Mission Impossible 1917: Sam Mendes has done it again, writes BRIAN VINER

1917 (15)

Verdict: Award-winning stunner 

Rating:

Twenty years after winning a coveted Golden Globes double — best drama film and best director — for his debut feature, American Beauty, Sam Mendes has done it again.

On Sunday night, he won the same two awards for 1917, his riveting action-thriller about World War I. Next stop, the Baftas. Then, no doubt, the Oscars.

Mendes was a 34-year-old movie novice when he won for American Beauty, precociously brilliant but already well-established as a theatre director.

Yet he could not have made 1917 then. He has fed two decades of film-making experience into this wonderful picture.

During the centenary years of World War I, some terrific films were made about the conflict. The pick of them was a remarkable 2018 documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, a treasure trove of original but newly colourised footage which showed that no big-screen dramatisation of trench warfare would ever be quite right, for one striking, if prosaic, reason: in real life, soldiers’ teeth, almost without exception, were terrible.

In every other respect, however, Mendes propels his audience back to the Western Front with the same extraordinary, visceral power.

That’s due to both his skill as a film-maker and the bold simplicity of his story. Bold, because he resists the temptation to introduce layers of plot or characterisation.

He even resists the temptation to tell us anew what, thanks to all those familiar animal metaphors, we already know — that our brave boys were lions led by donkeys, going like lambs to the slaughter.

Instead, this is an account of a perilous but straightforward mission by a pair of lance corporals, who are handed the challenge of delivering a message intended to save the lives of 1,600 men. To do so, they must cross battle-ravaged no-man’s land and the Germans’ abandoned front line at immense personal risk.

It is a partly fictionalised tale, but is inspired by the director’s late grandfather, Alfred Mendes, to whom the film is dedicated.

I have read conflicting accounts of that inspiration, some saying that Alfred Mendes himself delivered such a message, others that he told his grandchildren stories about others who did so.

Either way, this is an intensely personal project. Yet Mendes would be the first to concede his debts both to his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns and, above all, to veteran British cinematographer Roger Deakins, who won an Academy Award for depicting the future in Blade Runner 2049 and is surely a strong contender for another — for evoking the past.

He takes us with these men on their harrowing journey by filming what appears to be (but isn’t quite) a single continuous take. The effect is thrillingly — at times knuckle-chewingly — immersive, and actually the roots of it are in Mendes’s 2015 Bond film Spectre, which began with an eight-minute take.

The director’s theatrical background is also conspicuously influential . . . like many of his plays, this unfolds in real time. Mendes has picked cinematic titans Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch to play the top brass.

Mark Strong and Andrew Scott play officers, too.

But, astutely, he has cast as his two lance corporals a pair of actors you may recognise but struggle to name: George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman (the latter was the sulky, mulleted best friend of the Bruce Springsteen nut in last year’s Blinded By The Light). They are the stars of this film, handily reinforcing the message that most war heroes come anonymously from the rank and file.

Chapman plays Blake, chosen because he is good at map-reading and has a beloved older brother with the endangered division.

A general (Firth) explains tersely that the Germans have retreated, and the field commander (Cumberbatch) is about to order an advance, not knowing what aerial reconnaissance has shown, that the enemy has retreated only in order to lure the British into a heavily fortified trap. With phone wires cut, only messengers can stop the otherwise inevitable carnage. So Blake picks his friend Schofield (MacKay) to join him, and their grim-faced captain (Scott) sends them off with a ‘cheerio’ that is anything but cheerful.

After that, they are on their own; except, of course, that we are with them every step of the way — past the putrefying corpses of men and horses and even cows (shot by the Germans to remove a source of food), through booby-trapped, rat-infested trenches and on into other equally unforgettable visions of hell.

Mendes’s last two films were Skyfall and Spectre, featuring oodles of British derring-do, James Bond-style. But 1917 depicts an altogether different kind of courage, forced on two ordinary young men by a fierce sense of duty, yes, but an even fiercer instinct to survive.

It is a stunning film, fully deserving of all the gongs that will end up on the already-crowded Mendes mantelpiece.

• A shorter version of this review ran last month. 

Sandler’s gamble pays off as he ditches the goofball

Uncut gems (15)

Verdict: A wild ride 

Rating:

Seberg

Verdict: Fascinating, but flawed

Rating:

They came up with a word for Matthew McConaughey’s revitalised screen persona, and now Adam Sandler deserves his own version of the McConaissance — the ‘Sandlereinvention’, perhaps.

