“All Quiet on the Western Front”; a handsome, if remote endeavor

It’s not the film’s fault that “All Quiet on the Western Front” left me strangely unmoved. That might sound odd, but I hope what I follow that with makes a modicum of sense. 

If I hadn’t seen the first film adaptation from 1930, if I hadn’t seen other, equally and perhaps more so, visceral re-enactments of life and death on the battlefield, I might have been more drawn in. However, I have, and I wasn’t.

Germany’s entry for - among other categories - Best International Film and Best Motion Picture is most assuredly A Prestige Picture. At the same time, it has too much else going for it to be merely Oscar bait^TM. For one thing, it does present in unflinching detail that kids are cannon fodder and the great lie of any country that resorts to mass murder to settle accounts or for that matter, attempt to force the rest of the world to bend a knee is that it is a civilized polity. At one point, a battle weary Kat tells our main character Paul that men are beasts. This is borne out repeatedly with the kind of twentieth savagery that was novel in the teens of that century but has swiftly become commonplace a hundred years later.

Felix Kammerer as Paul goes from callow underaged youth to haunted, battle hardened vet in a convincing arc from signing up with his pals - all of whom die - in school through deployment to having seen too much shit that no one, let alone a child, should have to see. Fortunately for Paul, he has a mentor in the cobbler turned expert soldier Stanislaus Katczinsky (a charming and fascinating Albrecht Schuch). Kat keeps Paul grounded throughout the unceasing shifts between conflict and stasis between engagements.

Edward Berger’s screenplay is tight and focused and Berger introduces a behind the scenes look at the negotiations for truce to armistices between the German High Command and their French counterparts. We are later introduced to that breed of military man for whom the expenditure of lives is necessary for his own self-worth (aka “glory”, in their parlance) and duty to God and country in the form of General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow, as commanding, dictatorial, and petty as they come. Von Stroheim has nothing on this guy; at least, there is a kind of humanity in his military men. 

In other words, Berger takes the tack of rendering a global or at least, international context to what is happening on-screen locally. I don’t know that it was completely necessary; Remarque in his novel and Milestone in his adaptation referenced the larger, out of frame elements but kept us firmly rooted in the (in)humanity of it all on the ground. Perhaps Berger feels modern audiences need to have the point made more explicit?

My main issue with cut-aways to the negotiations is that it removed us from investing more deeply in the very human and tragic story of Paul and Kat and the heartrending reality that is combat. The Friedrichs scenes are more of the moment and perhaps Berger also felt a need to balance out the one with the other, letting people know that 17 million people died from the hubris of military martinets as well as larger geopolitical catastrophes based on arrogance and greed. 

I can go with this to a point, but as far as cinematic structure goes, it did slow down the proceedings and blunted the emotional impact of the unimaginable. 

Speaking of structure, Berger expertly begins the film in the deployment of one Heinrich Gerber, a new recruit who meets his end shortly after his arrival at the front. From there we see his uniform’s journey along with others to a laundry and then to a battalion of seamstresses where it is sent back into rotation to be worn by a new recruit, our Paul. In the first fifteen minutes or so, Berger crafted the perfect short anti-war film. It is succinct, brilliant, chilling, and saddening.

When Paul discovers Gerber’s name still patched on the uniform he returns it to the dispensing officer who removes the patch saying that the recruit found the uniform too small, “it happens all the time.”

By the time Paul and his friends are en route to the front, I had already adapted the sense of fatalism that the genre brings. There are moments of haunting beauty, worthy of Terrence Malick, juxtaposed against sequences of utter barbarism. That Malick’s WWII film “Thin Red Line” has already eclipsed many who followed after is beside the point. It’s effective filmmaking and instills the sense of humanity as a global tribe of mad primates, divorced from the natural order.

Berger also has me wondering if the raison d’être for making this film was to emphasize the humanity of the Germans in “the war to end all wars” as well as to drive home the universality of man’s inhumanity to man regardless of “who started it.” If so, he succeeds in some measure, but also undercuts that thesis to some degree with those divergences to the peace negotiations. 

Regarding those, yes, the conditions for the armistice were harsh but Germany is often considered the aggressor and Kaiser Wilhelm’s designs on Europe were expansionist and unacceptable, to say the least. The result of that war plunged Germany into a depression and an unsteady period until the rise of the Weimar Republic. Post World War One Germany birthed a generation of artists, composers, poets, and filmmakers and a society suffused with instability and unease that would be capitalized on/seized by Hitler and his gang of thugs in 1933. Berger is no doubt aware of this, but again, shifting the focus away from the action on the ground takes away from the very personal stories of these young men (well, Kat is a bit older than Paul) and the immediacy of what they’ve lost. 

Indeed, in one of the more affecting moments, a comrade, Tjaden, doesn’t think he’ll ever be fit for returning to civilian life. Aside from the truth of the statement, there is also the sense that anyone who begins to talk of the future at all is doomed to die before the movie’s over. Here again is where by this point, every word is foregrounding. Part of that is the nature of the genre; the other part of it is that we don’t spend enough time with the characters consistently to feel the impact of those deaths.

I understand that “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the most expensive German film ever. It shows; there is a tactile sensibility throughout the film. James Friend’s cinematography is remarkable, alternating between the vast, ruptured landscape of the front, the pocked, ravaged soil littered with corpses to scenes of staggering quiet of the countryside to the close, intimate moments between comrades in the face of the inevitable. Small wonder that this is another of the film’s nominations.

Special mention must be made of Volker Bertelmann’s score. It is by turns, mammoth, primordial, as haunting as the faces of the living and deathly afraid as much as those already dead, and stunningly lyrical. Bertelmann is up, too.

At the end of it all, though, do I think the film is “Oscar worthy”? Frankly, given how often the statue has been given to frankly pandering, if not outright ridiculous, candidates, I don’t know that being “Oscar worthy” is a litmus test of excellence. That said, it’s a fine film. To repeat myself as I do, I didn’t connect with Berger’s vision fully, however, I appreciate and respect what he attempted. There’s a lot to be said for that attempt.

I think, given the crop of competitors this year, though, Oscar worthiness is being found in a more tightly packed harvest. I haven’t finished writing about all the best picture nominees, so I’ll hold off on my hopes/predictions. As for “All Quiet…”, I’m glad it got seen and is so well-received, but I don’t know that I find it as unique or as important a film as a nomination among the current pool it might be.

Click here for my Oscar Post-Mortem.

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