Movie Review of “Band of
Brothers,” “Black Hawk Down,”
“We Were Soldiers”
une 6th marked the 60th
anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy,
which began the final act in what, for Americans at
least, was the greatest national drama of the 20th
century. World War II has also been the greatest single
historical source for our fictional dramas. War
provides instant drama. Just add blood. The Video Hound
Golden Movie Retriever lists about 800 WWII movies,
more than all other war movies combined. Coming in a
distant second is the Vietnam war, with about 150
films. (It would be interesting to see such a
“popularity” ranking of war movies for
other countries, though it should be remembered that
Hollywood (i.e., the American movie business) is and
always has been a very international enterprise,
attracting talent from the four corners of the world
and sending product back out to them.)
This runaway
success of WWII as a drama source is a curious
phenomenon if you stop and think about it. Why
shouldn’t our Revolutionary War in 1776 be
considered just as
important or inspiring? Why has
it led to only 13 movies? The Civil War was at least as
vital to our national history as WWII, yet it has
inspired only about 100 movies.
But movies are not
made for homo historians, but for homo
sapiens, a species that
needs stories to order its formless lives just as much
as it needs food and shelter. The Second World War
obviously resonates with some deep mythic structures in
our unconscious better than any other armed conflict
does. And the general outlines of WWII are so
well-known that a film needn’t spend much energy
on background exposition, conserving its resources for
the story in the foreground.
It is, for
Americans, a comeback or revenge story whose first act
was the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Big
explosions are de rigueur in action movies, and they
don’t get any bigger than the ones at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki the provided the climax for the final act.
WWII is also a
coming-of-age story for us. Before it, we still labored
in the shadows of the Old World, acting with due
cultural deference. After the war, it was clear that,
in some ways, the Old World was now in the shadows of
the New. It’s not just that we had become an
unrivaled economic power and a military power rivaled
only by the Soviet Union. It had become clear that
Europe had lost any claim to moral superiority. Not
content apparently with the blood bath it started in
the First World War, it started another one barely
twenty years after its conclusion. For Americans,
cultural self-confidence followed the recognition of
our economic, military and moral power. Cultural
dominance followed (and furthered) that
self-confidence.
It might be helpful
at the outset to distinguish between war movies and
combat movies, a sub-set of the former in which
military action moves from the ominous background into
the violent foreground. “South Pacific”
(1958) and “From Here to Eternity” (1953)
are war movies, even though there’s little
shooting in either one, and there’s none at all
in another great war movie, “The Best Years of
Our Lives” (1946), the great William Wyler study
of the homecoming of a group of Yanks.
Still, despite the
enormous popularity of war as a raw material for film,
fashions come and go. Steven Spielberg’s
“Saving Private Ryan” (1998) did more than
rescue one private. It rescued a whole genre, making
the world safe again for war movies, which had fallen
into some disfavor. But the Lord giveth and the Lord
taketh away, and “Band of Brothers” (2001),
which Spielberg executive produced along with Tom Hanks
(star of “Ryan”), so definitively mastered
the subject of combat in the European theater, that it
is hard to imagine another director following in his
footsteps anytime soon.
“Band
of Brothers”, a
10-part miniseries on HBO, follows one particular
company of American soldiers, Easy Company, part of the
101st Airborne Division, from training camp to D-Day to
the Battle of the Bulge to the capture of
Hitler’s mountain hideaway in Berchtesgaden. The
script was based on Stephen Ambrose’s history of
Easy Company and, in keeping close to its facts, the
makers of the film were able to resist the temptations
to sentimentality that generally ensnare movies in this
genre, including Spielberg’s own “Saving
Private Ryan.”
“Band of
Brothers” is so good that I now find it
impossible to watch, or remember, other combat movies
without finding them, in the final analysis,
manipulative and phony. In other combat movies the hero
is always wounded in the shoulder so he can wear a nice
photogenic sling. Or else his temple will be grazed so
he can wear a white bandanna with a little splash of
red on it. He won’t get shot in the ass, as more
than one soldier does in “Brothers”.
Halfway into most war movies, you already know
who’s going to turn yellow and get killed,
who’s going to crack under the strain and get
killed, who’s going to redeem himself with some
heroic action and get killed, and who’s going to
quietly persevere or surprisingly emerge as a plucky
leader; and, of course, you know that the grizzled
sergeant will survive.
It’s
not fair. “Band of Brothers” raises the
standard for the combat film so high that it makes
excellent movies such as “Black Hawk Down” (2001) and “We Were Soldiers” (2002) look contrived. Both of these
were closely based on historical events. In the first
case, it was the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, our
disastrous attempt to bring some order to the Sudan
(which has been spectacularly cursed, even by African
standards, ever since the cowardly killing of Gordon at
Khartoum in 1885). In the second case, it was the first
major land battle of the Vietnam war, in the Ia Drang
Valley in 1965.
It’s clear
from these movies that American soldiers fought with
great skill and bravery in both cases, but that they
were hamstrung by commanders (and, ultimately,
commanders-in-chief, Clinton and LBJ, respectively) who
wanted to wage war on the cheap. (It could be argued
that our leaders are doing the same thing today in
Iraq, where we are trying to make an omelet without
first breaking the eggs, and in our war against Muslim
fanatics, pulling our punches against those states in
the Middle East that sponsor or tolerate terrorist
networks.)
The most
interesting thing about “We Were Soldiers”
is to see the way the American commander, Lt. Col. Hal
Moore (Mel Gibson), operates. Outnumbered four to one,
Moore is able to survive largely because he knows how
to get inside the enemy’s head. It’s
because he thinks of him with respect and interest and
empathy, that he can anticipate his moves and
ultimately outwit and outfight him.
