They Shall Not Grow Old a Marvel on Many Levels

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

Directed by Peter Jackson

Warner Brothers, 99 minutes, R (war violence)

★★★★★

We’re going to be quarantined for a while folks, no matter what the Orange Fraud in the White House thinks. I will be featuring films that are marked by greatness of some sort that make them must-see experiences. Not all are masterpieces, but each is remarkable in some way.

But let’s start with one that is a masterpiece: the technically brilliant and deeply moving They Shall Not Grow Old. You know the director: Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame. They Shall Not Grow Old (TSNGO) is a genre-breaking non-fiction film that’s non-linear and loosely structured. Jackson and his crew salvaged World War I footage, meticulously restored it, and overlaid it with moldering archival audio interviews.

Consider a famous song, and I don’t mean “Mademoiselle from Armentières.”  Pete Seeger first penned “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in 1956; his friend Joe Hickerson added several verses in 1960. It may well be the most famous antiwar song in Western history. Here’s a link if you need to refresh your memory re: the lyrics. Note how the song moves from innocence to tragedy. Peter Jackson does the same thing in TSNGO without interjecting a single word of commentary. He also does a great service to history in honoring the men who went to war but, like Seeger’s song, Jackson doesn’t allow us to ignore the accompanying horrors.

World War I is as hard to justify as World War II is to disclaim. Perhaps you remember from an old history class the causes cited for World War I: militarism, imperialism, unstable alliances, wars in the Balkans, sclerotic leadership…. It is a litany of folly, not nobility. From it came 20 million deaths from the conflict and another 50 million from the Spanish flu pandemic unleashed upon compromised immune systems–not to mention the Bolshevik Revolution, millions of displaced persons, the collapses of aristocracy, and global assaults on civil liberties that planted the seeds for the rise of fascism. Seeger asked, when will we ever learn? Alas, it’s usually in retrospect (if at all).

Jackson performed a herculean task. He found more than 600 hours of audio interviews from more than 200 vets and another 100 hours of war footage. Try whittling that down to 99 minutes! The first 20 minutes of the film unspools as audiences might have seen it in a silent movie theater: in black and white and in a smaller format. Jackson’s only nods to modernity were repairing the footage and adding voice-overs. (Movies didn’t ‘talk’ until 1927.)

At first it seems that Jackson is valorizing the war. The voices tell of rushing to enlist and the images are of smiling young men at recruiting offices, crisp drilling, and cheering spectators as boats are loaded for France. Only when they arrive does the footage go to full screen and color. There was no color film at the time, but this isn’t a Turner Films colorization hack job; Jackson’s team carefully researched the era to show it as soldiers themselves would have experienced it.

Color has a dramatic effect. Grainy grey photos become lurid nightmares of blood and mud. Gung-ho attitudes also give way to deadly guns and runs–diarrhea and disease killed just as surely as bullets and bayonets. The filth of the trenches beggars the imagination. Consider a single uniform for the duration, muck-covered puttees, rotting horse flesh, strewn human corpses, clouds of flies, legions of lice, and the smell of open latrines. (Witness a row of naked backsides defecating over a single board suspended across a makeshift trench.)

Jackson occasionally stitched and timed photos to give brief bursts of motion to otherwise static images–basically a more sophisticated version of what your phone can do. As we move to battlefields, the narration is weightier. Contrary to histrionic movies, most soldiers didn’t rush pell-mell into no man’s land; they had to pick their way carefully through barbed wire, bomb craters, quicksand, minefields, and the dead. Jackson leavens the horror with humor. The British love of tea is self-lampooning when one witnesses it being drunk for jerry cans still reeking of petrol. More poignantly, class distinctions are on display the moment soldiers smile and we see the appalling dental hygiene of the poor.

One is left with the question of what good came of this. There was little jubilation when the guns went silent on November 11, 1918. For survivors, theirs was the reaction of the emotionally, physically, and psychologically wrung-out. Jackson pulls another sleight of hand by returning to small-frame black and white when troops return to a public that neither understood what they experienced, nor cared to hear about it. The “boys” were now “men,” and their habits, language, and grotesque wounds embarrassed much of the populace. “Tommy” did his duty, but then it was back to the bottom of the social heap.

There are no names attached to the voices we hear, nor are locations or dates given. This was partly done for continuity’s sake, but also because Jackson wanted to keep the focus on ordinary individuals. Each tale is simultaneously unique, but cut from similar cloth. Jackson further showed his sympathies for the average Tommy by restoring all of the footage and giving it to the Imperial War Museum. He took no fee for his own labors.

TSNGO is a double entendre. Millions never got a chance to grow old; those who made it home have both the bloom of their youth and the wilted flowers of their early manhood preserved for posterity. Thanks to Jackson and his amazing film editor Jabez Olssen, fading back and white photos from a now-forgotten war is there in color to remind you that you can look away, but the truth is still there. These are the faces and voices of war. If they make you uncomfortable, watch how you vote!

Rob Weir