Canadian Cinema Canon: Passchendaele

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Canadian Cinema Canon: Passchendaele

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Written by April Yorke

Friday, 12 November 2010 00:00

Canadian Cinema Canon is an examination of what makes Canadian cinema Canadian and what it says about our country and its citizens.

To say that I was underwhelmed when I saw Passchendaele in theatres would be an understatement. Instead, I was completely thrown by just how miscalculated it was. Nevertheless, it picked up Genie Awards, Directors Guild of Canada Awards, and Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards and Writers Guild of Canada nominations. Could I have been wrong about it?

Yes and no.

The problem with Passchendaele is Passchendaele. But we'll come back to that in a moment.

For a long time, all I knew of Passchendaele was this:

Based on that, I made a mistake as a viewer and as a critic: I got excited. The most important thing to do before you see a movie is to manage your expectations. That will only get you so far (Due Date managed to sink even lower than the bar I left on the floor for it), but it's still a good place to start. Even so, that teaser trailer showed me a movie that I was sure I wanted to see. Paul Gross goes to war, he and his special lady friend write each other letters, and then they meet on the battle front! And love each other forever! While Canada comes together to kick everyone's ass! Or something to that effect. That sounds like a pretty good movie, doesn't it? I would see that movie. Passchendaele is not that movie.

For the first two acts, Passchendaele doesn't take place in Belgium. It starts out in Italy, where Michael Dunne (Paul Gross) and company are in a firefight. Soon, only Michael and a young Italian solider are left. The boy is shot, bleeding and whimpering in the rubble strewn street. Michael approaches, and the boy seems to be pleading with him for help. Michael responds driving his bayonet into the boy's head.

It's the kind of shocking, violent opening that you wouldn't expect from either writer-director Paul Gross (Men with Brooms! Due South! Okay, sometimes Hamlet, but a nice Hamlet, right?) or a Canadian film, for that matter. It's as unambiguous as it is brutal. And just when you reconcile your mind to what kind of movie you think you are seeing, Dunne wakes up suddenly in a hospital bed in Calgary.

That so quickly out of the gate Passchendaele zigs when you think it will zag is fantastic filmmaking, as is the next hour set in Calgary. We meet the special lady friend, Sarah Mann (the luminous Caroline Dhavernas), a nurse whose beauty and sadness catches Michael's eye. He works hard to woo her, to break down her defences and learn her secrets. She's an addict who's socially ostracized because her Bohemian father returned to fight for the motherland instead of allying with his adopted homeland. Her younger brother (Joe Dinicol) longs for the glory of war but is kept home by asthma. Michael's older and broken, too. His pursuit of Sarah never feels like now-standard romantic comedy stalking. It speaks instead to a subtle understanding of two pieces that fit together.

Obviously a movie called Passchendaele will have to travel to West Flanders at some point, and things go downhill from there. Despite his asthma, Sarah's brother David is approved for combat by the local doctor, who hopes that David will die overseas, severing David's relationship with his daughter. Despite having been assigned to a non-combat position in Calgary and royally pissed off his colleagues there by thwarting a recruitment drive by telling the truth, Michael re-enlists under a false name and follows David abroad to protect him. Realizing what Michael's done, Sarah takes her nursing skills overseas as well. All of our major players are now outside Ypres.

Please, please do not take what I am about to say as any slight toward the Battle of Passchendaele nor do I mean to denigrate the real people on whom this story is partially based. I have nothing but the utmost respect for men and women in uniform, both past and present, who take on harrowing, unimaginable experiences that so few of us would even consider. There is nothing but bravery and honour to be found in what they do.

Man alive does the Passchendaele portion of Passchendaele do the movie a disservice. A lot of work went into turning Alberta into eight kilometres of mud that Allies spent four months capturing. Without the work of the Canadian Corps (dubbed "storm troopers" by the enemy), that ground never would have been taken. It was a victory, possibly a Pyrrhic one, that put Canada on the map. It is our story. One that we must tell.

At least that seems to have been the thinking behind the final hour of the film. There are some highlights (great acting, beautiful cinematography, and one very hot sex scene), but the longer it goes on, the more operatic it becomes. The less it is about the three characters that we've been following for the better part of two hours, the more it becomes about the story of CANADA. By the time the camera slowly pans up Michael's uniform as he carries David on a cross on his back, what should be a powerful moment becomes tedious. It's not enough for Michael to die to save David. He must do it in the most painfully dramatic way as possible so that we understand Michael not as person but as signifier, his sacrifice a symbol for the universal suffering and sacrifice of Canadian soldiers.

By the time the movie takes us back to Alberta to count the cost, it can only manage to be a little sad. The over-baked hour in Belgium has left a bad taste behind.

What makes Passchendaele overrated by the awards isn't that final act. It's that the final act came after so brilliant an opener. If it has been only that, if it had only been Passchendaele, it would have merely been mildly disappointing. But to follow so carefully modulated a tone with such theatrics undoes the good work that came before it. If Passchendaele is how we portray this defining moment in WWI and Canadian history, I'd rather see a movie about the Christmas Truce.

Actually, if Paul Gross isn't too busy . . .