War of words

Regeneration shames Private Ryan

by Peter Keough

REGENERATION. Written and directed by Gillies Mackinnon. With Jonathan Pryce, James Wilby, Jonny Lee Miller, Stuart Bunce, Tanya Allen, David Hayman, Dougray Scott, and John Neville. An Alliance Pictures release. At the Kendall Square.

Steven Spielberg's celebration of the savagery and heroism of war begins with fire, water, and blood and ends with platitudes. Adapted from Pat Barker's historical novel Regeneration, Gillies Mackinnon's tortured analysis of war's morality begins with mud and by the end is still immersed in it. An overhead track shot of a World War I no-man's-land shows men and parts of men, the dead and wounded of both sides, submerged in the same gray morass; the camera skips over a parapet to reveal weary British soldiers sipping tea.

Like Saving Private Ryan, Regeneration begs a justification of this horror. It seeks, however, not decency but sanity. In the face of such obscene absurdity, contrasting unthinkable disaster with pitiful decorum, is not madness the only rational, even moral option? Yet (perhaps inevitably), though Regeneration is the more honest movie, it is also less cinematic. Despite its flashes of nightmare imagery, it bogs down in murky talk like a stilted and not especially illuminating group-therapy session.

The voice of reason in this case is Dr. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce, looking appropriately compassionate, stoical, and distraught), an actual British psychiatrist whose daunting and dubious assignment was to treat shell-shocked officers with Freudian analysis and make them fit once again for duty. Among the patients sent to him at his hospital in Scotland's gloomy Craiglockart Castle is the poet, war hero, and war protester Siegfried Sassoon (a bland James Wilby). Sassoon offers a unique challenge: far from being insane, he is supremely rational. Although he won a decoration for heroism and is beloved by his troop's command, he has issued a declaration of protest against the war, which he quite reasonably believes is sacrificing a generation of young men to benefit political and other profiteers. Facing court-martial, he's persuaded by his friend and fellow poet Robert Graves (Dougray Scott) to spare himself and his cause by accepting a stay in Craiglockart for observation.

If Sassoon's ailment is speaking out, that of officer Billy Prior (a forceful Jonny Lee Miller in the film's most resonant performance) is not speaking at all. Mute and amnesiac from some repressed trauma, he communicates with a notepad, ripping off pages like a crisp salute on which are written things like "No more words." Unlike Sassoon and most of the other officers at Craiglockart, Prior is from the lower classes, an enlisted man who worked his way up through the ranks. Although asthmatic as well as traumatized, he's determined to get back to the front line and prove himself again.

Sassoon and Prior never really meet, so the clash of classes and sensibilities remains just a suggestion. Instead, Sassoon is accosted by dreamy Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), who's smitten by Sassoon's verse and perhaps more (Sassoon's homosexuality is barely footnoted). Whatever disorder Owen suffers from is reduced to a certain wistfulness and a recurring image of an ominous canal that ultimately proves one of the film's most haunting images. If Sassoon's response to language is to utter protests and Prior's is to remain silent, Owen -- whom some believe might have rivaled T.S. Eliot had he lived -- prefers to use it to transform the unbearable into the sublime.

Unfortunately, Owen's role in Regeneration is marginal. He's seen lounging on the desultory grounds (in an apt but oppressive touch, everything is immured in the muddy tones of the front -- no sunlit, bucolic escapes here), nodding with Sassoon over a book of verse or comforting a less fortunate patient found naked and surrounded by slaughtered wildlife in the woods. Instead, Regeneration circles around the feckless Dr. Rivers, whose talking therapy is frequently broken by stutters engendered by the abominations he must rationalize.

He has at least one success: he hypnotizes Prior and returns him to the scene of primal horror that undid him, and with one accusing eye Regeneration achieves much of the impact and point of Private Ryan's famous opening sequence. Rivers also persuades Sassoon to return to duty for the good of both causes. And Owen, for whatever reason, returns to meet his fate.

But there remains that staring eye, and the even greater success of Rivers's colleague Dr. Yealland (John Neville). Yealland treats shell-shocked patients with electric shock, sticking a probe down their throats and basically torturing them into being fit for duty. It's quicker, he points out, and less painful, and they all end up in the same place anyway. This is one of the few moments of eloquence in Mackinnon's well-meaning but inarticulate movie. That and the snippets of Owen's poetry. Rivers reads his last words and weeps. It's not enough to wash away the mud, but it is the beginning of clarity.