War is hell, war is a drug…you
know the drill. Inside every director of
war movies lurks two dueling impulses—one, to dutifully thrust us into the
horror of people killing each other; the other to buoyantly gloat, “But all
this bloodshed is tragically poetic, right?”
Both “The Hurt Locker” and “American Sniper” hovered between those two
poles; now, Yann Demange’s “’71” hurtles you back into that grisly conundrum
with thrilling, punishing force.
Except we’re not in Iraq anymore. It’s 1971 and private Gary Hook (a flawless
Jack O’Connell) is among the battalion of Brits dispatched to deal with “the
situation in Belfast,” as one officer calls it.
Protestants and Catholics are warring and Gary and company have been
sent to “let the people know that we’re here to protect them”—a mission that
turns out to be almost ludicrously resistant to their efforts. When the Brits arrive in Ireland, they’re smattered
by a volley or water balloons…a prelude to an assault of rocks, knives, and guns
that leaves Gary stranded, racing through narrow passageways and streets while the
furious men and boys of Belfast charge after him.
And so the real story of “’71”—the story of a man on the
run—begins. Yet we’re not in the
playfully sinister realm of “North By Northwest,” or even the grimly
exhilarating shadows of “The Bourne Supremacy.”
With ferocious commitment, Mr. Demange rolls up his sleeves and insists
that we watch the unwatchable—Gary, sobbing into his hands as he realizes he’ll
probably be dead soon; shrapnel cuts, stitched up in horribly graphic detail; a
little boy, his arms blown off by a double agent’s bomb.
Yet Mr. Demange doses us with adrenaline to alleviate the
pain. As Gary stumbles up and down a
metal staircase at the pitch of the movie’s climax, I caught myself glowing at
the sublime precision of the moment—at the way that you can see, with perfect
clarity, the exact distance between Gary and his pursuers. Of course, “’71” never truly becomes an
entertainment.
Watching
the movie, we know nothing about Gary aside from the fact that he has a son and
that he’s in the army (he isn’t even referred to by name until halfway through
the picture). “You’re just a piece of
meat,” someone tells him and the film agrees—it paints Gary not as a saintly
knight or a necessary evil, but as a dehumanized victim who never realizes that
beyond the smooth rush of preparing for battle lie fierce city streets, waiting
to swallow their next victim.
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