REGENERATION / BEHIND THE LINES (1987)

Novelist Pat Barker had recently won The Booker Prize (for another book) when her WWI novel was adapted into this reasonably effective, if rather conventional film; script Allan Scott, direction Gillies MacKinnon.  Set at an officer convalescence hospital in a peacefully splendid pastoral setting, a very grand manor near Edinburgh, Jonathan Pryce is top doc at the well-staffed facility, gently trying to prod his charges thru mental traumas so they can quickly be sent back to the trenches; all expected War is Hell/War is Madness tropes front & center.  Jonny Lee Miller functions as a sort of baseline case, his ‘recovery’ less attributable to the good doctor’s services than to the simple pleasures of finding romance with a townie.  What really interests the filmmakers (if perhaps not the target audience) is When Siegfried Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, nonpareil British war poets; one rich, famous, published/the other discovered only after war’s end.*  It makes for serviceable drama, but not a surprise in sight, even when we jump in and out of the battle-lines.  Only a brief terrifying visit to a sort of electronic torture chamber of a clinic jars us out of our comfort zone.  Elsewhere, the horrors of war supplanted by a wish to book a room for the verdant lodgings and group sing-a-longs.  Not the takeaway we’re looking for.

DOUBLE-BILL:  British filmmaker Terence Davies covers similar territory in BENEDICTION/’21.  (not seen here)  This ‘marmite’ of a filmmaker, after two unequivocal masterpieces, has turned mannered & self-indulgent.  But perhaps a lack of conventionality is what's needed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Sassoon not there for medical reasons, but political/philosophical ones having publically denounced the war as having turned into an act of aggression.