***SPOILERS***
In 1917 the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, awarded an MC and nominated for the VC, wrote an anti-war declaration in which he said he was refusing to carry on fighting, since the war he and his fellow-soldiers had entered on as a war of liberation had become a war of aggression. He argued that the war had become about utterly annihilating the Germans rather than looking for a negotiated peace, that it was "being prolonged by those who had the power to end it." His high public profile meant he had to be discredited before this statement was read out in Parliament and published in The Times. So he was deemed to be suffering from a nervous breakdown and packed off to a psychiatric hospital for officers in Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh in Scotland. Here he met Wilfred Owen and, in getting Owen to write about his war experience, was instrumental in the creation of a poet widely held to be the greatest produced by the First World War. His doctor at Craiglockhart was one William Rivers (who makes an appearance in some of his poems), a Cambridge scientist and gold medallist of the Royal Society, who, a man ahead of his time, focussed on getting the men to discuss their experiences instead of repressing them, to talk about their nightmares and their fear and terror. Pat Barker's 1991 novel Regeneration was a sombre and profound look at this period in Sassoon's life and the work done at Craiglockhart, and it has been made into a sombre and profound film by director Gillies MacKinnon.
The film opens with a bird's-eye-view of a battlefield, covered with the shattered remnants of bodies, twisted, torn, drowned in clinging mud. The camera pans across this nightmarish, Hieronymous Bosch scene, and we realize with a shock that some of these wrecks are just inches from safety, lying just outside their trenches, brought down before taking more than one or two steps. The thudding of shells in the background is an all-pervasive, overwhelming sound, impossible to ignore or shut out. Men sit exhausted in the waterlogged trenches, waiting their turn to go over the top and add a fresh layer of corpses to the mud. This is the landscape the men at Craiglockhart see night after night in their dreams, the landscape they pace the floor until the small hours to avoid, a hell on earth that Dr Rivers must try every day to save them from. The paradox he cannot come to terms with is that this is the hell his cure will send them back to: his job is to get these men back to the front as quickly as possible.
Regeneration focusses on four people: Rivers, Sassoon, Owen, and Billy Prior, a fictional character, an officer from a working-class northern family who is sent to Craiglockhart suffering from mutism. Added to his bitterness about the war is the snobbery he enounters in the trenches, where he is looked down on by the other, public-schooled officers. Prior is in many ways the most difficult patient: once his voice comes back he proves to be rude, aggressive, and manipulative, refusing to allow Rivers to get away with anything and making his already tiring work even more difficult. Rivers, sensitive and empathic, begins to suffer from shell-shock symptoms himself as he lives the horrors of France vicariously through his patients. This is a film about redemption and change: essentially, the characters swop places in the drama. As his patients begin their slow recovery Rivers begins his slide into illness. When the film starts he is assured of himself and his opinions, able to bury the knowledge of what the men he cures are going back to under the day-to-day grind of making them better. But the daily litany of horror and suffering he must listen to takes its toll, as it has on the patients, and he is brought face to face with the reality of what he does in a visit to another doctor, Lewis Yealland, who cures mutism by applying electrical probes to the tongue and larynx, literally torturing his patients back to speech. Rivers, horrified and revolted at this barbarism, comes to believe that he does exactly the same thing, merely with more gentle methods. One way or another, both of them are simply repairing fighting units which have broken down in order to get them back into action, where they are useful. Conscience-stricken, this realization pulls him apart.
The film skips ahead of the book to the end of the war, although only in a haphazard, hopscotch manner. Otherwise, it is one of the more faithful screen adaptations I have seen. Entire blocks of dialogue are lifted straight from the book; other things, however, are changed for no discernible reason. The name of the man whose death precipitated Prior's breakdown was Towers, not Sawdon; the meeting between Sassoon and Owen took place in Sassoon's room, as Owen's letters to friends describe: he even mentions the gleam the sun strikes from Sassoon's purple silk dressing-gown. Why set it outside? It doesn't add anything. Of course, little blips like these will only bother those who know the book, but it would be interesting to know why they occur when the rest of the film is so faithful to its source.
Director Gillies MacKinnon has allowed the film to move at the same slow pace as the book. There are plenty of long, sun-filled silences, and to match them plenty of static camera shots, lengthy close-ups that look more like paintings than film. These give Regeneration a meditative aspect perfectly suited to its subject matter, allowing details to seep slowly into your mind and stay there, as opposed to the blink-and-you'll-miss-the-ideas quality of a more fast-moving film. These calm, peaceful, leisurely shots contrast startlingly with the battle scenes we see in flashbacks, sequences with most of the colour leached from the print so that they stand out starkly against the rich chocolatey colours of the hospital scenes. It's very effective.
The acting throughout the movie is terrific. Jonny Lee Miller is good as Prior, angry, resentful, furious with himself for being weak, as he sees it, for breaking down, for being a degenerate. He has to turn that anger on others and the unfortunate Rivers bears the brunt of Prior's self-hatred. Miller makes what could easily have been an obnoxious character sympathetic - we can see the scared little boy at the back of all his outbursts. James Wilby is ideally cast as the aristocratic Sassoon, another angry man, furious at the waste of life and the "callous complacence" of the people in England who cannot imagine the suffering of the men in France. He is contemptuous of the "loonies" he is stuck with, but we can see this is because of fear - there but for the grace of God went Sassoon. Stuart Bunce is likable as the shy, klutzy Owen, in awe of Sassoon until he begins to develop a bit of confidence in his writing and himself. But towering above all these is Jonathan Pryce. Superb as always, it is his performance that holds the film together. Rivers is the cornerstone of the movie, and Pryce invests him with dignity, compassion, and a deep-rooted humanity, in one of the best performances of a distinguished career.
Regeneration invites comparison with Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Both films are a look at the human cost of warfare, the question of whether war is justifiable, whether you can order men to die for principles, sacrifice thousands of lives for an idea. But Ryan is an external film: we watch what happens to these soldiers as they fight their way across occupied France, get picked off one by one - it is a shattering film about the bloody horrors of the battlefield. Regeneration, in contrast, is a wholly internal film. The battle is going on in the patients' minds, and we learn more from a close up of a face than any amount of gory battle scenes. Both movies are important anti-war films. But for me Regeneration is more haunting, more compelling: it brings home in a more penetrating way the true cost of war, and, in Owen's words, the pity of it.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999