All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Continuing Oscar catch-up: Edward Berger’s bleak adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front is there, I suppose, for people who need periodic reminding that combat isn’t a game. Technology and a more elastic R rating have made it possible for movies to put us right next to young soldiers getting their heads blown off or their bowels slashed out, their blood spurting or misting, steaming in the cold winter air. This All Quiet (the book’s 1930 adaptation won a Best Picture Oscar, and the new one is nominated for that and eight more) certainly doesn’t skimp on the misery and filth of trench warfare in World War I. It is not, nor is it intended to be, “entertaining,” though Berger and cinematographer James Friend occasionally give us the reprieve of natural beauty to counteract the gore-saturated mud and ruined flesh.

I respected the film’s commitment to the unpleasantness of the endeavor, but like Sam Mendes’ 1917 it unfolds at a bit of a remove. We spend most of our time with one soldier, 17-year-old Paul Baümer (Felix Kammerer), but find out very little about him other than that he enlists with a few friends, one of whom is blown to hell almost as soon as he hits the front line. Paul and the others are fed by wartime rhetoric and propaganda, of which the ugly realities of war disabuse them. The point of the story might be to show the process of a young warrior’s disillusionment. In Remarque’s book and the 1930 film, Paul goes home on leave and confronts a schoolmaster who has no idea what actual war entails now — the bombs, the tanks, the flamethrowers, the gas. There’s nothing like that in Berger’s film, nor does it get into how soldiers who go home physically unharmed still carry the inner scars of war with them, as the book did.

The movie is a technical achievement, I guess. What pleasure can be derived from it comes from its craft and its performances; newcomer Kammerer gives us a Paul alternately numb and terrified, and he doesn’t falter during a key scene involving Paul and a lone French soldier he encounters in a bomb crater. Berger succeeds at framing the battle scenes as death panoramas criss-crossed with horror and rage — soldiers drop dead everywhere you look, and we wonder how anyone managed to get out of it alive. A sense of futility sets in fast. What neither the book nor the 1930 film knew at the time, of course, was that the World War was only World War I, that there was an even ghastlier sequel coming. Berger is working with that knowledge, and tries to drum up our sympathy for boys who were lured into the meat grinder by nationalist populism. He adds a subplot not in the book involving higher-ups negotiating for an end to the war; he invents a character, General Friedrichs, who resents not having the glorious military career his ancestors did, and orders Paul’s regiment to carry out one last attack on the French before the armistice takes hold.

Things like that did happen, but by his additions and omissions Berger pulls focus away from what should be a study of the breakable human soul in wartime. So the movie just ends up striking us as a brutal account of the Realities of War, and doesn’t make much impression otherwise. If we’re supposed to feel the existential horror of Paul turning into a merciless killer and then realizing the import of what he’s done, only Kammerer’s performance conveys a little of that. This All Quiet seems to have lost track of the story’s point. The relentless physical awfulness of this particular war has been dramatized far better before, most recently in Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. And even the theme of “Hey, the German soldiers were people, and they suffered too” was signed, sealed and delivered in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. I’m afraid Berger’s film wants to be great but is only occasionally even good. It seems to have been made now solely because the technology was there to make it.

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