darkness at the heart of all mankind, and the ability of such darkness to consume all that is good and just and sane if fully unleashed. Kurtz has tipped over into this darkness by his experiences in Vietnam. The war has caused him to see the futility and the nonsense in his orders, and he now lives out his days as a hollow man who has understood evil at the cost of losing his soul. Willard kills Kurtz to fulfil his mission, but the very act of obedience threatens to tip him over into the same darkness. Although he manages to resist, he leaves Kurtz's kingdom as a shell of a man, his life shattered by knowledge of that same evil.Apocalypse Now is a truly extraordinary piece of work which is fully deserving of its masterpiece status. In spite of its myriad flaws, it retains an indescribable aura which leaves us shrinking into our seats, mesmerised and paralysed with fear and wonder. It's a film which damaged both Coppola as a filmmaker and the New Hollywood movement, whose reputation for indulgence had finally caught up with them. But at the dawn of the blockbuster age, it is a fantastic last hurrah and remains one of the most extraordinary experiences in American cinema.

Rating:
Verdict: New Hollywood's last hurrah

Saving Private Ryan (USA, 1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon

It's a total lie that directors who seek primarily to entertain cannot be considered great filmmakers. But it's a lie that Steven Spielberg has bought for quite some time, and his career has suffered for it. Spielberg at a heart an entertainer, a circus ringmaster who excels at making light-hearted popcorn films with a rich and subtle heart. When he attempts to be 'serious', he just gets bogged down and loses his way, resulting in a number of admirable failures like Saving Private Ryan.There can be no doubt that Saving Private Ryan was made with the very best intentions. In his earlier films about WWII, the conflict had served as the backdrop to light-hearted character drama complimented by action sequences, something especially true of Indiana Jones. In making this film, Spielberg was seeking to move the war film away from the action genre, to tackle the heat of battle head on and capture the fear and bravery of the men involved.This intention is clearly evident in the great opening section involving the D-Day invasion of the Normandy beaches. Spielberg shot these 20 minutes without storyboards and completely in sequence: in a feat not attempted since Full Metal Jacket, his camera crew took the beach with the soldiers a few yards at a time over the course of two months. Most of the scene is shot in intense close-up with shaky camera, putting you right next to the soldiers. You get not only the adrenaline but the incoherence of being in a battle, and when people around you are getting killed or wounded, it feels terrifyingly real.This realistic, documentary approach is reinforced by the grainy cinematography. Janusz Kaminski, who also shot Schindler's List, shoots the battle sequences in very pale colours, giving the impression that we are watching black-and-white footage which has been artificially colourised. This, together with the positioning of Spielberg's camera, blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, so that if you came in after the opening credits, you would swear you were watching The World at War.A related strength of Saving Private Ryan is its cast. In the past war films have avoided going down the Rambo root of being ultra-violent star vehicles by casting little-known actors in lead roles - for instance, Matthew Modine in Full Metal Jacket. Spielberg, on the other hand, has both the star power to sell the film and the conviction (in his casting at last) not to let the stars take over the story. Tom Hanks is there in a good performance, but the other members of his company are unrecognisable in the best possible way. And that's before we've got to the well-blended cameos by Paul Giamatti and Ted Danson.Up until the twenty-five minute mark then, everything is so far, so good. But like Schindler's List and The Colour Purple before it, there comes a point in Saving Private Ryan when Spielberg loses his nerve. He drops the ball momentarily, in a plot device or a particular image which undercuts the dark, weighty tone he had been going for, and after that the film never recovers its initial intensity. In Schindler's List, it's the girl in the red dress; in The Colour Purple, it's Celie finding her sisters' letters; and in this film, it's the moment when the Chief-of-Staff personally orders Captain Miller to bring Private James Ryan home.This might seem an odd objection, considering that this order and the subsequent mission are the centrepiece of the whole film. But the objection is justified because it completely changes the tone and intentions of Saving Private Ryan, in a way which ultimately detrimental to the power and message of the film. Having started so confidently, this scene makes everything that follows seem contrived, imposing a generic Hollywood rescue movie onto something so resiliently un-Hollywood.

