Ray Richmond: Why ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ should make plenty of noise in tomorrow’s Oscar nominations
An admission: I’m not a giant fan of war movies. I loved “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Thin Red Line,” “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” to name a half-dozen. But too often, I’ve found the violence gratuitous, the point about the pointlessness of war driven home too hard and transparently. But my fellow editors at Gold Derby have been insisting for weeks that the German remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front” on Netflix was a harrowing masterpiece that needed to be taken more seriously in the Oscar race – and not just for Best International Feature but picture, director (Edward Berger), adapted screenplay, cinematography and a slew of crafts categories, too. I finally caved and watched it over the weekend, and I’m happy to report they were right.
I was late to the party, but I’m all in now. “All Quiet” is a spellbinding film that deserves nominations across the board and could well perform better in tomorrow’s noms than many expect. No one should be shocked if it winds up making the cut for editing, sound, score, visual effects and makeup/hairstyling in addition to the bigger ones. It won’t match the 14 nominations it earned last week in the BAFTAs. but it could land anywhere between 7 and 10 Academy Award noms. And it would deserve every one. It won’t pick one up for star Felix Kammerer, but not because he wouldn’t deserve one with his haunting performance.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, do yourself a favor and get to it. As an adaptation of the 1929 Erich Maria Remarque novel, Lewis Milestone’s 1930 classic film and a 1979 made-for-TV movie starring Richard Thomas as our protagonist Paul Baumer, the latest edition is a haunting, shattering portrait of the madness of war. It centers on German’s deadly and futile Western Front campaign during World War I between 1914 and ’18, focusing on blindly zealous, nationalism-driven soldiers used as cannon fodder by dueling politicians in a war of constant attrition.
In the new version, Paul (Kammerer) is shown to be a gung-ho young German man so anxious to defend the fatherland against France that he forges his parents’ signature to join the military. But as the horrible reality of what he’s signed on to dawns on him, it’s far too late, and the horrifying despair we see through his eyes becomes our own. The battle scenes are spectacularly shot by cinematographer James Friend, grabbing the audience by the throat. But as dreadful as it is, it’s not the crux of what makes “All Quiet” so powerful. It drives home, by showing rather than telling, the utter bleakness and chaotic absurdity of a conflict where no one wins and nothing is accomplished. It’s an antiwar movie movie that paints its pictures in broad strokes that play like simple truth rather than propaganda.
The film depicts one muddy, bloody ordeal after another, all of it fought in narrow trenches from which there is no escape. Paul becomes our hero by dint of his ongoing survival against the odds, which has everything to do with luck, little with fortitude. He and his mates, who keep dying around him, notably make no advances against the enemy. Indeed, the enemy is shown to be their own conscience, while nothing is gained in terms of land or leverage. The fight is waged over the same few hundred meters. There is no victory, only survivors – and precious few of those.
By the time you get to the end of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” you feel like you’ve persevered through your own ordeal. It’s so incredibly well constructed, cinematically and psychologically, that it holds us consistently in its thrall. The fact that it’s filmed in a foreign language doesn’t detract in the slightest from either the strength or the message of the movie for the American audience. All of the pros working on it bring their A-game. My only wish is that I could have watched it on a bigger screen than the one in my living room.
Can a foreign-language film really shake up the Oscar status quo? You only have to go back three years to find evidence of it, to 2020, when the South Korean masterpiece “Parasite” won four Academy Awards (including picture, director, screenplay and international feature). It was also nominated for production design and editing. “Parasite” was an anomaly, yes, but that doesn’t mean a brilliantly-conceived war movie redo can’t follow suit, at least in terms of nominations attention. That’s what we’re focused on tomorrow. One step at a time.
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