When I saw the stage play a few years ago, the natural barrier of no women characters was too much for me. I really didn’t enjoy it. So, it was with some curiosity I attended a screening of JOURNEY’S END, based on the 1928 play by R. C. Sherriff, which will be released in Australian cinemas November 8th. And like Shawshank Redemption before it, I was won over by the storytelling. And the exploration of universal themes. Despite modern warfare being explored often in contemporary screen art, The Hurt Locker and Burns/Novick’s Vietnam come to mind, this story of trench warfare in WW1 may have its greatest impact in its distance.
We meet the officers and men, astonishing nomenclature made worse when we meet the ‘servants’ of Company C, in Aisne in 1918. They are being rotated to the front, “up the line” to serve their 6 days per month allocation. The story is of the officers in their dugout rather than the NCOs and men around them in the mud and the sewerage. Their captain is Stanhope (Sam Claflin) who has a slight and slipping grip on his heavy responsibilities which he is unable to attend to sober. But he is a man for whom duty is not just a word and he has the support of Lieutenant Osborne (Paul Bettany) who is his mentor, his champion and a loyal, capable, Number 2.
Into the mix comes Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) who has pulled strings with his Field Command General uncle to be deployed to Stanhope’s Unit. With Raleigh’s sister, the three were a trio that roamed free before the war when the boys were in diff years at the same school. He looks young, baby faced, and is as green as only a new second looie can be. The main characters are rounded out by Second Lieutenant Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) who has shell shock only occasionally faced or contained and Second Lieutenant Trotter (Stephen Graham) who is the workhorse veteran and Private Mason (Toby Jones), erstwhile batman and cook.
This is a robust film of delicate intimacy. With close-ups the most predominant shot selection from Director Saul Dibb (The Duchess) and Cinematographer Laurie Rose (Peaky Blinders), we become very acquainted with them, even to the point of watching them shave, a ritual repeated. And in the greenish, cold light of the trenches the faces never look at rest. Inside the bunker, lit flickeringly by the glow of cigs and candlelight with rough tin reflectors, the amber serves to deepen the shadows and highlight the upper rank conflict. With the ceiling and top beams mostly in shot, the claustrophobia is well conjured and the lack of long shots, even in sorties, further ties the men to their place.
The screenplay is crafted by Simon Reade to develop the story slowly after we are pulled into the period and place. We never really get a complete background to the characters but what we clearly know is: they are new men, lesser or greater for their experiences. “Cheerio” echoes often and hits hard in a superbly evoked mire where nothing could be thought of as cheery. These meticulously mannered men speak across the generations of a war to end all wars and though warfare has changed, the impact, the loss and the service remain.
Stanhope is a piteous creature, his decay and demons expressed to the viewer through his point of view delusions and his frank conversations when able. He is fragile and his struggle to do right, is brilliantly expressed by Claflin who vibrates with despair at his powerlessness. And that theme is explored in a myriad of ways in JOURNEY’S END. Not just in the evident PTSD-ridden Hibbert, simply thought of as a malingerer, but foregrounded in the pared down, measured, emotional inhibition of Bettany’s Osbourne. Also well moderated is Butterfield’s Raleigh who is our guide to the horrors. And Jones’ workingman grunt is stolid and cynical, brings tea without being asked and knows when to retreat to his kitchen. Away from the violence.
This is not a physically violent film, no mutilations or bombs blowing bodyparts out of foxholes, the violence is in what war does to humans. And while there may be no women in the cast, there is a female hand in the editing, the score, the executive production team and so forth because this is a film about what conflict was then that resonates with the challenges that humanity faces now.
JOURNEY’S END is absorbing, powerful and redolent peacemaking. Not to be missed or dismissed as a man’s film, it opens in Australian cinemas November 8th.