Testament of Youth
by Vera Brittain, Juliette Towhidi
I expect that we’ll see a number of WWI themed movies over the next three or four years as we pass through the centennial anniversaries. I’ve written before how I have this fascination with the insanity that was WWI, so yes, I’ll go see like, all of them.
I was really excited for this one, being the biography of Vera Brittain and how much I love women’s history and telling women’s stories. I also, having cut my teeth on M.A.S.H. before I knew what I was watching, love wartime hospital stories, so… this was a foregone conclusion. It was an anxious wait, as it opened in June 5th in the US, but didn’t arrive in Boston until June 19th.
This is the story of Vera Brittain, who essentially argued her way into Oxford (first with her parents and then with the examiners), and then WWI happened. Her brother, his BFF, and her fiance all enlisted, and she left Oxford to become a nurse. She ended up in a field hospital in France, and after heavy personal losses, she went on to become of of Britain’s leading pacifists.
So I was prepared for a tearjerker. I was prepared to be a mess and hid in the back of the theater. I had KLEENEX for god’s sake. I HYDRATED. I was ready.
It didn’t land. I didn’t have any deep feels. I had some feels, but I didn’t cry, I didn’t rage rage rage against the coming of the night, and I left the movie and it didn’t stay with me at all. I have spent four hours trying to figure out why.
It’s not the acting. Alicia Vikander as Vera is stunning. Her face is so expressive, and she has this extraordinarily eloquent set of her jaw when faced with something that needs to be overcome, whether it’s coping with everyone else’s feelings on Armistice Day, or facing her entrance exams when she hadn’t studied Latin (and who hasn’t had that nightmare?), or faced with an ugly amputation. Her face is just luminous (and if you haven’t see A Royal Affair where she plays Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark, having an affair with Mads Mikklesen, DO IT NOW).
Kit Harrington plays Roland Leighton, Vera’s fiance, and he will be okay after his run of Game of Thrones is over. He’s a poet, but wants to do his duty. Dominic Cooper and Emily Watson play Vera’s parents, and Britain’s National Treasure Hayley Atwell is the head nurse in the field hospital at France. All of the performances are good! (Oh, and, tumblr seems to think that I’ll go to hell if I don’t mention Merlin’s Colin Morgan who was Vera’s brother’s BFF and he was there too.)
I think the main problem is the pacing. It’s plodding, like, we’re halfway through the war and I’m thinking “my god, how long IS this movie?” It’s just two hours, but we spent so much time getting to the war, with tiny plops of dread scattered about, that by the time you get to the war I was all “FINALLY.” Generally, they’re light with the foreshadowing- boys playing rugby in the mud is obvious, but not belabored.
Lots of things could have been tightened up to move things along. The cinematography was beautiful, and lots of little moments where Vera is a very tactile person- she experiences the world through touch as much as through words, and many many loving closeups of her hands emphasize this.
I liked that the field hospital pulled no punches on the horrors of war wounds and the mud and blood. Vera ends up in a hut filled with German wounded, and that shapes her views after the war (I hope Carrie can confirm if this is truth in television). There’s a crane shot of the yard filled with wounded on stretchers which is basically a Gone With The Wind shot, but it gets the point across.
The movie doesn’t end when the war does- there’s still the question of what you do when you’re the only one who survived. The war is over, she goes back to Oxford, but it isn’t until she realizes that she’s not alone in her brand of survivor’s guilt that she begins to live again. Every woman in the country is trapped in the same place she is, and it’s through friendship with Winifred Holtbey that she finds healing. And her work as a pacifist begins then, too.
I wanted to like this more than I did, but I still liked it. I was just hoping for a gutpunch and instead got a perfectly respectable biopic. MORE MOVIES ABOUT WOMEN PLEASE.
I really can’t wait to read CarrieS’s upcoming Kickass Women In History post about Vera. She seems FASCINATING.
This film is currently in theatres and you can find tickets (US) at Moviefone and Fandango.
As I read your review, the book came flooding back to me. And, more importantly, all of the reasons the book didn’t land for me came back to me. This sounds like a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, because the problems you cite with the movie are exactly the ones I had with the book. I wonder if it’s different for British people who read/view it because they are closer to the war physically, or if they have a similar experience because the distance in time changes our view of it?
You may need to watch the old PBS miniseries for gut wrenching. That was excellent and being much longer did get into the nuances of the action better.
OK, this has Hayley Atwell, now I have to see it. Also, I have been reading more WWI set fiction recently – must be the centennial that is putting it more on my radar.
Thanks for the comment about your problems with the book Taffygrrl, I was looking at it too but this makes me pause.
For more Hayley Atwell, I stumbled across a British TV Movie she did called Restless. Very interesting past (WWII spies) and years later (the 1970’s I think). Hayley plays a woman spy for England during WWII (really made me think of Agent Carter), and Charlotte Rampling plays the character years later, when she reveals her secrets to her daughter – played by Michelle Dockery. Highly recommend if you can find it – I ran across it on the Sundance channel.
I think for me that some of the possible poignancy was lost by knowing that Vera went on to marry and have children after the war – her daughter Shirley Williams was a famous female politician here in the UK even before Margaret Thatcher became well known. Also, of course, so many British families (including a previous generation of my own) had similar losses in WWI, and without necessarily having the comfort of a later marriage – a whole generation of women were left single for life by that war.
I’d just add to that review that there is some seriously gorgeous clothes and interiors porn in the pre-war parts of the film.
I agree with Ann about the 1979 version that was shown on PBS. It was excellent. It used to be on youtube, but I’m not sure if it still is.
I haven’t seen this new version yet, but I want to.
I read the book a few years ago. I loved it. I loved it in that “OH MY GOD, I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS” kind of way. I sobbed, I gasped, I had nightmares. It’s a vivid, heartbreaking, raw book, and I recommend it to everyone.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve watched the trailer and man, it looks just so… bland. Like someone watched Antonement and Downton Abbey a bunch of times and rolled with it. Everything about it looks romantic, gauzy, a tear-jerker.
A pity. I doubt a man’s WWI memoir would have been filmed that way.
If you like these sorts of stories, I highly recommend the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. They are immediately post-war and deal with a woman who served as a nurse in WWI and with PTSD among other issues.
My experience of reading the book years ago was the same as Kate’s. It was gut-wrenching and really brought home the tragedy horror and loss of WWI. I wouldn’t see the film for that reason.
Airing right after Poldark (so much yaaassssss)on PBS, is The Crimson Fields, a WWI mini-series following nurses in the field (I think, since I’m currently watching it as I write and it seems to be the focus)
I was a little worried when I heard Vera Brittain’s book was being turned into a movie. That book had a huge impact when I read it in college, but I might check this out. I liked The Crimson Fields last night, too, and I love Maisie Dobbs.
Another great pair of series set in this era: Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge & Bess Crawford series. I keep hoping they’ll eventually intersect. I prefer them to the Maisie Dobbs series. I read a number of the Maisie Dobbs books, but I finally had to quit because I found Maisie a tad self-righteous after awhile.