Hacksaw Ridge

Hacksaw Ridge (2016(, a relentless and simple-minded war film directed by Mel Gibson, raises questions about the role of suffering. Certainly, the last hour of the film dramatizes many forms of horrific physical and emotional suffering. Gibson is a believing Christian, apparently a reactionary Catholic, and his film is ultimately an exercise in practical theology played out against an allegorical landscape of hellfire and torment. Suffering does not induce salvation; the hero’s convictions as a pacifist Seventh Day Adventist are never really in doubt and never challenged – the film is dogmatic in demonstrating the inviolable sanctity of its hero. Rather, the ability to endure the most awful kinds of suffering, and the willingness to embrace even more suffering, seems a warrant or guarantee of the hero’s virtue. It’s an austere and terrible message: salvation is demonstrated by good works and the ability to overcome suffering in the pursuit of these good works is a measure of the hero’s sanctity. Gibson’s points are as simple as they are disturbing but there’s no benefit to denying the film’s power. With single-minded intensity the film drives home its message – a man is measured by his convictions and those convictions are meaningless unless they require the sacrifice of enduring extreme emotional and physical pain.

The tow-headed hero of Gibson’s allegory is a skinny and naive young man named Desmond Doss. Doss is a hillbilly raised in the Shenandoah Valley near Lynchburg, Kentucky. His father, who was awarded medals for heroism at Belleau Wood, is a mean drunk, beating his sons and his wife – Doss senior suffers from what we would call PTSD; he hasn’t recovered from the trauma that he experienced in World War One. Doss’ mother is a pious Seventh Day Adventist and, after he nearly shoots his father in a violent domestic altercation, Desmond swears that he will eschew all violence – although the point is made obliquely, he is apparently also a vegetarian and will not harm animals either. When World War II is declared, everyone in rural Lynchburg enlists. Doss, who is in love with a pretty nurse at the local hospital, also volunteers for service, declaring himself a concientious objector and demanding that he serve as a medic. During his basic training, Doss is taunted and savagely beaten for his pacifism by the other enlistees; his refusal to even touch a weapon is thought to compromise the esprit d’corps of his unit. At a court martial trial, Doss is acquitted of insubordination and allowed to serve with his platoon as a medic. The troops end up fighting in a brutal battle at a place called Hacksaw Ridge on the island of Okinawa. After the infantry is slaughtered in futile attacks and counterattacks, the remnants of Doss’ unit withdraw from the battlefield. Doss remains on the ridge, however, and scuttles around in the darkness dragging wounded men off the field and, then, lowering them down an eighty foot cliff to a beach under American control. In this way, he saves 72 injured soldiers, including some Japanese. (The injured Japanese saved at great risk by Doss are simply murdered when they reach the bottom of the cliff.) The platoon returns to battle and the Japanese are defeated. By this time, Doss is regarded as a hero by his fellow soldiers and, later, receives a Congressional Medal of Honor from President Truman. In an extended epilogue, we see the real Desmond Doss, hear him recalling the battle at Okinawa, and are shown photographs of the actual man with his wife and family. (He died at 87 in 2006.)

Gibson’s obsession are on view without any real effort at disguise. Doss looks exactly like a young Mel Gibson – he has the same thousand candle-watt smile and aw-shucks hairdo. Gibson’s film, in large part, is literally about blood. The hero is smeared with blood in an early scene when he helps to rescue a man pinned under a jalopy – the guy has severed an artery. He first sees the love of his life, a radiantly beautiful-looking nurse all in white while he is covered with someone else’s blood. He courts the woman while donating blood – a procedure shown in big close-ups. In the opening scene, Gibson’s drunken father smashes a whisky bottle on the grave of a dead WWI comrade and lacerates his hand – we see his blood dripping all over the white gravestone. As the troops climb up toward Hacksaw Ridge, ascending a great rope ladder, blood drizzles down on them from above. And, then, Gibson stages a protracted battle sequence involving every possible kind of wound and mutilation, shredded limbs and entrails scattered all over a battlefield that is a wasteland of craters, stripped and barren trees, and heaps of burning rubbish. Life is in the blood and, as in Gibson’s savage Apocalypto, the film is a testament to the power of blood sacrifice.

For better or worse, Hacksaw Ridge is a combat picture and, although the entire movie is handsomely made and very effectively staged, the enterprise rises or falls with its battle scenes. These sequences are spectacular and, probably, represent a kind of horrific lyriscim that has not been seen, or attempted, on the screen, since the death of Sam Peckinpah. (Indeed, some parts of the battle scenes harken back to Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron.) Gibson’s second unit films everything using a telephoto lens – this flattens the images into a kind of continuous frieze, everything pushed up close into the foreground. The combat images are crowded with writhing soldiers, all planes of action flattened into a single tapestry of frenzied motion – it’s as if the Parthenon frieze had come to life, men wrestling with one another in tangles of action interspersed with great gusts of orange fire. These sequences are extraordinary, although their very flamboyance undercuts some of the film’s dour and ascetic message. But the centerpiece of the movie eschews all spectacle for something equally compelling – the agon of Doss, his passion as he drags mangled soldiers one after another off the smoky and blackened battlefield, lowering them down the cliff by rope and, thereby, maiming his own hands, ripping the flesh off his fingers and palms, and drenching himself in gore. At some moments, Hacksaw Ridge resembles Terence Malick’s equally uncompromising The Thin Red Line – in both movies, the director comes to accept that the only valid response to combat is something like prayer, a kind of musing stream of consciousness combining exhortation, and supplication to God: Doss’ prayer, uttered again and again, is "let me get one more of them", a cry from the depths that he answers by yet another trek across the smoking hellscape of the battlefield. (The most powerful effect in the movie is the simplest – it is very moving to hear the real Doss as an old man repeat the exact prayer that we have seen in the movie.)

The film has weaknesses – Doss’ character is too simply drawn and the strong admixture of defiant pride that must have been integral to his personality is suggested, but never really dramatized. Further, Doss’ convictions are overdetermined – Gibson is not willing to let Doss’ pacifism arise from simple reason and his Christian beliefs. Rather, Gibson creates a double backstory to support Doss’ defiant non-violence. First, he shows Doss almost killing his brother with a brick when the boys are roughhousing – the injury that Doss inflicts on his brother causes him to stare at a framed image of the Ten Commandments, focusing particularly on Cain’s attack on Abel and the commandment that "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Later, Doss threatens his father with a loaded revolver when the older man is beating his mother – this event also inspires in Doss a repugnance for all forms of violence. It’s as if Gibson has to apologize for Doss’ non-violence, as if he has to find other sources for it than merely a conviction that the Gospels mean what they say about "turning the other cheek." Gibson goes too far with some of the scenes – I don’t think we need a graphic hara kiri sequence, although I suppose that scene is inserted into the film as a sop to the Japanese audience. A movie of this kind, although powerfully made with real conviction, doesn’t speak to me – it’s too simple-minded and the film’s message is too schematically made: the film has a high wordless angelic chorus that we hear at one point on the soundtrack and, near the end, we see Doss literally ascending into heaven – the camera whirls down below a stretcher bearing Doss from atop the ridge to the beach and the descending camera creates an effect that Doss is rising up into the bright light of the heavens. This sort of imagery is over-emphatic and distracts a viewer like me, although, perhaps, others would find these shots inspiring. But, if nothing else, the film lacks any kind of cynicism and, unlike too many movies made today, it is memorable and has the courage of its flawed convictions.