^ My pleasure! Let us know what you think of it.
Vultural said:
Testament Of Youth - 2015 - 7/10
Latest adaptation of Vera Brittain’s World War I memoir.
Brittain, presumably part of the rural gentry, dreams of becoming a writer and being admitted to Oxford.
Events go her way at first, though one is reminded of simmering tensions in Europe throughout.
Gradually, however, the conflagration across the Channel empties her world.
Film picks up pace as the conflict grows. First part of the movie is a bit too low key.
The romantic leads lack chemistry, as well as intensity.
Second half is altogether sharper and grimmer.
Ending felt rushed. Investigate the 1979 version for a fuller aftermath.
A movie of stupendous beauty in almost every shot*, starring a formidable actress of equally stupendous beauty in Alicia Vikander. Which is just as well, as there's little in the way of wit from the characters or dialogue, though Taron Egerton has tons of charisma, Colin Morgan makes a big impression in just a few scenes, and Hayley Atwell's brief cameo as a no-nonsense but good-humored nurse deserves a spin-off of her own. In fact, just about the only cast member who
isn't strikingly good-looking is the the mushy-faced romantic lead played by Kit Harington, whose performance is likewise merely adequate. But maybe that's intentional? What matters is our heroine loves him, and it isn't necessary that we share her enthusiasm, and maybe even important that we
don't, as her feelings are her own.
An obvious companion piece to the superior
Atonement, which is much more cinematically daring, with characters we
do fall in love with, and very much feel for. But that movie is granted license by the moral and emotional clarity of its "Good" war to be operatic in its emotion, whereas all the
Great War merits is a dirge. Apart from Vikander's performance, what makes this otherwise unremarkable movie a genuinely good
film is a striking sequence in which the central pair are reunited, but, after the young man's seen combat, he can barely even feign kindness to the woman he loves, and which historical reality, in an eye-rolling display of on-the-nose symbolism, has named "Brittain."
I agree with
San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle's
positive review: "To see this film is to understand — not in an intellectual way, but in a direct, visceral way — why the British ignored the threat of Adolf Hitler for so long. In World War I, a generation learned that war was not the answer. In World War II, another generation learned that pacifism was not the answer. It would seem that there just isn’t an answer."
B+
* (Has there
ever been an aesthetic disaster worse then plastic? It sometimes seems that the whole world has forever lost a staggering amount of beauty since it went mainstream. I don't wish for glass glasses, and I know for a fact that without modern medicine I'd have died as a baby, but still...)