The movie is intense, dramatic, highly personal, and truly breathtaking. For much of the time, you can’t even hear the hushed audience breathe. When folks depart after two hours of surprise and nuance, most are silent, not wanting to speak, words inadequate for their emotions.
The “Great War” ended just over a century ago. From the year 1917, and on but one day in early April, and at just a small section of the Western Front, and in a singular mission of two soldiers delivering an urgent top-level order, only the tiniest of glimpses are possible into that war’s vast and years-long aching womb of death.
Yet if one looks in just the right way, the entire universe may appear in a single grain of sand. That’s the key to “1917.” The movie doesn’t even attempt telling the war’s full story. Sam Mendes develops his film’s plot from actual events and true stories, including his soldier grandfather’s high-risk courier missions, by adhering to the storyteller’s premise that in the particular one can see the universal. This intimately detailed movie is one of the best world views you can hope for.
I can report that at both the Norwood and Capitol my new book about the same war is on offer. This movie/book combo expresses the neighbourly style of owners Brian Mitchell and Gina Mitchell-Giaschi who continue the family tradition of making “a Muskoka connection” that Gina’s great-grandfather Joseph Giaschi began with his 1926 theatre in Huntsville.
The movie and the book are not at all the same. Yet they are each about the same incredible haunting madness that melted all humanity and dissolved the old world order, one soul at a time. Every part of Canada, and most places around the globe, has its own particular connection with the First World War.
“The year 1917 was Canada’s year from Hell!” said historian, author, and Liberal Member of Parliament John English a few years ago, when we discussed him writing a book about those twelve bleak and devastating months. Indeed, it was.
The movie, starkly branded with only the four digits1-9-1-7, delivers one slice of that Hell. Another slice was how Muskokans in that year coped with riots over military conscription, fighting overseas, and the Halifax explosion killing thousands, while the Home Front wept and rallied, a war-time election split the country irrevocably, rationing increased, censorship maintained its bubble of confused ignorance and hope, and the deepest layers of duty and revenge became buried secrets for most of a century.
“Muskokans Fight the Great War” includes, but does not glorify, the British Empire’s prowess in exploiting her colonies for imperial purposes, Muskoka clergy exhorting local men to enlist and fight the Devil in a holy war, and Europe’s interrelated royal families pushing war from atop their throned class hierarchies in Russia, Germany, and Britain.
But as in all efforts to weave together the whole from its particulars, as “1917” does with exceptional poignancy and award-winning drama, the saga in “Muskokans Fight the Great War” likewise also celebrates the capacity of ordinary people, under extreme duress, to accomplish extraordinary things.
