Behind The Lines
Added 9/6/2009
6 Sept. 09 Sunday: I find this movie to be a true history of the 1st WW. We humans will never give-up on WAR!!!!!!.. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ A 100 per/cent profit!!!!!! It will never end!!!!!.. We forget our { pass } & our history & we are damned to repeat it, penned by George Santayana. This DVD a great bargin & at a low $$$$ price. Thank you Amazon.com. Best/Wishes Charles in So. California...
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Great Movie
Added 9/2/2009
This is a fine film, based on Pat Barker's great nouvel roman, Regeneration. The movie was originally called Regeneration also, but some moron changed the title to "Behind the Lines." Wonders never cease. Probably lawyers involved in the title change.
In any case, a fantastic movie, beautifully acted and, and a real antidote to super patriots and arm chair generals who think war is a good thing without ever exposing themselves to any of its risks. It's one of those stories that is so true it's bound to be dismissed as "radical" by the right.
The novel and the film have recreations of real characters: Dr. Rivers, one of the pioneers of PTSD work; and the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. See it.
Works of art are supposed to change how you see the world: this one will.
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An Excellent Lead in to an Excellent series of Books
Added 2/3/2009
This is an excellent and faithful take on the first book of the Regeneration trilogy by British author Pat Barker, who won the Booker Prize for the last book in the series, The Ghost Road. Jonathan Pryce is, once again, brilliant in his role as William Rivers, the anthropologist and neurologist disrupted in his life's work with the people of Melanesia to be a therapist and psychiatrist in the Scottish shell-shock hospital Craiglockhart in WWI. All the supporting cast is up to snuff with his lead. The anti-war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are played adeptly and smartly... Owen is so heart-wrenchingly sweet, and without any affectation that might imply, that you'll moan and cry once again that this great poet was murdered in a war for territory and riches... "For profit" said journalist Jack Reed. Some of the important themes in the book are foreshortened, or just implied, when in the book they are explored meticulously and compellingly, but I think this movie is great at leading one to the books of the trilogy, even as it stands alone as a very fine little movie that deserves more attention that it received. By the way, Jonny Lee Miller has an important supporting role in this and he is very very fine, hardly recognizable as the same actor who does so well in the excellent American TV series Eli Stone
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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2.5 stars out of 4
Added 2/3/2009
The Bottom Line:
A capable-enough film version of Pat Barker's novel, Behind the Lines (aka Regeneration) features a good performance by Jonny Lee Miller but doesn't offer enough to be worth recommending; additionally, the movie's decision to dance around much of the book's homosexual themes seems cowardly.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Mutilated film
Added 9/16/2008
In 1998 I saw a great war film that was lost in the glare of the nearly simultaneous American film releases of Terrence Malick's remake of The Thin Red Line- which is a great film, and Steven Spielberg's cliché and stereotype-dripping Saving Private Ryan. It was a 1997 Canadian and British film called Regeneration, directed by Gillies MacKinnon (who directed The Playboys, and Small Faces), based upon the famed book of the same title by British novelist Pat Barker. The screenplay was written by Allan Scott. There were a couple of differences between it and the other films; the first being that it was set during World War One, in 1917, while the other two took place during World War Two. The second was that Regeneration may have been the best film of the trio. In the years since, I have searched for the film on DVD, but it only was available in a Region 2 DVD format. Then, I recently found it online, released by Artisan DVD, for American audiences. The DVD is as bare bones as one can get- not a single bonus feature. But, even worse is the fact that it was released under a different, and far less compelling and more trite, title of Behind The Lines. Worse yet is the fact that this film is a bowdlerized, dumbed down version of the great film I remember seeing.
While I cannot pinpoint all the changes from the original film, the overall effect on me was not as great. Oh, it's still a good- even arguably a very good film, but the greatness has been lost due to the cutting out of some scenes entirely and the trimming of others- to get the nearly two hour original film down to 95 minutes, and re-editing the film into shorter scenes that are interspersed with each other, designed to appeal to a more MTV and video game mindset. Lost in the rush to appeal to typical American idiocy was most of a small romantic subplot, and extended scenes between two of the main characters, the War Poets Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce). One has to guess that if the film had too much poetry in it that the McDonald's fed masses would be turned off. Yet, the worst cut, for me, comes about two thirds into the film, where Dr. Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), head of the asylum- Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, where shell-shocked soldiers go for psychotherapy, goes to London, on R&R, to visit a colleague, Dr. Yealland (John Neville), who is using a very effective form of electroshock therapy to get soldiers suffering from mutism to speak again. All these years later it was that scene, above all others, which stood out in my memory. As a mute soldier is strapped down and about to be shocked for the first time, the camera cuts away from the soldier, and as his agonal screams ripple outward, one only sees the slightly winced reaction of the doctor. It's a brilliant cut and displays the director's command of his craft, for it's a) always better to imagine such horrors, and b) the doctor is the more important character. However, in the Americanized DVD version, all that is lost. We see a standard, even generic, editing job of pain, the doctor wincing, pain, the doctor hanging his head, etc. Thanks, my native land!
