Written by: David Williamson

Directed by: Peter Weir

BBD Comments:

While Wiener may have had trouble tracking down a pick for his night, I am very glad he settled on this. ‘Gallipoli’ is one of those films once seen you aren’t likely to revisit but as it speaks so well to our moment in time, I was very glad to see it again. I first saw ‘Gallipoli’ in Junior High. Our teacher Mr. Roberts used it, along with ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ to demonstrate the particular nastiness of trench warfare. I remember being more thrilled to see Mad Max playing another part than I was to learn about the deadly realities of global conflict. But the film stuck with me (and ironically I have always confused its title with that other Wiener pick, ‘Papillon’).

I spent the weekend prior to this pick in Seattle happily witnessing the marriage of Richard and Catherine Gustafson. Among the many highlights of the trip were two evenings spent chatting late into the night with Gus’s new in-laws. The elders in Catherine’s clan are all retired members of the U.S. State Department and some of the conversations brought back memories of ‘The In-Laws.’ One of the perspectives about the sad state of affairs in our Foreign Policy was a thorough and detailed accounting of the few short years it will take for America to isolate itself from the world as China becomes the predominate super power. Shortly after that shift in the balance of power we will be bankrupt, martial law will be declared, totalitarianism will be the norm and we will begin to walk a path similar to the one the Germans walked in the aftermath of World War I. Who wouldn’t be delighted to sip brandy and talk of such things?

My point in relating all of this is how pertinent I found ‘Gallipoli’ after all these years. In the end it is the story of the senseless and brutal death of fine young men at the hands of other presumably fine young men. Their deaths are ordered by disconnected officers who care little about the lives they callously destroy. One cannot help but find parallels here to today’s conflicts over seas, and despite Abu Ghraib, I expect most of our troops are fine young men and women answering their nation’s call to arms. Like the British generals on Gallipoli, we rarely pause to consider the person behind the soldier, and sadly they are reduced en masse to numbered dead.  ‘Gallipoli’ then, serves to tell us the story of two such soldiers, Archy and Frank, and in doing so expands our empathy for all the other stories we never get to know.

The parallels between this film and our world today are legion. I was struck most by the deft demonstration of the general ignorance the soldiers had about the nature of the war they were signing up for. They were swayed by jingoism that is still employed today. Most notably is the line atop this page, that we fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here. That old saw is so empty and hollow, and yet its on the lips of many politicians to this day.

‘Gallipoli’ provoked a great deal of thought in me, and dovetailed quite nicely with the gloomy prognostications of Richard’s new in-law Doug. Doug sees it all as numbers on a board. x + y = China rules the world. His view is unswerving and fatalistic. He sees the path as intractable and individuals as nameless, helpless figures. There seems no room for the stories of individual will and human perseverance in Doug’s telling of our slow march to minionship.  Where I hope Doug’s outlook misses the mark is in it’s underestimation of the power of a single soul to try and save the day. A single soldier can shift the outcome of a war, and a simple film can change our hearts and minds. Though Frank’s legs may not have been fast enough to save Archy, ‘Gallipoli’ reminds us to keep running. And to remember those that ran before.

SELECTOR Comments:

It seems that as we enter the second year of Movie Night, the wheels are falling off the review wagon.  As Mr. Davis has pointed out, it was actually my idea that we should review the damn movies.  And more ludicrously, it was my idea that our review should be turned in by Thursday.

As a New Englander, I think Mr. Davis is alone in appreciating my attempt to turn any kind of pleasure in to a productive act of work.  However, I need to apologize to all of us for creating an expectation that we should write reviews.  Because our reviews are a pointless, masturbatory exercise.

Mercifully, we've abandoned our first review convention of devoting our first paragraphs of prose to comment on the state of the InFocus projector and the seamlessness (or lack thereof) of the transition from classic rock to watching a movie.  At least that narrative was uniquely ours and, at times, charming.  Now we're all just channeling Pauline Kael--badly.

I would like the greater Movie Night audience out there (and I'm told you exist) to embrace something.  Sorry for being all post-modern and shit here, but what matters about Movie Night is our totally personal, totally immediate, and totally emotional response to what's being screened.  We have no perspective on the work of Orson Welles or Carol Reed or Sam Peckinpah or Steven Spielberg that professionals don't have in spades.  All we have to distinguish our dedicated bunch is our commitment to letting the movies on the Stucco wash over us as if it's our first time seeing them (unless you're Coolbaugh, and it is your first time seeing them).

What am I getting at?  My review of "Gallipoli" offers no recital of the plot.  I will not talk about how this work prefigures Peter Weir's career, nor Mel Gibson’s for that matter.  All I can do is offer a personal response to the film, and a brief one at that since I've done so little with so many words in my Selector bully pulpit.

Here it goes:

I hate the extra-diegetic sound in ‘Gallipoli.’  Someone needs to get rid of that synthesizer every time there's a running scene.  It's like you're watching ‘Chariots of Fire’ and suddenly, ‘Beverly Hills Cop II’ breaks in.  More than anything else in this fine film, the music dated it and ruined it.

As a Canadian, I like ‘Gallipoli’ because it reflects on the worst of the colonial experience, as well.  Some among us (colonials, that is), are so enamored of our British masters that we're willing to send our boys to their deaths to preserve the tea time British officers can't seem to live without.  I don't want to descend in to racial stereotyping, I'll leave that to Mel Gibson, but there's a common narrative that runs through Candadian, Australain, and Kiwi stories about both World Wars. Namely, the British used them as cannon fodder.  And it's probably true.  The British elite’s idea of “Operation Get Behind The Darkies” was to get the young men of the colonies to die first and fastest.   There was enough death for all in both World Wars, but the futility of trench warfare (by the cavalry, no less) is well communicated by the film.

Anyway, I like ‘Gallipoli’ because it forces the question:  Would you embrace certain death because honor dictates it, even for a pointless cause?

I wish I could say unequivocally that I'd have the courage, but I can't.

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