After becoming all but synonymous with the vacuous goofball movie, he was terrific as a kind-hearted loser in Noah Baumbach’s hugely enjoyable 2017 Netflix film The Meyerowitz Stories. Now, in another Netflix production (but with a short theatrical release first), and as an even more spectacular loser, he’s better still.

Uncut Gems, written and directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, is the brothers’ crazed ode to their own childhoods growing up in New York City, where their father worked in Manhattan’s diamond district and came home with stories about hugely colourful characters such as Howard Ratner (Sandler).

Howard is a diamond dealer, an incorrigible ducker and diver, a relentless motormouth and an irredeemable gambler. Sandler plays him superbly, if a little alarmingly.

It’s like watching pure adrenaline being shot directly into the veins of an acting performance. Combined with the Safdies’ characteristically edgy style — the jerky camera and overlapping dialogue — it adds up to a challenging spectacle.

I watched the film with my wife, who, after the first ten minutes, had to be quietly talked into sticking with it. I think she’s glad she did.

Howard has managed to import an uncut black opal from an Ethiopian mine. He sees it as his passport to riches, but first he is talked into lending it to a famous client, basketball player Kevin Garnett (playing himself), who is convinced the rock brings him luck.

In the meantime, Howard is in serious hock to his own brother-in-law, who has some extremely menacing associates.

In its wild, free-form way, the film follows his attempts to appease Garnett, his angry creditors, his long-suffering wife (Idina Menzel, an awfully long way from Frozen) and his sweetly loyal mistress (Julia Fox). He could possibly pull it off — if it weren’t for his self-destructive gambling habit.

Let’s just say that Uncut Gems is a heck of a ride.

Seberg could do with being more of a ride. It tells the fascinating story of the American movie star Jean Seberg (played by Kristen Stewart), who, despite coming from small-town Iowa, became the poster girl of French New Wave cinema with her performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic Breathless.

Benedict Andrews’ film barely touches on her screen career, however.

Its focus is the two-year period from 1969, in which Seberg, an ardent civil rights campaigner who helped to bankroll the Black Panther movement, was followed and bugged by the FBI.

It then exposed her extramarital affair with a leading black activist in a bid to discredit her. The surveillance made Seberg paranoid, and may well have been responsible for her death, a probable suicide, several years later.

It’s a shameful episode well worth chronicling, and Stewart gives a committed performance with decent support from Jack O’Connell as a conflicted FBI man on her tail.

Unfortunately, much of the dialogue, from British husband-and-wife screenwriting team Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, is strangely leaden, with too many characters speaking in slogans and cliches.

It’s a missed opportunity, and rather a shame, because Shrapnel has a personal investment in the project — his grandmother was Deborah Kerr, who starred with Jean Seberg in the 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse.

But what about the film they all forgot?  

Last Sunday’s Golden Globes, swiftly followed by the Bafta nominations, have underlined the excellence of films such as 1917, Joker, The Irishman and Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

That’s fair enough; they’re all worthy of awards. But at the same time, not everyone has loved them.

The only film over the past 12 months that I’ve anointed with five stars and seems to have beguiled everyone who has seen it is Greta Gerwig’s beautifully judged, gorgeously acted adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women.

It’s a joy. Yet neither the Globes nor the Baftas have included it in their Best Film shortlists, and both have similarly overlooked Gerwig (pictured) for Best Director.

Significantly, four out of five of the Bafta Best Film contenders feature men with guns.

Maybe if Gerwig had included a deadly shoot-out, she’d have stood more of a chance.

Either way, let’s hope the Academy Awards put right what the Globes and Baftas have got so wrong.

The Runaways 

Rating:

This low-budget drama has a certain charm, and oodles of lovely Yorkshire scenery, but would work much better as a TV serial unfolding over half a dozen Sunday tea-times. As a feature film, it outstays its welcome.

Written and directed by Richard Heap, it follows the adventures of three children who live with their father (Mark Addy) in Whitby, where he runs a donkey-ride business.

When he dies suddenly, soon after his nasty brother (Lee Boardman) has been released from jail, the trio set off across the moors — with donkeys in tow — to find their estranged mother (Tara Fitzgerald).

There are distinct echoes of The Railway Children of blessed memory, and of the 2017 film Lean On Pete, though the poignancy here begins to feel forced.

As a whole, it is uneven and at times unconvincing (the eldest child, though nicely played by Molly Windsor, seems more middle-class than her siblings).

But the North Yorkshire tourist board won’t mind any of that — the views are fabulous.