1917
“Sam Mendes’ film makes incremental updates to the war movie genre, reflecting a story crafted in 2019, not 1917.”
Title: 1917 (2019)
Director: Sam Mendes 👨🏼🇬🇧
Writers: Sam Mendes 👨🏼🇬🇧 and Krysty Wilson-Cairns 👩🏼🏴
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 5/5
Nothing I could say here about the technical mastery of 1917 hasn’t already been said before. Even reviews that critique the pretensions of the film, like Manohla Dargis’ “Paths of Technical Glory” for the New York Times, concede to Roger Deakins’ cinematography and the sophisticated editing that makes the film appear as if one long take.
Beyond the nuts and bolts, however, what one takes from director Sam Mendes’ film will be to personal taste. I agree with Dargis when she says the continuous shot “registers as grandstanding”; however, I enjoy a good visual experiment. Did we really need yet another backwards-looking war movie, a reminder of simpler days when good was good and evil was evil, and (as many falsely assume) everyone making history was white? Of course not. But if we’re going to hit another hit off that nostalgia pipe, then we might as well take it for an artistic spin around the block too.
For a viewer interested in the craft of filmmaking and okay with the fact of Mendes giving World War I a major glow-up, then dive headfirst into this sumptuous display of cinematography. I certainly enjoyed the ride.
Gender: 1.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
GradeMyMovie.com Assessment: 31% of key cast and crew members were women.
Soldiers fill the screen in 1917. On IMDB, 89 male actors are listed while the number of roles going to women can be counted by flipping the two-finger salute: A Frenchwoman (Claire Duburcq) who briefly nurtures the protagonist during a respite from fighting, and the baby girl (Ivy-l Macnamara) she has taken charge of.
As paltry as this is, the precedent for women in war movies could not be any lower. I actually prefer the way 1917 casts Duburcq to speak a handful of lines over the way past movies like Dunkirk (2017) have women scurry around as voiceless nurses in crowd shots, or more aggravatingly, when films force them to be the “heart” of a film as picture-perfect wives look ponderously out of windows and wait for their men to come home.
What really nudges this score up, however, is the fact of having Krysty Wilson-Cairns co-write the screenplay. In her interview with Variety, she asks rhetorically: “Only a man can write a war movie: why? Because he needs to write it with his penis?”
Race: 1.75/5
GradeMyMovie.com Assessment: 8% of key cast and crew members were POC.
While Mendes passes for white, his grandfather Alfred H. Mendes—to whom 1917 is dedicated to and inspired by—was Trinidadian and enlisted in the British Army at the age of 19, leaving his home in the Caribbean to fight with the 1st Battalion Rifle Brigade. The film that follows is mostly fictional, but the fact remains that it would have been more “accurate” to cast someone mixed-race rather than splitting Private Mendes’ story between two white characters: Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay).
On the plus side, 1917 does include a Sikh soldier, Sepoy Jondalar (Nabhaan Rizwan). As explained by historian Peter Singh Bance, more than 3 million foreign soldiers and laborers joined the British Army between 1914 and 1918, many of them fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with white soldiers in British regiments. This nod to the full diversity of history proves a welcome change from the aforementioned Dunkirk, which plainly ignored the 2.5 million Indian soldiers who fought for the British Empire during World War II.
Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.83/5
To the credit of 1917, it stands out with its fresh take on what a war film can look like. Genre issues remain, such as problematic nostalgia and the setting aside of almost a hundred acting roles for solely white men. But Wilson-Cairns’ co-writing and the inclusion of a Sikh sepoy fighting alongside those white soldiers make incremental updates to the war movie genre, reflecting a story crafted in 2019, not 1917.
Like 1917? Try these other stories set against a war-torn backdrop.
Dunkirk (2017)
Little Women (2019)
Darkest Hour (2017)