Rather, he directed the very, um, vivid “The Passion of the Christ,” which betrayed no Kurosawa influence that I could detect; that was in 2004, a very good year to be Mel Gibson, largely because of that film’s box office success and cultural ubiquity. 2006’s “Apocalypto” was a movie that only a man with an incredible and unexpected box office success such as "The Passion of the Christ” could have gotten made: a shudderingly violent epic of the end of Mayan civilization with all the dialogue in the Yucatec Maya language. To tell you the truth, that movie didn’t work out too well with me either. All those beheadings—I got a lot more grindhouse than Kurosawa out of that one. And 2006 turned out to be a bad year to be Mel Gibson, as his DUI arrest and separation from his then-wife were just the first in a series of events and actions by Gibson that would seriously tarnish his reputation within the film industry and particularly the media that cover it. I just saw a piece that refers to Gibson’s coming to Venice with his latest directorial effort, the World War II drama “Hacksaw Ridge,” as part of Gibson’s “Forgiveness Tour.”
Well I’m not gonna get into that. I’m a serious critic, and I’m going to review the work, not the man. Also, I hear Gibson is staying at my hotel. Good grief. I’ve already shared a water taxi on this trip with one director whose film I’ve trashed, and I’m not about to push my luck.
But seriously: “Hacksaw Ridge” is a not-inconsiderable achievement for Gibson, a war film so stolid in is values—both aesthetic and the other kind—that it marks the actor/director as fully ready and able to take up the banner of Hollywood’s Last Classicist whenever Clint Eastwood decides to give it up. Based on the true story of one Desmond Doss, a young fellow from the Blue Ridge Mountains who enlisted in the army during World War II not to fight, but to be a medic, and furthermore held to his pacifist beliefs so strictly that he refused to carry or even touch a weapon, it tells an affecting tale with conviction. Conviction that carries it over and through its cornball touches, and there are many of those.
Andrew Garfield plays Desmond, seen early on as a boy rough-housing with his brother. A mishap when the fighting gets too rough puts the horror of violence into Desmond, as does a later incident involving his alcoholic WWI vet father (Hugo Weaving) that’s only revealed in flashback a good deal later on. The grown up Desmond is a goofily grinning good boy who falls hard for local nurse Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) after putting a tourniquet on an injured buddy and escorting him to the hospital, because that’s just the kind of guy this devout Seventh-day Adventist is. The courtship of Dorothy and Desmond sees Gibson evoking The Charm of The Widescreen American Pastorale with great élan. Of course it can’t last, as a newsreel full of Nazis reminds us, and so Desmond enlists, although he’s going to do basic training by his own rules. He’s read up on the “Manual of Practical Anatomy” enough that he knows he’ll make a good medic, and at first his platoon seems like an amiable enough lot. It is filled, in fact, with every multi-ethnic cliché from every bad World War II film ever. “I’m Grease Nolan, out of Red Hook,” one character actually says, with an accent that would raise Leo Gorcey from the grave just so he could die again. There’s a Polish guy, a guy with a Clark Gable mustache nicknamed Hollywood, and more and more. Then Vince Vaughn shows up as the drill sergeant and does something resembling a mild Don Rickles routine. This was entirely tolerable to me—there are times when quaint doesn’t bother me, and the movie maintains its solid visual construction throughout. One thing I appreciate about Gibson as a director is that he knows there are worse things you can do with a movie camera than put it on a tripod.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmn52jqba3rcusZq%2Bdnp6wpnnFoqOmZZaawLW11ZqjZmpgZoNutMCcoqyZp2K%2FqrDGng%3D%3D