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from The
Observer Sunday 21 November 1999
 War - what is it good for?
by Kathryn Flett
Reviewing
All The King's Men
BBC1
Warriors BBC1
How do you prefer your wars? Slo-mo in sepia with sunsets and violins,
jerky and grainy in monochrome with muffled gunfire, soaked in technigore
with cannons in Dolby or hand-held in de-saturated colour with hard-core
techno? Yup, it would be a brave, if not downright bonkers, director who'd
subvert the stylistic conventions and make an American Civil War epic in
black and white with a deep house soundtrack.
All the King's Men pretty much fell into the first stylistic
category, but then this was a First World War story. It starred David
Jason in (rather surprisingly) his first role portraying an historical
figure, though Jason's Frank Beck - the Sandringham land agent who led his
company of royal estate workers, the 5th Battalion of the Norfolk
Regiment, to an apparently mysterious death in Gallipoli in 1915 - was
another straight role in the Frost mould, the kind of part you suspect
Jason takes in order to erase another little bit of Del Trotter from the
collective psyche. Though not wishing to underrate Jason as an actor (few
give us a better empathetic, sad-eyed everyman with humanity, decency and
frailty writ small), I regret that his towering creation of comic genius
should guest uninvited during the first few minutes of everything else I
ever watch him in - and that the harder he works to steer us from Del,
perversely the more Peckham's most famous son is brought to mind. Still,
perhaps this time it was due to the fact that the first few minutes of All
The King's Men were so awash with predictable WW1 backstory and costume
drama cliché (Maggie Smith was this production's dame of a certain age
hired to play a dead queen) that I had nothing else to distract me.
Before the chaps upped and left Sandringham for the front there was a
wedding, an enlisting boy soldier (Mrs Beck: 'He's a child!'; Beck,
admiringly: 'He's more of a man than I am'), the appearance in the village
of the haunted, hollow-eyed veteran (back from Mons; had he seen The
Angel?'), a been-there, done-it-in-the-Boer-war-thanks doctor and a wee
bit of aristo-homoeroticism, replete with poetry-reciting - and of course
those lingering, Vaselined shots of a sun-dappled Norfolk were eminently
saleable to numerous upmarket networks worldwide (though the footage of
Gallipoli was, in fact, shot in Spain).
The performances were mostly impeccable and the script elegantly
predictable, for unfortunately it is the lot of a WW1 drama to paint a
picture of a golden age, when everything, including war and politics,
paused for tea and/or metaphysics. The fact of the matter is that the 5th
Battalion finally met a bloody end, butchered at point-blank range by the
Turks, for whom taking prisoners of war was a luxury they could not
afford, though the truth of their deaths was hidden by the government,
partly to spare Queen Alexandra who looked on them as her own, and partly
to promulgate the romantic spin that even at this early stage surrounded a
war which was anything but romantic.
The Battalion was said to have been enveloped in a mysterious mist
which, like the stories of 'the Angel of Mons', 'gathered the men as they
fell'. And everybody wanted to believe it. The First World War was perhaps
the last war during which both facts and troops could be sacrificed in
such a cavalier fashion, to be supplanted by such potent myths and
archetypes.
Perhaps it was a similar combination of governmental arrogance,
righteousness and self-delusion that forced a later generation of
ill-equipped young men to play at peacekeeping with the UN, in Bosnia in
1992. It is difficult to imbue a conflict of the recent past with any of
the dramatic glamour or perceived narrative romance that can force us to
suspend our disbelief and shed reactive, nostalgic tears - and happily
Warriors didn't attempt this.