What results for the best part of two hours is a film pulling in two different directions. On the one hand, it wants to continue to be bleak and unsentimental in its depiction of war and death, trying to keep up the realism and put the audience through the mill. On the other hand, it wants to bring in the mainstream, giving us not just spectacle but sentimentality to take off the rough edges - the very rough edges that would have made the film more convincing. In the end, Spielberg never quite decides which one of these directions he would prefer: he tries to have it both ways, and gets nowhere.The comparisons with Schindler's List are not only structural. There is a direct through-line between the films in the scene in the French village, in which a family ask Vin Diesel to take their young daughter away so that she will not be killed by the Germans - think Sophie's Choice, with the roles reversed. This could be a powerful image or scene, counterpointing the soldiers' refusal to take the child with their orders to liberate France. But as with the girl in the red dress, it feels instead like a clunky shorthand for the cost of war, a melodramatic insert designed to spoon-feed its audience instead of letting them soak up the horror for themselves.That's not to say that Saving Private Ryan doesn't attempt to tackle a number of interesting issues, albeit ones which are familiar within the war film genre. The film tries to understand the mentality of the soldiers in Miller's company, from Upham, the nervous but intelligent fish-out-of-water, to Miller himself, seasoned and battle-hardened but plagued by the shakes. And in the final battle involving Miller and Private Ryan (a good performance by Matt Damon), there is an interesting discussion about confusing orders and the role of duty. The characters torn are between doing what was ordered (leaving with Ryan, thereby letting the bridge fall) and what is right (staying and fighting, at the risk of killing Ryan and failing their mission).But again, there's a conflict in such scenes between Spielberg's intentions and the possibilities afforded by his directorial technique. Whether because of the shooting style or the frenetic pace of the dialogue, we never bond with the characters as much as we might like. We can only name half of them at any one time, and the speed at which people are killed leads us to feel that, dramatically speaking, it may not be worth our while bonding with any of them. This makes the quieter conversations interesting interludes but not something which is narratively cohesive.A further problem with Saving Private Ryan is the goofiness of certain scenes which jar completely with the film's serious intentions. In the midst of trying to play things straight and grim, Spielberg leaves in certain moments which would be great in his lighter works but have no real right to be here. The sequence where Paul Giamatti pushes a plank of wood which knocks down an entire wall - the very one the Germans just happen to be hiding behind - is every bit as out of place as the man treading on the piano keys in Schindler's List. And then there's the epilogue, in which the elderly Private Ryan turns to his wife and says "Tell me I'm a good man" - a saccharine cop-out which makes that scene seem a lot less honest.Like The Colour Purple and Schindler's List before it, Saving Private Ryan is an admirable failure. It is made with the very best intentions, and in both its visuals and its battle choreography, it is technically brilliant. But it never manages to live up to its opening section, settling for convention over character, sentimentality over sheer terror, and - worst of all - length over depth. One hopes that War Horse will be the moment in Spielberg's career when he finally manages to get the balance right.

Rating:
Verdict: Begins brilliantly but ultimately disappoints

The Deer Hunter (USA, 1978)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, Meryl Streep

Which is worse? A heartless, soulless blockbuster with no wit, intelligence or shelf life, designed solely to milk money from moviegoers in the quickest and most cynical way possible? Or a film which presents itself to be a poignant, intelligent, moving work of art, only to emerge as a bloated, pretentious, self-indulgent piece of crap? For most of us, the obvious answer is the former. But that all changes once you've seen The Deer Hunter.

At the risk of slowly making myself unpopular, let me be perfectly clear from the outset. The Deer Hunter is a truly hateful film, a badly-written, badly-directed, poorly-acted piece of garbage, at turns boring, racist, mawkish, churlish, pretentious and manipulative. It is in a very select group of films which are almost unendurable, because of its length, its structure, its tone and its content. It is an utterly hollow experience which leaves its audience somewhere between slipping into a coma and erupting into blind fury.There are many three-hour films which justify their length - think of The Green Mile, Barry Lyndon or The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are also a great many films which use long unedited shots very effectively, like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope or The Passenger. The problem is not length in itself, it's whether or not the film is disciplined in a way that you don't notice or aren't bothered by the length. In The Deer Hunter, the editing is so bad that you feel every agonising minute of those three hours. Shots that should be short and sweet are allowed to run on for minutes, so that hours come to feel like days until the whole film has run itself into the ground.

