Regeneration

Battle Scarred: James Wilby as Siegfried Sassoon in Regeneration

Sane and Shell-shocked.

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Gillies MacKinnon

Recommended

As Steven Spielberg and company have demonstrated, war movies can mean big money and big prestige. U.S.-made world war movies were once the province of studio assembly lines, with stock characters and situations. Non-U.S.-made world war movies have always tended to be less nostalgic and celebratory, suggesting that the "good wars" were never so good for their participants.

The ravages of World War I were painfully recorded by photographers and journalists, as well as soldiers who became artists during and after their service. It took shape from a collision between new technology (including poison gas and tanks) and outdated combat etiquette, like marching in lines into full-on assaults. The experiences dramatized by the British soldier-poets were among the most appalling, in part because they were so astonished by the ugliness: often they were young, wealthy, and well-educated, and completely unprepared for what they saw and did in war.

The movie Regeneration evokes this bitter, demoralizing experience. Shot in grey and brown tones, without exhilarating camerawork or rousing musical score, it focuses on the ways that combat destroys the lives of its survivors. Directed by Gillies MacKinnon (whose dark comedy about underclass kids, Small Faces, came too closely in the wake of Trainspotting to have its own life), the film opens with a terrible overhead sweep of a muddy battlefield, after the fight: most bodies lie still, crumpled and bloody. At the end of the shot, the camera cranes down and barely pauses to show a soldier who can only sit and stare, overwhelmed.

This is the film's subject, being so overwhelmed. Most of the action takes place in an asylum near Edinburgh called Craiglockart, where psychiatrists treated what they used to call "shell-shocked" soldiers, typically with the goal of sending them back to the front. One of the doctors there was William Rivers (played by Jonathan Pryce), and two of his patients were the poets Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby, best known as the protagonist in Maurice) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce). This much is factual. The rest of the screenplay (by producer Allan Scott) is quite loyal to its source, Pat Barker's fictionalized account of their encounters, the novel Regeneration, which is the first part of an intricate trilogy featuring the same characters, followed by The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize).

Rivers attempts to make Sassoon "well." According to Rivers' superiors, this means convincing the young man to recant his outrageous declaration that the war was morally unsound and a slaughter, perpetuated for political and economic purposes. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockart rather than a court-martial and likely death sentence, because his fellow officer and future memoirist Robert Graves (Ever After's Dougray Scott) intervened. Skeptical of his assignment, Rivers meets and diagnoses Sassoon: he's not suffering a "war neurosis," as he has been accused, but rather, a "powerful anti-war neurosis."

As combat veterans, both men know that this is a sane response to the war. They bond in this knowledge, tacitly agreeing that efforts to "cure" the poet are absurd. But Rivers fears for Sassoon's life, because, he knows the poet will be attacked for "other reasons" (namely, his homosexuality), charges which would likely lead to prison, at least. Further, the doctor is battling his own demons. He has his own increasingly acute case of shell-shock derived from hearing horror stories from his patients. And so, Rivers and Sassoon engage in ongoing arguments that might be characterized as philosophical, save for their very real consequences.

At the same time, their differently evolving emotional lives are revealed in other relationships. Sassoon befriends a fellow inmate, the as-yet unpublished poet Owen, and encourages him to work on his writing, to use it as therapy. Ironically, Owen does get "well" enough to return to France, where he is killed, in 1918. And Rivers works with Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller of Trainspotting), an officer from a working-class background whose muteness is an affliction more often suffered by upper-class soldiers. (The first world war was one of the last to attract this class in droves, as naive youths acted out a sense of duty and will to prove their masculinity.)

Soon enough, Billy is talking again, and his flashbacks grant the film some of its more harrowing moments, including the event that caused his loss of speech. He begins this account by describing the attack by his troops, "like any other," meaning, "terrible, noisy, suicidal," as he and his men walked directly into a wall of gunfire and explosions. "How did you feel?" asks Rivers. "It was like sex," says Billy. "Exciting and ridiculous."

The movie is good at showing this combination of effects, maintaining both distance and rage (reminiscent of Kubrick's Paths of Glory). The only possible good here is in intentions, which Rivers has in abundance. This makes him feel weak and troubled about his job. At one point he collapses, and is sent on a working vacation to London, where he observes another doctor, who treats trauma with incredibly cruel shock therapy.

And this is the crux of it, the paradox of making men "crazy enough to go back." Serving as our emotional surrogate, Rivers is confused, angry, benevolent and helpless. He sympathizes equally with Sassoon's astute, passionate analysis and Billy's desperate faith in gender and class myths (to be a man, to earn respect, he has to go back).

The title Regeneration refers not only to the "scientific" regeneration of sanity and nerves, but also to the regeneration that cannot occur, the rebuilding of hope, the restoration of order. Throughout, the film offers up several poems and poem fragments to insinuate the costs of violence and faith in war, as the men read their work to one another. But these images, like the movie's beautifully composed visuals, don't do the devastation justice, and this may be Regeneration's most salient and subtle observation. The costs are always too great.