The first part of this fine and illuminating drama (hand-held cameras,
desaturated colours and not too heavy on the violins, if you're
interested) was shown last night and concludes tonight. The scheduling
seems awkward, but even if you missed last night's 85 minutes, I would
strongly urge you to tune in for the denouement. I will normally flick
quickly through the production notes sent to the press (hype and puffery;
everything is 'powerful', 'flagship' and 'unmissable', while the quotes
invariably include actors saying what a privilege, yawn, it was to work
with so-and-so), but hearing director Peter Kosminsky interviewed by
Paxman on Start The Week persuaded me to read the glossy Warriors
brochure. The three-hour film (named for the tanks, not the
job-description) had taken six years of planning and was filmed on
location in the Czech Republic as a military exercise entitled Operation
Rhino Peacekeeper, because even the BBC can't just hire a bunch of Royal
Green Jackets and some hardware and roll into a topographically suitable
country for some luvvie manoeuvres without unravelling a great deal of
international military red-tape. Indeed, before I watched it, it looked as
though the programme's extraordinary production story might be more
interesting than the finished film. During filming in the Czech Republic,
for example, Serbia's leading young actress, Branka Katic (a pacifist
anti-war campaigner hired to play a Croatian Muslim) had to work with the
knowledge that her home town, Belgrade, was being bombed by Nato.
In a TV year during which a number of important documentaries have
overshadowed a bunch of negligible dramas on all the channels, Warriors
came as a revelation. I had thought it would be very hard for the subject
to engage the viewer as a drama when the reality of the Balkan crisis is
all too vivid, but I was very wrong. While All The King's Men depends on
an entirely nostalgic, if inaccurate, perception of a long-lost age of
innocence, Warriors demands of the viewer a more contemporary - and
therefore necessarily cynical - eye. Deployed as peacekeepers (and wrongly
assuming this to be a relatively soft option), the trained killers of a
fictional tank battalion are soon faced with the most demanding ethical
and moral dilemmas - whether to merely obey orders, stand by and watch the
conflict, or whether to disobey, intervene and bloody well do something .
I am giving nothing away by saying that, being human but required to act
as automatons, they vacillate - with excruciatingly painful results.
You will not see a more subtle, finely wrought contemporary TV drama
than this. The ensemble acting from the young cast is heroically
restrained and happily free of the Rada flourishes which turn far too much
British drama into declamatory posturing. Ioan Gruffudd, as
stiff-upper-lip career officer Feeley, Matthew Macfadyen, as football-mad
Liverpudlian Private James, and Damian Lewis, as headstrong Lieutenant
Loughrey, are particularly compelling, though all the performances are
excellent. If there is a weak link it is possibly Ms Katic who plays her
pivotal role as if on Prozac, for which she can be forgiven.
That Warriors is not without its military clichés miraculously fails to
detract from the storytelling. The soldier-types in All The King's Men are
replicated here too, but over three hours there is time to flesh out their
bones and because this is not a film about our brave boys charging in, but
shuffling impotently on the sidelines instead, these are characters which
transcend the usual black and white, good and bad, heroic or cowardly, and
turn out to be infinitely variable and interesting shades of grey.
So how do you prefer your filmic wars? I'll happily admit I loved the
sepia Gallipoli with Mel Gibson running towards oblivion in slo-mo, was
riveted by the kinetic psychodrama of Apocalypse Now , transported by the
lyrical existentialism of The Deerhunter , impressed by the machismo of
Platoon , and wallowed shamelessly in the full-blown sentiment of Saving
Private Ryan ... war-as-myth the lot of them. But perhaps right now, at
the end of the century, it is fitting that the most successful - and
indeed moving - war stories should be the ones that don't try too hard to
move us; that have the courage to steer clear of any of the seductively
sentimental myths of 'heroism' and simply (though there is little that is
simple about it) tell it like it is.
After tonight's concluding episode of Warriors there will be a Heart of
The Matter debate focusing on 'the rights and wrongs of following orders
in defiance of moral conscience'. I am very surprised to be able to say
this of a drama, but Heart of The Matter has a tough act to follow - and,
if they haven't already, by the time it is aired viewers will have made up
their own minds where they stand.
The first film in Kathryn Flett's review - All
the King's Men starring David Jason & Maggie
Smith - is available from Amazon UK.
(US format not available) |
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