“Fighting”, in our normal use of the word,
implies anger, loss of temper, loss of control. This
movie makes it clear that contempt for the enemy is an
attitude that only civilians can luxuriate in, as a
bath to soothe our anxiety. It is not an attitude that
soldiers can afford.
Many wise decisions
contributed to the success of “Band of
Brothers.” One was the casting of unknown actors
for all but one of the parts. This does wonders to
preserve the feeling that one is watching a
quasi-documentary. It also bolsters the presentation of
Americans as virgins and newcomers to the ancient
blood-soaked soil of Europe.
The one known
actor, David Schwimmer (Ross from
“Friends”), is cast as Capt. Herbert Sobel,
the martinet drill instructor at Camp Currahee. Some
critics have attacked his performance, but I think he
does a superb job of portraying a deliberately
unlikeable character. And picking a celebrity actor for
this unpleasant role floats out the following subtext
for us: just as we come to root for the soldiers under
his rigid authority, who learn from him even as they
come to hate and outgrow him, so too we root for this
movie, which has learned from all the old war movies,
with their hammy celebrity actors and rigid plot
formulas, even as it outgrows them. In inviting us to
hate Capt. Sobel, the movie invites us, in a sense, to
hate Schwimmer as well – not as a person, of
course, but as a symbol of a more contrived way of
making war movies with celebrity actors. Schwimmer
deserves great credit for agreeing to act as this
sacrificial scapegoat, as a symbol of a celebrity.
A deeper and darker
layer of subtext may be operating here as well. Of all
the cast, Sobel is the most obviously Jewish. By making
him such an obnoxious character, and by using for an
actor to portray him someone whose screen persona
embodies a certain – okay, okay, let’s face
it, he’s a complete schmuck – Spielberg is
perhaps trying to make us see how easy it is to slip
into an anti-Semitic attitude. He thus steers the
audience away from any smug self-righteousness it may
feel vis a vis the Nazis. If so, then that is one more
sign of his genius and courage in shunning the
temptations of sentimentality.
You can tell a
bigger story on the small screen than the big one. This
is the fundamental insight behind the mini-series, a
hybrid form that came into popularity at the end of the
1970s, with “Roots” (1977) and
“Shogun” (1980). Of course, any episodic
television show can use its generous allotment of time
(roughly 20 hours for a season of hour-long drama, or
an order of magnitude greater than the length of an
average feature movie) to build tremendous layers of
depth and complexity in its characters, just as
painters in the Italian Renaissance used numerous
layers of translucent color, in the technique known as
glazing, to give a shimmering depth to their images.
This depth is more
apparent in a mini-series because it tells a single
story and is scheduled as a special event rather than
being swallowed up in the background noise of the
regular television season. And, thanks to cassettes and
DVDs, the mini-series now can live on independently of
broadcast and cable signals. (That’s the only
reason I was able to watch this show – or most of
the other movies I discuss in these columns –
since I haven’t had actual TV reception since
1976.)
But the mini-series
has some other interesting differences from the
stand-alone feature. Because of its greater length, it
is cut into pieces, and because it is cut into pieces
and shown at different times, it needs to be
re-introduced each time, that is, to show opening and
closing credits each time. This serves a perfectly
mundane purpose but the effect on the audience is like
hearing the refrain of a popular ballad, or the chorus
of a song. This, in turn, has two ramifications.
The first has to do
with orientation and expectation. The ballad is a more
popular and traditional form of literature than those
forms prevalent in modern times, which are one-off
productions that emphasize the individuality (and
alienation) of the author. The most typical is the
lyric poem set in free verse, the private, agonized
confessional being the form that most concentrates this
spirit of modernity. The ballad is originally an oral
form: the common medium-length form in an oral culture,
with epic at the longer end and epigram at the shorter.
Just as the modern lyric (and especially the
confessional) dares or demands the reader to match the
unique emotional intensity of the author, so the ballad
soothes the reader, putting him at ease with its
familiarity of form and its familiarity of content.
Difficulty has come to be accepted as an intrinsic and
identifying characteristic of modern literature,
especially poetry (T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens
offering good examples). Such literature ostensibly
appeals to an elite. A certain ease, on the other hand,
is one of the identifying characteristics of the
ballad, which ostensibly appeals to the masses. (In
truth, it makes more sense to consider both the
difficulty of modern poetry and the easiness of
traditional ballads as masks that form part of their
costumes, costumes that are not removable.) The revival
of the ballad by an educated cultural elite began in
the 18th century with the stirrings of Romanticism (the
publication of Lyrical
Ballads in 1798 by
Wordsworth and Coleridge being generally given as the
inception of this movement in England). The ballad is,
of course, also the source of the folk song, one of the
important sources of popular music in the 1960s, which
has had such a formative influence on all artists since
then. Hearing a ballad – any ballad – has
an immediately soothing effect on the listener (or a
soporific effect on the inattentive listener). It
reassures him that he will be hearing a story with an
easy-to-follow linear time sequence. It reassures him
that the story is part of a tradition. It reassures him
that he and the author are parts of a coherent group.
All these reactions form a deep, buried bedrock of
emotional response in the viewer of episodic television
and, even more intensely, of the mini-series. For the
viewer of “Band of Brothers”, this bedrock
is the viewing platform whose safety and solidity makes
it possible, and indeed, enjoyable, to watch the
harrowing events depicted therein.
