According to Sam Mendes, the inspiration for the film 1917 was based on stories that his grandfather Alfred Mendes told his family when he was in his seventies. Alfred had served in the British Army and one particular story became the center of his script.
"It wasn't until his mid-70s that he decided he was going to tell the stories of what happened to him when he was in his teenage years. And there was one particular story he told us of being tasked to carry a single message through no man's land in dusk in the winter of 1916. He was a small man, and they used to send him with messages because he ran 5 1/2 feet, and the mist used to hang at about 6 feet in no man's land, so he wasn't visible above the mist. And that stayed with me. And that was the story I found I wanted to tell." (1)
Two British Army lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, are tasked to carry a commanding general’s order across No Man’s Land, the desolate area separating the opposing trenches, and proceed to a forward position where a battalion of 1,600 soldiers are poised to attack a German position – and fall into a trap that will result in the destruction of the British force. One of the soldiers, Blake, has an older brother who serves in the battalion. Schofield, who is a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, accepts the assignment reluctantly, but Blake is mortally wounded early in the journey, and Schofield must fulfill the mission on his own.
Mendes decided to construct his film as one complete and uninterrupted take, with his camera, operated by Roger Deakins, following Schofield from the opening to, nearly two hours later, the closing shot. When I first heard about the film and this seamless-seeming single-take construction, my first thought was that it was just a stunt. But within moments of watching it, I was swept up in its feeling of inexorability, of a duration comparable to the passing minutes the characters in the film were living out. There is a break in the design, however, when Schofield is knocked unconscious by a bullet hitting his metal helmet. The screen goes black for several seconds, and Schofield comes to where he fell, many hours later.
As expected (Mendes’s grandfather lived to tell the tale), Schofield succeeds in delivering the general’s message in time to interrupt the battle, and he finds Blake’s brother, a lieutenant, to deliver the news of his death. Watching it, I remembered the Czech film Diamonds of the Night, in which two teenaged boys escape from a train bound for a German concentration camp and make their way to safety. The boys’ arduous flight in that film, however, was enlivened by flashbacks and fantasies. The film that 1917 most resembles is Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which fixatedly follows its heroine, played by Sandra Bullock, in her increasingly desperate – and astronomically far-fetched – attempt to survive being stranded in space. The two films are also similar in their use of obtrusive music.
1917 won a few Oscars, for Roger Deakins’s camerawork and for the sound design. Yet the sound design, presumably incorporating Thomas Newman’s music, is the weakest element of the film, and the one that prevents it from rising above the level of good entertainment. It doesn’t seem possible any more for a filmmaker to trust in the seriousness of his material, a good story told with striking images, without the, to me, intrusion of music. One has only to look at classic cinema and how sparingly their filmmakers used music, if they used it at all. Robert Bresson was quite right to insist that music adds a dimension to a film that it could do perfectly well without. As I watched the film and listened to the heaving of the sound design, I caught myself thinking how much more effective it would’ve been if there had been nothing but incidental sounds to accompany the images. Unfortunately, filmmakers today are afraid the audience will get bored. The film is made in such a way that it provides an immersive experience for the viewer – immersed in the experience of the messenger, Schofield. Over the course of perhaps twenty-four hours (excluding several hours of unconsciousness), we endure everything he endures, from putting his wounded hand into a rotting corpse to nearly being buried alive in a trench cave in to plunging into a raging river. So where is all that music coming from?
But there are moments in the film that I won’t soon forget, such as the omnipresence of rats, the death of Blake (his face growing visibly ashen), a lieutenant telling Schofield “If you get to Colonel Mackenzie, make sure there are witnesses… Some men just want the fight”, the French girl hiding in a basement (along with Sam Mendes’s baby daughter), the wrecked French village illuminated by flares, and Schofield’s dash across an active battlefield to reach Colonel Mackenzie, who receives the order to call off the attack reluctantly, telling Schofield, “There is only one way this war ends – last man standing. Now fuck off, Lance Corporal!”
Schofield locates Blake’s brother, then walks into a peaceful spring meadow, sits down under a tree and takes out two photographs, one of Alfred Mendes’s mother, with the words “Come back to us” inscribed on the back. (2)
We are not informed of how young Alfred Mendes felt about completing his mission, if he thought it was worth it or just some meaningless boondoggle in the midst of the enormous shattered death machine of the war. Before the end credits, his grandson dedicates the film to him:
FOR LANCE CORPORAL ALFRED H. MENDES
1ST BATTALION KING’S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS
WHO TOLD US THE STORIES
(1) “‘It Was Part Of Me’: Director Sam Mendes On the Family History in ‘1917’, by Scott Simon, NPR, December 21, 2019.
(2) Some have mistaken the photos to be of Schofield’s wife and children. Alfred Mendes was just 19 at the time, and unmarried.
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