It’s the age-old story: a solitary, unlikely individual is chosen by a higher power to transcend their limitations and achieve something impossible. Against all the odds, and despite the scorn of their peers, their deep beliefs allow them to do something others cannot. They endure, they prevail and, eventually, they go down in history, remembered with reverence and awe. They do not have a say, these chosen few, they must simply follow the call of duty. But they always prevail. And so it is that I today accept my own impossible burden: to write about why a Mel Gibson film should win the best picture Oscar.
For those of you who haven’t seen Hacksaw Ridge – which may include those opposed to individuals who make antisemitic remarks or engage in domestic abuse – let me set the thing up for you. Andrew Garfield plays Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist from Virginia. Hard-working Doss (the irony is lost on the Americans) is a patriot who volunteers to join the army after Pearl Harbor, but there’s a small complication: his religious beliefs prevent him from taking up arms.
As you might imagine, this doesn’t endear him to his superiors. Soon after reaching boot camp, Doss is forced into a court martial. It goes in his favour after a remarkable intervention by Doss’s alcoholic, wife-beating father who must, deep down, have a heart of gold. Roughly halfway into the film, Doss is reincorporated into the army and sent as a medic to the Japanese front.
The second half of the film is almost all on the battlefield. Doss’s division is tasked with taking the eponymous ridge, a crucial patch of land that stands atop a cliff edge in Okinawa and is filled to the brim with Japanese soldiers for whom no act is too inhuman. After an extended battle scene of Saving Private Ryan proportions and laden with typically Gibsonian gore, Doss finds himself stranded at the top of the cliff with nothing but his faith to protect him. And so, in a narrative shift I couldn’t help but find incredibly moving, he sets about spending what may be his last hours on Earth hauling as many wounded comrades down the cliff face as possible.
Spoiler alert: they’re not his last hours. The real Doss became the first American to receive the Medal of Honor without having fired a shot.
In itself, Hacksaw Ridge is a tale of classic American heroism of the sort that that the Academy traditionally loves, and indeed it has been nominated for six Oscars. But the film is more than a simple derring-do second world war flick, even one as epic and meticulously made as Steven Spielberg’s (which earned 11 Oscar nominations and won five). It is a film that could not have been made by anyone other than Gibson.
Gibson’s religious beliefs have provoked their own controversies, but there’s no denying they give him a perspective shared by few other film-makers. Both The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto explored faith with a visceral fascination and while it’s sublimated here through the prism of a war movie, it produces distinctive results.
Doss’s trial by boot camp is less Full Metal Jacket and more Stations of the Cross, as he is made to endure pain and humiliation in the name of his unyielding beliefs, gradually winning the grudging respect of his peers. This, in turn, sets up a situation whereby the climactic battle scene comes once the real fighting has finished and features very little violence, just Doss tearing back and forth to drag his fellow soldiers off their battlefield.
The story that Gibson wants to tell, of religious faith providing values and perspective that can be transformative even in the most constrained of circumstances, makes for a war movie that is ventures above and beyond its genre. On those grounds, members of this critical court martial, I present the case for it winning the best picture award.