Film critics often heap praise on directors, but it's worth remembering that most great directors have been kept in check by their writers or producers. There's no doubt that Michael Cimino was talented; he co-wrote Silent Running and his first film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, is a solid, light-hearted thriller. But do a little digging and you discover that all his best work happened before he was given a free rein. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was produced by Clint Eastwood, who forbade the young director from doing more than four takes on any given scene. Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley simply didn't put pressure on Cimino like they should have done; left to his own devices he couldn't separate the wheat from the chaff, and thus the whole thing is dust.Then we come to the politics of The Deer Hunter, which are at best churlish and at worst completely reprehensible. For starters, the film is every bit as racist in its depiction of the Vietnamese as The Green Berets ten years earlier (ironically, since John Wayne presented Cimino with the Best Picture Oscar). The Vietnamese are depicted as bloodthirsty gamblers who enjoy sadistically tormenting innocent soldiers and winning money in the process. There is no attempt made to explore the conflict from their point of view, or to offer examples of the intelligent political activity that brought Ho Chi Minh to power in the first place. It's the kind of blatantly racist propaganda that makes even The Birth of a Nation seem even-handed and subtle.It's easy to see in hindsight why The Deer Hunter won over American audiences. America was still licking its wounds after the fall of Saigon and so a film which portrayed their enemies as essentially mad, bloodthirsty killers with no brains or mercy was bound to strike some kind of chord. Looking at it now, the film is overtly manipulative in getting us to sympathise with the people invading and terrorising a foreign country. In the last scene before the characters play Russian roulette - which incidentally, probably didn't happen - we see Robert De Niro turning a flame-thrower on a 'gook' soldier, and the camera lingers in graphic detail as the flames slowly engulf him. And then there is the ending, where Meryl Streep begins to sing 'God Bless America' in a pathetic rip-off of Paths of Glory. The film swallows the very lies it set out to dismiss, being little more than sour grapes and flag-waving.

As if that wasn't enough, the film is completely up its own fundament. It's the classic kind of epic or awards contender which constantly thinks it is saying something profoundly meaningful, when in actual fact it has no depth at all. The dialogue is just a bunch of platitudes and tittle-tattle delivered by characters that are paper-thin and uninteresting. All the issues which the film claims to address - the ethics of warfare, its impact on communities, etc. - aren't addressed beyond the odd scene of random hysterical crying.More than anything else, the film has no sense of humour. That might seem an obtuse comment to make about a war film, but the best war films are those which see the humour and humanity in the darkest situations, whether in the outlook of the characters or in the total absurdity of the war in question. Full Metal Jacket may be a harrowing, chilling exploration of the duality of man, but it's also clearly a black comedy. Apocalypse Now has the scenes of the soldiers joking on the boat, not to mention all Dennis Hopper's ramblings. The Deer Hunter takes every aspect of these characters so seriously that they become less and less human. Everything is delivered with a face so straight it's made of stone, and the more we try to connect the less it works.Then there is the tone of the film, which lurches between the ponderous and the melodramatic, the snore-inducing and the outright hysterical. For most of its running time, the film is like sleepwalking through treacle; most of the dialogue is either mind-numbingly repetitive or incomprehensibly mumbled, and the slow pace makes everything feel like a bad dream. But then, there is a massive amount of odd, stupid scenes which any editor worth their salt would have taken out in a heartbeat.It makes no sense to have Robert De Niro running through the streets taking all his clothes off, only to sit down and have a quiet chat with Christopher Walken in the very next scene. We don't need the scenes of the veterans playing bingo, or the boys winding up Chuck Aspegren with the car, or the erotic dancers in Saigon: we get the message just fine without these distractions. Most of the opening hour is pointless: when we're not being bored out of our skulls watching people dance, we have to put up with the cast being drunk and disorderly.

Then there is the plot itself. As before, you don't need three hours to tell what is a relatively simple story - three men go to Vietnam, one gets left behind, one of the other two goes back to find him. But as The Deer Hunter draws to a close, various contrivances begin to emerge which cause it to tip even further into melodrama. How can Michael get back into Vietnam (and out again) just as Saigon is about to fall? How has Nick been able to earn so much money without getting shot? And why, if the army haven't found him beforehand, are they so willing to let Michael try?The performances in The Deer Hunter are not much cop either. Robert De Niro is largely phoning it in, hiding behind that thick beard, mumbling most of his lines and not showing anything approaching emotion until the final reel. Christopher Walken, like most of his roles, essentially plays himself, right down to a scene of him dancing awkwardly in the bar. Meryl Streep is showy and grating as Nick's bride-to-be, and John Savage's performance flits between dull and hysterical without good cause.The Deer Hunter is one of the worst films of the 1970s and a failure on every conceivable level. It is a total, unadulterated mess, exacerbated not just by its racism but its gleeful depiction of cruelty, whether towards humans or animals. If it had simply been boring it might be easier to forgive, or at least for the memory of its poor quality to quickly fade. But its attempts to be meaningful or profound, all of which fail miserably, leave you with a headache that will last for days and days.

Rating: 0.5/5
Verdict: Almost unendurable