The film still has, however bowdlerized, more contemporary relevance than the other two films which drowned it out in 1998, if only because- given the current U.S. treatment of both its Prisoners Of War and veterans of the Iraq War, it shows how little supposedly `civilized nations' have come in almost a century of warfare. It also touches on smaller aspects of the war, like mail censorship, which are never shown in war films, much less even discussed in many for a regarding warfare. While The film lacks the high tech graphics of its bigger budgeted cousins from 1998, the words of some of the poems, and the reactions of the soldiers say far more than mere `shocking' images can, for words that are well chose can never inure their readers. Images, even great ones, can do just that through sheer repetition. That said, the best images in the film are not elaborate war scenes, but those designed to show the aftereffects of war on the human body and mind. As example, there is a young soldier who is a quivering wreck, wont to running naked through the woods and mutilating himself, because, we learn, he was thrown by a shell explosion, into the air and when he regained consciousness he was lying face down in the rotted corpse of a German soldier. Hearing what caused him to become so disturbed is more effective than showing his face inside a bloodied, rotting mass of flesh, for, as in the cut scene of Dr. Rivers turning away from the sight of electroshock therapy, what is imagined is always worse than what can be portrayed, for each individual will fill in the horror with their own fears, rather than having a fixed image in their minds.
The cinematography, by Glen MacPherson, is stunningly realistic yet beautiful- especially in the sepia-tinged, color leeched war sequences, but throughout the whole film, as well; and it works well with the simple and understated musical score. It is a stark reminder that, then and now, one need not have all the high tech big budget special effects wizardry of a Steven Spielberg film to leave far more haunting images- perhaps the most effective one left in this bowdlerized film is the opening of a pair of human eyes buried in mud, so that the whites burn with startling intensity up at the viewer. If only the American distributors had not so badly butchered this film, from the title on, the rest of the film would have retained the intensity of those eyes which held me through nearly a decade.
2 out of 3 people found this helpful.
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Behind The Lines
Added 9/6/2009
6 Sept. 09 Sunday: I find this movie to be a true history of the 1st WW. We humans will never give-up on WAR!!!!!!.. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ A 100 per/cent profit!!!!!! It will never end!!!!!.. We forget our { pass } & our history & we are damned to repeat it, penned by George Santayana. This DVD a great bargin & at a low $$$$ price. Thank you Amazon.com. Best/Wishes Charles in So. California...
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Great Movie
Added 9/2/2009
This is a fine film, based on Pat Barker's great nouvel roman, Regeneration. The movie was originally called Regeneration also, but some moron changed the title to "Behind the Lines." Wonders never cease. Probably lawyers involved in the title change.
In any case, a fantastic movie, beautifully acted and, and a real antidote to super patriots and arm chair generals who think war is a good thing without ever exposing themselves to any of its risks. It's one of those stories that is so true it's bound to be dismissed as "radical" by the right.
The novel and the film have recreations of real characters: Dr. Rivers, one of the pioneers of PTSD work; and the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. See it.
Works of art are supposed to change how you see the world: this one will.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
An Excellent Lead in to an Excellent series of Books
Added 2/3/2009
This is an excellent and faithful take on the first book of the Regeneration trilogy by British author Pat Barker, who won the Booker Prize for the last book in the series, The Ghost Road. Jonathan Pryce is, once again, brilliant in his role as William Rivers, the anthropologist and neurologist disrupted in his life's work with the people of Melanesia to be a therapist and psychiatrist in the Scottish shell-shock hospital Craiglockhart in WWI. All the supporting cast is up to snuff with his lead. The anti-war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are played adeptly and smartly... Owen is so heart-wrenchingly sweet, and without any affectation that might imply, that you'll moan and cry once again that this great poet was murdered in a war for territory and riches... "For profit" said journalist Jack Reed. Some of the important themes in the book are foreshortened, or just implied, when in the book they are explored meticulously and compellingly, but I think this movie is great at leading one to the books of the trilogy, even as it stands alone as a very fine little movie that deserves more attention that it received. By the way, Jonny Lee Miller has an important supporting role in this and he is very very fine, hardly recognizable as the same actor who does so well in the excellent American TV series Eli Stone
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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