By Dominique Paul Noth
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| Felix Kammerer as Paul in "All Quiet on the Western Front" |
As the Oscars approach March 12, the only confident prediction I will make is that the best international film prize will go to Germany’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” – also nominated for best picture Oscar, which it won’t win.
And though it is a good film, I don’t think it deserves the international film prize, though it will get it, given the astounding publicity for it, the credentials – Erich Maria Remarque’s famous 1920s novel that also was a phenomenally successful 1930 American film – the importance of the antiwar message down through the ages and the lack of any equally strong campaign for the other four nominations.
But there I have a favorite – “Argentina 1985” – that I think should win and is now getting some buzz. In some ways it might be dismissed as a courtroom drama, but it is faithful to an actual lesser-known court drama, exposing a once-powerful right-wing junta, that may be more immediately resonant in our current political age.
For anyone paying remote attention to Argentinian history, the film is also a reminder of a country caught in the ceaseless back and forth of military dictatorship, democratic rule, then military again, then democratic -- and throughout, thankfully, a mordant sense of humor. (The same prosecutor who is a stickler for court proceedings can hurl a vulgar gesture at his opponents.)
The film chronicles a reluctant federal prosecutor who had learned to subdue his judicial ethics under military rulers but now has a more liberal government in Argentina. Yet he still has healthy suspicions about the powers that be, fearing this new wave of democracy won’t last (in that regard he was right).
Nevertheless, he tries to fight for justice, and his shrewd moves make a good movie, recounting the miraculous ways he worked with a ragtag group of supporters to speak out in public and punish the nine junta leaders responsible for thousands of “disappearances” and brutal killings of ordinary citizens.
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Actor Ricardo Darin |
It’s almost imperceptible how smoothly the film has been dubbed into English and it is intriguing how good the cast is, led by Ricardo Darín, a highly rated stage and film actor who, even in dubbed dialog, makes us feel for this methodical, put-upon and slowly demonstrative prosecutor. I wound up preferring this slower, more intellectually demanding film. Director Santiago Mitre may not plow new ground but he effectively uses the full range of semi-documentary storytelling techniques.
Not to say “All Quiet” isn’t powerful. But it struck me as over-used film making, hardly ground-breaking in an arena where it could be breaking ground. That is the problem with war movies that make the same devices tell the same story, unlike how “Argentina 1985” truly introduces a new set of characters and complications.
“All Quiet” is exposing a horror we all know called World War I in which soldiers in separate bunkers feet apart lost lives by the millions barely gaining a foot of ground in the process.
Down through the decades of war films, though all wars are hell, WWI may well be the easiest one to make look foul on all fronts. There is no national pride left in anyone about its craziness. This film echoes the waste of soldiers on all sides, making the novel’s focus on the German side speak volumes to all sides, from the way the students were encouraged to join the military by gung-ho schoolteachers (they would feel at home in Florida under DeSantis) to the savage lessons its story elements constantly reveal.
The main lesson has some fresh insights in how commerce is secretly fed by the carnage. The film extends the novel’s insights here, striking us in the guts about money-making merchandising dominating every conflict. Doesn’t matter if labeled capitalism or communism – the soldiers are unwitting cogs in a bloody machine.
“All Quiet” opens – much like other war films – in absolute brutality with cameras flying all over the mud, spikes and facing bunkers. Individual soldiers are dying brutally, but they are not the soldiers the plot will follow. These bodies and possessions are scavenged by the survivors (their fellow troops), their bloody rat-infested uniforms salvaged, cleaned, the bullet holes sewed shut, the fabric then pressed and neatly folded – and then given to the new soldiers who are becoming fodder by the millions. “Whose Heinrich?” wonders Paul, our main protagonist, as he receives the garments of a soldier who died reels ago. Paul’s physical presence is hauntingly embodied by gaunt Austrian actor Felix Kammerer.
Visually these are powerful social images, barely touched in the novel, as is the brutal manipulation of the ruling class of generals (a topic most brilliantly covered back in 1957 in Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory”). Here we get to see the armistice negotiations as the combatants locked in trench warfare are dismissed as pawns in the egos of the leaders -- the absolute indifference on both sides to the consequences for the soldiers.
There is a moment from the novel but more powerfully rendered by 1927’s unrelated “The Big Parade” directed by King Vidor, where a soldier is stuck all night in a trench with the slowly dying foe he stabbed. These almost endless painful moments become the most haunting intimacy in the new film. They reminded me how the colorized actual marching, bathing and latrine footage of WWI doughboys exposed the harsh indifference of actual war, without the flash of fire and charging bodies, in New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s largely forgotten 1918 short documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old.”
Where the 1930 “All Quiet” – deservedly award-winning for director Lewis Milestone – gave time for camaraderie in the trenches, in the 2022 film most of the soldiers Paul has come to know just die suddenly alongside him – except for his best friend Kat, who helps him steal food to survive. The most famous 1930 final image (often parodied) was of Paul reaching for a butterfly -- his flopping hand tells us he also died. Death is never so clean in the 2022 film.
Indeed, WWI is again a set piece for film makers to send battalions of extras into the carnage and the futility of battle. The new one adds the arrival of armored tanks and flame throwers, which these bunker-entrenched opponents had never seen and flee in panic. A 2019 Oscar contender, “1917,” in which director Sam Mendes became too enamored of pretending WWI was all done in one flowing camera shot, nevertheless matches German director (actually Swiss) Edward Berger in epic size and fierce fire scenes.
Both films are trying and failing to come up to the D-Day horror standard of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” But all are playing on the same battlefield, making us sometimes feel that war is a test of moviemakers rather than humanity.
We always feel the humanity in “Argentina 1985.” While satisfaction seems elusive at first given the setbacks as the prosecution plods along, suddenly satisfaction soars out in a trial speech that compares with the great humanizing speeches of past courtroom films like 1961’s “Judgment at Nuremberg.”
Pretty sure “Argentina 1985” won’t win at the Oscars but suspect it will hang around our minds for years longer than the competition.
About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic.
