Passchendaele (Paul Gross, 2008)

Paul Gross' Passchendaele occupies an odd place: on the one hand, it's a romantic WWI epic that contains so many familiar narrative touchstones that it's hard to believe the script wasn't penned decades ago. On the other hand, it's a certifiably “important” film, and not just because it taps out a larger budget than any other Canadian production. Rather, the massive loss of life for Canadians at the Third Battle of Ypres is a story that's been sorely unrepresented, even within our own country. But if it's true that stories of marginalized history need to be told with their own distinct voice, then Passchendaele's shortcomings go beyond awkward over-stylization and the usual limitations of doing a Hollywood genre with a (still, at only $20 million) sub-Hollywood budget. By staging the narrative around Gross' shell-shocked, cynical Sergeant Dunne, the film is hardly endorsing the war as a meaningful venture, but it's hard to think of a lot of films that do since All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

The film obviously sets out to illuminate Canada's specific role in the war, and to this end it can be informative. Certainly a number of Canadians are still unaware of the prejudice against anyone in the country with German descent, an ugly stain in our history that seems to have paved the way for the imprisonment of Japanese-Canadians in World War II. In the film this prejudice comes to the fore when it's revealed the nurse (Caroline Dhavernas) whom Dunne is in love with is of German descent and that her father joined the war on the side of the Central Powers. What could be a more thorough investigation of irrational prejudice turns out to be as much a plot device as anything however, with the nurse's naive, asthmatic younger brother David (Joe Dinicol), stirred by hatred of their father and a desire to prove himself to the wealthy father of his fiancee (Meredith Bailey), manages to wrangle himself a spot in the war. In one of the most contrived plot turns – a genuine concern given the story was based on Gross' own grandfather's experiences, and the historical burden the film has as a cinematic watershed – Dunne decides to re-enslit to be the milquetoast's personal babysitter.

The decision to return to the frontline is played as a priviledging of personal valor and dignity over patriotism, which would be a fine prospect had it not already become the last desperate grasp of nationalism in the face of a war whose rational justifications have long dried up. In fact, the only elements of the film to distinguish it from British or American war stories is a handful of awkwardly-placed diatribes on the perceived chutzpah of Canadian soldiers. While on an international level the sacrifice of Canadians in WWI has no doubt been unfairly blanketed under the contributions of the British Empire as a whole, anyone who's taken a high school history course in this country has been fed the “young nation comes of age” story ad nauseum. That the Canadian Corps managed to secure Passchendaele is an historical fact; more dubious is the implicit suggestion that this can be chalked up as a facet of our bravery and fighting skill at an individual level (as if that were something that could be measured anyway) as opposed to the decisions of higher-ups who rarely saw the frontline in the first place. The reality is probably a mixture of top-down and bottom-up organization, but wherein lies the origin of smugness on the part of Canadians? In the fact that our generals were heartless enough to send our soldiers into the trenches until every last one of them perished, or in the fact that our soldiers were willing to follow orders unconditionally for a war whose benefits were so drastically removed from their own lives?

Passchendaele wants it both ways: the final caption before the end credits is quick to point out that the town was recaptured only a week after Canada lost 16,000 men securing it, and yet still seems content suggesting that the individual sacrifices made were what caused Canadians to take newfound pride in their accomplishments. Whether or not the war gave Canadians a sense of identity distinct from Britain, it's still a confounding paradox that a “young” nation (as a side note, when America reached its 50^th year of independence they had already doubled the area of the country and waged war against their former colonizers, which goes lengths towards showing how “independence” is a measure of perceived rights and freedoms rather than actual ones) apparently gained its stripes by showing they were still willing to fight unequivocally for British interests. The burgeoning negative attitudes towards Brits is summed up in the ludicrous comic-book villainy of British recruiting officer Dobson-Hughes (Jim Mezon) whose one-dimensionality is best summed up in his sudden un-dramatic death that recalls the unaffected reactions to Kenny's episodic deaths after several seasons in the show South Park.

Finally (spoiler alert), Passchendaele is a war film about the virtues of personal sacrifice, with an ending so inevitable you could get 100% of the sentiment of Dunne's dying words even with the sound off. Much has been made about the film's Christian symbolism in the ending: a shell sends David careening out of the enemy's trench and entangles him on a piece of wood in an exact image of the Crucifixion, after which Dunne braves No Man's Land and drags him back to safety, cross and all. It's absurdity is palpable, but it also has a narrative purpose: earlier in the film a lot is said about how Germans supposedly nailed a Canadian soldier to a cross, which Dunne defiantly insists is propaganda. This final scene is presumably meant to substantiate this, since it's readily obvious that David is thrown onto the “cross” by freak accident. But it's an odd cinematic move that doesn't exactly work: the preposterousness of the claim that Germans crucified a Canadian soldier has already been established as part of the reigning Ally myth of Germans as “godless”. Gross' insistence on driving the point home not only strains credulity, but it also shifts the image's meaning from that of irrational anti-German prejudice to the actual deification of Canadian soldiers – whether or not it's the Allys own shells or the Germans that throw David's body up there.

Passchendaele's most redeeming quality may be that as it makes its rounds across the country, it's accompanied by a Legion presentation on Canada's war effort, specifically geared towards the contributions from each area in which it's being shown. Gross has admirable intentions in mind: illustrating the horrors of war

in a way which upcoming Remembrance Day ceremonies will only hint at. These horrors are obviously quite close to Gross, who witnessed the psychological damage in his own grandfather; it's too bad he was unable to fully disentangle the nightmare from the glory, the reality from the myths we tell ourselves to cushion the blow.