All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Butterflies Not Included

or

"Germany Will Soon Be Empty" (The Ever-Diminishing Perspective)

 

"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

Im Westen nichts Neues "Nothing New in the West" 

Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front"—not an exact translation of the title, but it's stuck in the vernacular—created a sensation on its publication (in magazines form November 1928 and in book-form January 1929). Within a year, the author's fictionalization of his time during the first World War had been bought by Hollywood and made into an Oscar-winning film (for "Best Production") by Lewis Milestone. There was a TV version in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann, which won a Golden Globe for Best TV Movie—it was filmed in Czechoslovakia—and an Emmy Award for editing.

 

There was considerable buzz in the air around the Holidays in its being mentioned for Oscar nominations—and not just for Best Foreign Film. Frequent Twitterers mentioned it as a contender for the Best Picture short list.

Now Netflix has sponsored a new version of All Quiet on the Western Front (I guess you need 40 years or so to pass before doing it again—as if we weren't reminded enough that war is hell). The story of "Paul"* (played by Felix Kammerer—who seems genetically predisposed to have a "Thousand Yard Stare") one of a number of young German students, spurred by the patriotic speeches of their professors to join the German Army and to fight. Their teachers and academics fill their heads with dreams of glory and burnished reputations in protecting the Fatherland (who were the aggressors, if memory serves). But, once they tramp out to the trenches at the front lines, they learn different. They're stuck in shit-holes, where they arbitrarily wait for their generals (safely ensconced away from the battles**) to launch attacks that will gain them mere yards of ground, only to have them taken back when the French attack later. The absolute futility of the First World War was in how both sides traded time in each other's trenches.

Director-writer Edward Berger has changed a few things (from the novel). He starts—as with most of the segments—with beautiful shots of the terrain, forests, the natural world. Picturesque contrasts with what will come after—the grays and browns of the trench area punctuated with barbed wire strung on fallen crucifixes. The trenches are ramshackle caves where the soldiers huddle with the rats and offer little protection from aerial attacks. It's like the graves are already dug for the soldiers—they just don't know it yet.

After the beauty shots, Berger cuts to an attack—prior to Paul and his chums being sent to the line. It goes badly. The dead are catalogued, with their dog-tags broken in half (that's how they keep count of the kills and who's "winning"), graves are dug, and their uniforms recycled. Bullet holes and rips are repaired and readied for the next batch of soldiers—Berger will do a call-back on that later. But, it makes the point. The lives of the German troops are just as recyclable as the equipment. When one dies, another is put in their place. They're literally cannon fodder, indistinguishable from another. For small patches of ground.

But, there's an added element here. Ever since Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, there has been an artistic dichotomy to supposedly "anti-war" films.*** They're beautiful. Films like Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Sam Mendes' 1917. There's horrendous, ugly carnage, absolutely (all wars look the same from the inside), but there is also a directorly effort to make some shots as beautifully lit as possible. Michael Herr mentioned it—that dichotomy—after working with Kubrick on his Vietnam film. And Bergen is no exception. One of the things that bothered me about 1917 was how beautiful it looked (thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins) and wondered if that was enticing to potential recruits, the way the Top Gun movies are. Is this the film-making equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot?

Another thing got to me about the film. There is something called "One Point Perspective" Kubrick used it a lot in The Shining and 2001. Wes Anderson's films are masterclasses on one-point perspective. Here, Berger uses it to the extreme. At one point, there's a sequence in a train station with a slightly off-axis that I thought, "Oh, he's not going to center the train in the shot. Good choice."

I had thought too early. Within a minute, Bergen had moved the camera until, like it was on a track or something, the camera hit the mark so that the train was perfectly centered. Perfectly. Centered.

But, it is an interesting choice. Both Kubrick and Mendes used that technique to make an almost vertiginous experience, sucking you into the screen...and the story (when you're not distracted by all that symmetry, of course).

Berger does some interesting things with the script, as well. A whole section where Paul goes home and is repulsed by his household's fascination for the war is reduced to a single line in a bivouac sequence. And as persistent as he is with the perspective issue, he isn't as dedicated to the book's reluctance to show anything beyond Paul's perspective. He inter-cuts the scenes at the front with the attempts by Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl) to sign an armistice with the French, which as protracted and stilted as it is, still manages to convey some tension about the outcome of our singular hero.

It's an odd push-pull kind of dynamic that the film presents: the country that launched the war makes a film about it, not neglecting the bloody carnage or the irresponsibility of its generals, but making pains to show its humiliation in negotiating the armistice; showing the waste and destruction, but also including decorously-lit sequences that romanticize it; criticizing the war and its costs, while also making it romantic and poignant. One can acknowledge a film's worth, but also be deeply cynical about it, at the same time.

I can my reaction to it can be briefly summed up in that I watched it with English sub-titles—the film, as it should be, is in German—that are none too subtle. And at one point, had the foresight to clue me in to what I was not hearing.

* "Paul," by the way was Remarque's real middle name; he changed his pen-name to "Maria" to honor his mother.

 

** See Paths of Glory. No. Really. See Paths of Glory. 

 

 *** Notice I didn't mention Oliver Stone's Platoon? Can the lack of romantic lighting in that film be because Stone actually fought in the Vietnam War.