{"id":2389,"date":"2020-01-18T16:01:57","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T16:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2389"},"modified":"2020-01-18T16:02:30","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T16:02:30","slug":"oscars-2020-1917","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/01\/18\/oscars-2020-1917\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2020: 1917"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sam Mendes’ one-take wonder arrives in cinemas with less fanfare than some Best Picture contenders, but it is a superb piece of immersive filmmaking which unites its some-might-say gimmick and its narrative into a single indivisible whole. On the surface, there\u2019s little here that\u2019s new. The whole movie in one take idea has been seen before in versions both genuine (Russian Ark<\/em>, Lost in London<\/em>) and faux (Birdman<\/em>) but arguably never before has it been deployed so ingeniously and so effectively. And, while no-one needs Sam Mendes or anyone else to tell us again that war is hell, it\u2019s rarely been so realistically hellish as it is here. The banality of the pointlessly slaughtered cows in the French countryside is somewhat the point.<\/p>\n

The set-up is perfect in its simplicity. Our heroes (George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, both totally committed and convincing) have to cross no man\u2019s land and get a message to the Devonshire regiment that they are waking into a trap. That\u2019s it. Early on, I wondered just where the drama was going to come from. Either the information our two have about the German withdrawal is correct, in which case they will meet no resistance; or it\u2019s wrong, in which case they will be diced by machine gun fire in two minutes. Either way, there isn\u2019t a story. But Mendes and fellow screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns have devised a remorselessly incremental series of obstacles which range from the purely natural, to collateral damage, to enemy action, to friendly fire.<\/p>\n

And far from being a show-off-y gimmick, the supposed single shot presentation is vital. It means that there can be no cheating. As MacKay and Chapman set out, we\u2019re going to watch every step they take, every breath they draw, every trap they blunder into, every adversity they triumph over. And when we desperately yearn to cut away, we can\u2019t. There\u2019s nothing to cut to.<\/p>\n

In The Revenant<\/em>, shot largely in long takes but including obvious cuts, several times I felt the style chafing against the story. As I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s camera tracked along the length of a rifle barrel to move from one side of a conversation to another, I couldn\u2019t help thinking \u2013 mate, you could just have cut there. Here, despite the overwhelming complexity of many of the set pieces, Mendes\u2019 camera always seems to be in exactly the right place, and when something does move out of frame that in a conventionally-shot film, we would cut back to \u2013 the fact that it is out of frame becomes the point.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also I think important to note that I never \u2013 and I use this word as precisely as I can \u2013 found the film exciting. Don\u2019t misunderstand me. It\u2019s never boring. It\u2019s absorbing, terrifying, gut-wrenching, horrifying and suspenseful. But it never feels like a thrill ride. This is not James Bond. This is not Bourne. This feels real \u2013 even the parade of one-scene cameos can\u2019t quite break the spell, although Benedict Cumberbatch comes close. Also, take a bow Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Mark Strong, Adrian Scarborough and Daniel Mays.<\/p>\n

And there are moments of quiet beauty too. Hope, among the pain, and one moment which echoes the end of Kubrick\u2019s Paths of Glory<\/em>. And if this film isn\u2019t quite as cynical as that one, then maybe that\u2019s for the good too.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s any justice, this will win Best Picture. It\u2019s more personal and more epic than its closest rival in my eyes, The Irishman<\/em>, although the bookies currently have it tailing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em> and I haven\u2019t seen Parasite <\/em>yet. But if I had to vote tomorrow, this is what I\u2019d pick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Mendes’ one-take wonder arrives in cinemas with less fanfare than some Best Picture contenders, but it is a superb piece of immersive filmmaking which unites its some-might-say gimmick and its narrative into a single indivisible whole. On the surface, there\u2019s little here that\u2019s new. The whole movie in one take idea has been seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[523,19],"class_list":["post-2389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-oscars-2020","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Cx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2389"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2394,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389\/revisions\/2394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}